MARCEL DETTMANN

The Berghain mainstay is an impenetrable representative of the increasingly fabled club

We all know all about Berghain by now: the brutal exterior, the infamously hard to bullshit doormen, the anything-goes dark rooms, the strict NO PHOTO rules, the commitment to transcendentally brutal techno, the stories of parties that go on in unending darkness of days and the brief respite of early-morning sunshine momentarily seeping through the blinds of the Panorama Bar.

We know all this and yet we still dream of it, we still wonder if the bouncers would look upon us without distaste or disregard, if we’d be permitted to join the hallowed ranks of those who’ve plunged into the blackness of a former power station that’s now seen by many as the greatest nightclub in the world. We can know it all, epistemologically, without knowing it at all ontologically. Right? Right. On the verge of his appearance at Simple Things, and with a new album recently released on the label most closely associated with Berghain, Berlin’s Ostgut Ton, Crack was lucky enough to catch up with a man who knows the place intimately, a man whose marathon sets at the club have etched his name into the techno annals forever. That man is Marcel Dettmann.

Figuring that, at this point into a career where he’s gone from an early residency at the club’s earliest incarnation – in a concrete slab secreted away in an industrial estate arrived at via an eastbound arterial road out of Berlin – to becoming, along with the similarly striking Ben Klock, the face of both Berghain and German techno in the 21st century, he’d be a little bored of knocking that conversational ball about, we eased in by chatting about his new record.

Sad but true: satisfying techno albums are hard to come by, an unfortunate but necessary byproduct of a scene that constantly evolves, one that works best when producers pass on messages for dancers via DJs rather than attempting monolithic statements of intent. A gritty, pulverising lurch down techno’s bleaker back alleys, II is a wonderfully atmospheric record that spatters its greyscale wanderings with moments of melodic salvation only to plunge the listener back into its dank depths. Negotiating the 12 tracks is an unbridled pleasure – and Dettmann himself is keen to think about them as tracks, rather than songs. As tells us, “When we talk about music which includes sung passages, we are talking about ‘songs’. A track is a piece of music taken from a series of musical pieces, which can also be instrumentals. Eventually it’s an extract from a larger entity. I see my album as an integral piece of art, basically a series of tracks that form an entity for me.” It’s dense, deep, dark stuff.

The thing is, with its hypercharged clanks and concrete thwacks and thuds, it sounds like we imagine, or know, Berghain to be. Which leads us down the rugged path back to the power station. An obvious point perhaps, but DJs hold the power in dance music: if they aren’t playing records, no one’s buying them, no one’s listening. Certain sounds catch on through their association with certain DJs, certain clubs. Crack wondered, then, how Dettmann felt about the resurgence of a steelier techno than we’ve heard of late, a techno that’s sandblasted the arch-romanticism and knowing melancholy out of the big-room records that the likes of Kompakt or Innervisions were pumping out in the mid-00s in favour of a return to a skeletal, heavy, industrially-indebted sound? Did he feel that the kind of records played by himself and the other residents and guests at Berghain – or even the idea of the kinds of records they might play at Berghain – and the releases that find a home on Ostgut Ton had helped sculpt techno in the 10s? He wasn’t so sure. “There has always been a big portion of industrial and melancholic music in Berlin. This is something that has always characterized Berlin for me. I can only speak for myself, but for me it has been there from the beginning, it doesn’t matter if it was at the first EBM/industrial parties or at the first techno parties. This instinctive way of making music has always attracted me, that’s also why the Berghain fits so well with what techno really means to me and has a big influence on what I am doing.” Part of us thinks Dettmann may be adopting and slightly affecting a sense of false modesty – Ostgut Ton’s influence can be felt in labels as diverse as Blackest Ever Black to Editions Mego, on artists that span from Perc to Pete Swanson – but another part believes that he believes it, that he just happens to DJ at a club that’s just happened to change the face of a genre, to redefine the notion of what a nightclub is and what a nightclub can be.

Two questions always come to mind when talking to people who make a living through making other people happy by playing records that perpetually return to the elemental, primal throb of kickdrums powering through cramped, dark rooms. The first is, is it possible to tire of the steadiness of the beat, do you ever want to break free of 4/4’s glorious repetition? Dettmann uses this question to dip into his own past, reflecting upon how, “I always think about the time when I started to go out,” noting that it was the “physical aspect of the music, no matter if it came from something aggressive, EBM stuff maybe, or more melancholic like synth pop,” that appealed to him then, and still inspires him now. The second: surely when you play a lengthy set to a packed crowd and you can see from the sea stretched out in front of you that every milimetrical turning of an EQ knob, every cued-up snare pattern, every bassline detonation has the power to send the room higher and higher, are you not tempted to put the headphones down, cue up a Villalobos B-side and join in for a bit? His response is clear, confident and fully in charge: “If I want to do this, I just do it for a moment, and then I return to the booth to play the next track.”

As conversation winds down, thoughts turn to simple things. Literally Simple Things. What can we expect from a DJ as sought after as Marcel Dettmann? The answer’s as cheeringly unpretentious as the hard-as-fuck techno we’re likely to hear: “I will bring my favourite records and we will all have a good time together!” With Dettmann behind the decks, that’s a guarantee.

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Catch Marcel Dettmann at the Shapes hosted Ostgut Ton showcase at Motion, Bristol, April 12th. For tickets, head here. 

residentadvisor.net/dj/marceldettmann

Words: Josh Baines