Welcome to Berlin: Then & Now, a podcast series exploring the city’s rich musical past, present and future through the gaze of two unique artists from different generations.
Recorded at the Sonos Store in Mitte, both artists share ideas and play each other tracks using the Sonos One Smart Speaker with voice control.
In our first episode, Peaches sat down with Lotic for a candid conversation about the different generations of Berlin’s queer scene and the ways in which they’ve both found a community in the city. For episode two, photographer, artist and activist Wolfgang Tillmans met Luz Diaz, the founder of Room 4 Resistance, a Berlin–based queer femme and non–binary collective focused on building communities and creating safety and visibility for marginalised voices in dance music.
In this episode, punk icon Gudrun Gut sits down with experimental musician Perera Elsewhere for a conversation spanning narcissism, experimentation, grime, beatmaking and Berlin.
Gudrun Gut is a German electronic musician who moved to Berlin in 1975. In the decades since then, her work has spanned many disciplines, genres and eras. From the “ingenious dilettantes” punk subculture of early 1980s to helping set-up female:pressure – an international network of female, transgender and non-binary artists in the fields of electronic music and digital arts. Her story is one of tireless support for the underground and a commitment to amplifying art that matters. As The Wire magazine wrote in a 2008 cover story on Gudrun, she is “a girl from German heatherlands who moved to Berlin to become one of the city’s central figures – feminist agitator, festival organizer, entrepreneur.”
Someone else who moved to Berlin and found a rhythm of her own is Sasha Perera – a producer and artist who makes music under the name Perera Elsewhere. Creating a sound which she calls “doom-folk”, the London-born artist’s bass-heavy productions are born out of experimentation and musical exploration. As the name suggests, she makes music that sounds as if it’s come from someplace else.
Both Sasha and Gudrun understand the importance of finding spaces to experiment and exposing audiences to unfamiliar sounds. Gudrun has founded a number of influential record labels while Sasha is responsible for bringing grime forefathers Skepta and D Double E over to Berlin for their first ever non-UK dates.
Listen to the podcast in the player below and stay tuned for the next instalment.
Producer: Eliza Lomas
Videographer: Ben Brook
Mixing: Tom Mercer
Music: Facta
Photography: Elizabeth Herring
Series Lead: Duncan Harrison