The weekend turned into a hell of a ride as the Dorfdisco editorial meeting in Trodel, on Dresdner Strasse, turned into a long forty eight hours of partying. The Mitte kill fest at Eschloraque Rumschlump followed on Saturday and Wolpert demonstrated his uncanny instrument.
Standing behind an elaborately tooled table-top guitar, accessorised with welded Morse repeaters and strange victorianesque brass gew-gaws, Wolpert, resplendent in a three piece suit, struck chimes on the electrified strings, whilst a mechanised brass arm spelt out the time. A Karl Hans Janke drawing come to life.
Wolpert, who sports sleazy sideburns cut with frightening precision, once worked the bar at Ex ‘n pop and offered our esteemed editor a short which consisted of pure Tabasco. The crowd drifted toward the Dead Chicken’s video documentary or slumped in sofas awaiting the headline act in the gemutlich surroundings of this Mitte courtyard.
Tanja, Dorf’s enigmatic photographer, had blown her meagre wage on chocolate cigarettes and experimental French music but her luck had turned and having won three singles in a row the Kitty Yo guys were getting restless. We dug the wurstchen.
Too fast for all those pointy shoes we headed off to Yaam on Berlin’s riviera to be regaled with tales of the Mexican desert by ex-Factory guru and record label maverick Mark Reeder. Master baker Reeder, confessed that the sheets were clammy in that one horse town and the drop dizzying. Peyote buttons, apparently, have the texture of breast implants. Alec Empire’s set kicked off at 4am and his merchandise stand was doing thriving business as we kicked over the traces.
On Sunday we made for Bar 25 and spent some time with the beautiful people. The music in the place turned the, always relaxed, venue into a circus of eurotrash - minimal electronics with a live brass accompaniment which eventually drove us to the deserted White Trash am Strand (Pink Floyd and Leonard Cohen) and then to Kiki Blofeld’s where we watched the stars for a while.
Training our high powered binoculars on the opposite bank of the Spree the, now imperilled by redevelopment, Fünf und Zwanzig looked more and more like the strangely overlit set of a Clive Barker film to our crack squad of party stalkers. We also spied Steve Morell reclining on a sofa.
The weird mix of eighties synth pop drifting across the river was making interesting new shapes as it merged with the commercial dancehall reggae preferred on the south of the river. We returned to 25 briefly before rounding off the evening with a trip to Pinguin, in Schonfeld, were an argument about the relative merits of the Frankfurt School and French post-structuralism, inevitably, followed.
Harder, faster, louder,DORFDISCOTANIAL (see a picture of Moritz Wolperts uncanny instrument)