DJ T. tour blog: Week 2

DJ T. tour blog: Week 2

24 July, 2009 | 6.03AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: dj t, dj t blog, get physical

DJ T. continues his weekly tour blog with some thoughts on the evolution of Hamburg’s club scene, and a dispatch from the enchanting city of Paris.

Sunday, 19th of July, Hamburg

Recently, I have found myself warming to Hamburg – big time. I guess I should explain: For as long as I can remember, I felt like a stranger in this city and among its people, with few exceptions.

Sometimes, it even made me acutely uncomfortable and I always breathed a sigh of relief when it was time to leave again. No idea why, I could never quite put my finger on it – I mean, objectively speaking, Hamburg is a beautiful city, but that’s what aversions are all about – sometimes, they simply defy rational explanation.

On the other hand, over the last two years, many of my favourite people moved to Hamburg and, at the same time, I’ve made more firm friends than in the preceding 15 years. I simply couldn’t go on just dismissing this city anymore and, who would have thought? The more I looked, the more my dislike started to fade; it slowly made way for an interesting interaction. Occasionally, I even catch myself having full-blown fun …

In hindsight, Hamburg has always been the odd one out. While, back in the 90s, the so-called techno scenes of Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich and Cologne encouraged a fertile exchange and excessive, multilateral rave tourism, Hamburg kept itself apart – looking back, it’s hard to tell whether this was a self-imposed isolation or simply a general lack of interest. All through the 1990s, I associated Hamburg with certain clichés, musical and otherwise: cheesy handbag and vocal house or unbearable hard trance seemed to overshadow and drown out all other sounds, the scene between these fixed points seemed marginal.

Sometimes, I even felt sorry for the city’s few champions of the greater good: To an outsider, it seemed like whatever they tried to build in their few venues was never quite glamorous enough to attract a hip and sparkling crowd beyond the limits of Northern Germany, a crowd to rival those of other clubs and cities.

I’m sure those who ran or frequented fine clubs like Unit, Click, Phonodrome, Waagenbau, Tanzhalle and Hafenklang would love to contradict me here. So, please excuse my overgeneralisation, but even you can’t deny that Hamburg’s nightlife, including its DJ, producer and label landscape in a particular subset of electronic music, was more or less inversely proportional to its international status. Let’s just say: Hamburg has always had a fairly erratic event scene, not a reliable club culture.

Back to the present: Right now, Hamburg’s star is on the rise – Cologne and Frankfurt, on the other hand, have watched their own relevance slip away over the second half of this decade, barring the latter’s vital nu house DJ producers and newcomer labels. Come night-time, however, these two cities are starting to fade and their nightlife feels staid and lacklustre, especially compared to its glorious past.

They desperately need new protagonists willing to give the long-established reigning elite a much-deserved kick in the butt with fresh and contemporary event concepts. Hamburg, on the other hand, might still lack venues to rival the international rep of seminal clubs like Panorama Bar and Watergate (Berlin), Robert Johnson (Offenbach) or Registratur (Munich), but at least it boasts a wealth of new locations with a decent selection of good events.

One of these is the weekly DIY night at Kukuun, just a stone’s throw away from the Reeperbahn, run by Adriano and Mladen aka Solomun.

Besides the parties at Ballsaal and Übel & Gefährlich, DIY has become one of the city’s favourite hangouts, with a weekly booking of international guests. With their hugely successful Diynamic label, the posse around Adriano and Solomun have really raised the bar for Hamburg.

In the realm of club music, only Liebe Detail managed to cause a similar international stir in such a short amount of time. Well, I guess I could mention early 90s staples like Superstition, Ladomat and Container, but those date back to the antiquity of electronic dance music. More recently, they were joined by labels like Dial and Smallville, but those explore slightly different musical pastures.

Besides Solomun, local heroes Stimming and H.O.S.H. complete the artistic core of Diynamic. Just like their label boss, both have wowed the international arena in virtually no time at all. And they are about to be joined by whizzes like Jay Bliss or Uner & Koyu. The latter have given the label its latest hit; both sides are universal dancefloor grenades guaranteed to get any crowd moving. Check the Beatport top 100 – at the time of writing, ‘Raw Sweat’ is already at No. 23!

My set for Solomun was truly special. My host gave me (and the clubbers) the warmest of welcomes, and then Hamburg’s open and interested crowd egged me on to go totally freestyle. Deep, minimal and fidget house, Detroit techno, straight beats, broken beats and classics from all ends of the spectrum, shaken up and stirred like there’s no tomorrow, 100% politically incorrect.

What more could you ask for from a gig? I would have loved to stay and listen to Solomun, who picked up again where I left off, but by then I had downed a few rum & cokes too many …

It was a DIY night to remember: Perfectly makeshift and a little shifty! DIY, you made my day and I’d love to come back for more Diynamic goodness!

Tuesday, 21st of July, Paris

Paris. Nowhere else do I play as often – except for my hometown Berlin, that is. By now, Paris almost feels like a second home; as there are plenty of friends to meet and hang with whenever DJing takes me here.

The city of love – in my case, Paris has never been stingy in keeping this promise. Just think of all those old songs and chansons, hailing Paris and its seminal secrets …

Can you think of any other city with such a glamorous – and (g)astronomic – reputation? Well, reputations can deceive, but in this case, I have to say: Paris has that certain flair and je n’est sais quoi that most other European cities and capitals lack.

In a way, it feels like I could spend months on end visiting all those examples of our collective cultural-historic canon, but also places of hidden beauty, without ever stooping to the mindless round of tourist traps.

Do you share this specific sense of complete anonymity, a feeling that grows in proportion with the size of a city? It’s a very particular sensation; one that can be great, but also painful. A lot of the time, it is both.

In this light, Frankfurt (my former home) is to Berlin what Berlin is to Paris. Back in the days, whenever I travelled from the Hessian capital (Frankfurt) to the reunified metropolis, I experienced an immediate sense of freedom, not least of all because of the radically different scale of the city.

In Berlin, everything was simply several times larger: from the width of the pavement and scale of the streets right up to the city’s expansive squares and historical architecture. So, even if this is a balancing act, on a pencil-thin line between exhilaration and feeling lost – I love the metropolis and find it inspiring.

Last night, I enjoyed one of my rare off-days. Usually, my busy schedule sends me straight home after every gig, but in this case, it made far more sense to go straight to the next stop on my tour by taking a train from Paris to Ghent.

I made the most of the balmy night by having dinner with a bunch of friends and taking an extended hike through nocturnal Paris.

Based in an arrondissement near the Eiffel Tower, we didn’t think twice about our first destination: I had never seen the city’s icon by night and its pretty lights proved irresistible.

The closer we got to the actual tower, the more bizarre its textures became, assembled from thousands of differently-sized metal beams, their monstrous beauty illuminated by an eerie, wan yellow light.

Once we had reached the tower’s centre, down on the ground underneath the structure, I directed my gaze all the way up and found myself spellbound with intense awe, an awe of this product of human ingenuity, a sense of reverence usually reserved for sprawling cathedral ceiling frescoes (which never really did it for me).

At the same time, this semi-epiphany got my imagination going: For a few, brief moments, I felt like I was in a Star Wars film, commanding one of the Federation’s nimble X-Wing fighters, caught in the Death Star’s tractor beam and beginning my slow, inevitable descent into the gaping mouth of a huge hangar.

In our naïve, post-excitement bliss (well, I was the only one not in the know), we took a break next to the tower to enjoy this special moment.

All of a sudden, I got the shock of my life: From one second to the next, the yellow lighting was replaced by a madly swarming wave of twitching strobe lights that swamped and engulfed the entire tower. It took me a few moments and breaths to realise that this was really, truly happening!

Once I had my wits back, I picked up my camera to capture this moment for myself – and for you. Everywhere around us, people where whooping and hollering hysterically, just as amazed by the spectacle as I was.

Video: The Eiffel Tower lights up

My Parisian friends just leaned back and flashed me a knowing smile. The ingeniously simple play of light was of such an incredible beauty – no fireworks display could have outdone it. On camera, it looks liked strobed flashes flying out from the tower and away into the sky, no idea how they managed that …?

Still in the grips of this intoxicating spell, we continued our nightly tour of the city. File under: infinite vastness. Have you ever noticed just how much real no-man’s-land there is, right in the middle of these global, metropolitan Molochs?

We spent ages walking down the Seine’s embankment, under bridges and past dilapidated jetties, and sometimes it seemed as if they were mere remnants off the beaten path, untouched or visited by human beings – urban wilderness.

It took us ages to reach the Champs-Élysées and my feet were already tired from three all-nighters, but this dark, yet illuminated Paris was simply too beautiful to call it a night.

Once we reached our final destination, the Arc de Triomphe, we sat down on a bench to watch the city’s nocturnal residents.

Here, an old lady, white-haired and pretty frail, but clad in an expensive designer outfit probably made for a 40-year-old and somehow sporting a girlish expression, was walking up and down the street in her slippers. Time and again, she would shuffle all the way up to the triumphal arch, to a certain streetlight, then walk around it … only to return to her other turning point. Just how long had this been the routine of this rich and lonely old woman? Scenes from a big city.

By now, it was definitely time for me to turn in because the previous night’s party had been an exhausting one. Its location, a boat called ‘Concorde Atlantique’, had brought me full circle to my own past.

Some six or seven years ago, the success off my first three singles on Get Physical had put the – then budding – label on the map and – on my part – opened the doors to international DJ gigs.

It was back then, in spring 2003, that the first invitations started flooding in from other European countries and, pretty much from one week to the next, I found myself playing the international scene.

And it all began with a set on this boat in Paris. Just like its neighbour, the ‘Batofar’, the Atlantique Concorde has been a firm fixture of the Parisian club circuit for many years. Every weekend, international DJ stars pass each other on these two moored venues.

I have always loved boats as party locations, for their communal and intimate aspect of ‘we’re all in the same boat’. This time, the invitation had come from Nadir Sayah and his partners Marco and Filipe of ‘We Become’, one of the city’s most popular crew of promoters, who regularly put on events at changing locations, including at the city’s time-honoured Bataclan concert hall.

The party started on Sunday midday and, like every self-respecting after-hour, it brought us a healthy mix of those who had pulled an all-nighter and some fresh-faced newcomers.

The party’s mood curve seemed a bit strange – whenever we thought the crowd had given up, bringing the party to a close, the dancefloor would fill up again and take us to yet another high.

I guess, it didn’t hurt to have a steady influx of new people who kept injecting a dash of new energy … Overall, it was a fun night, culminating in a one-hour finale around 6am for the remaining, select group of hardcore clubbers. But see for yourselves – the clip says it better than I ever could ;)

Paris, mon amour.

Video: DJ T. & Thomas Schumacher play back to back

The track is Nina Simone ‘Sinnerman’ (bootleg)

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