- For the last few years, a chunk of the music on SUED, Acido and Sex Tags Mania has been recorded at Neues Deutschland, the former HQ of a socialist newspaper of the same name, now an office complex where SVN, SUED's cofounder, keeps a small studio. Last Saturday, those three labels threw a party together in what seemed to be Neues Deutschland's events space, a cluster of nondescript white rooms designed for corporate functions, but that worked nicely for this odd little rave. The main dance floor had been equipped with just a couple red lights and a four-point soundsystem. Outside, a wide metal staircase curled down into a vast courtyard where people smoked and chatted on picnic tables. Next door to the dance floor, an office kitchen made into a makeshift bar served €3 gin and tonics and Eichhofener, a deep cut of German pilsener (late in the night, Dynamo Dreesen could be heard shouting to a friend that this party had "the best pils in Germany," a sentence that was surely misunderstood).
When I walked in around 12:15 AM, Dreesen was playing the A-side from SUED018, by a mile the label's heaviest club track yet. This set the tone for the night, which went in hard on driving rhythms and punchy drums, rarely touching on the light-footed, tropical side of these labels' sounds. SW., an artist who's performed just a handful of times in the past few years, came on at a distinctly counterintuitive time—I think it was 12:48 AM—and began his live set as inconspicuously as possible, mixing out of Dreesen's last tune without a pause for applause. The German producer's last few records have been wispy and reflective, but tonight he was all heavy donks and evil basslines of a sort never heard in his productions. Still, they somehow possessed the elusive personality that sets them apart.
By the time he finished the room was hot, stuffy and not without an aroma of body odor, but the party had lifted off, with a smiling crowd bouncing around beneath the unchanging red lights. DJ Sotofett hopped on and sailed through a medley of electro and ghettotech, finishing with Detroit In Effect's "Shake A Lil Faster" and Kraftwerk's "Tour De France." He stepped aside for his brother, DJ Fett Burger, who started with a bit of demented soul—Pepe Bradock's "Erectus Rework" of Candi Staton's "Do Your Duty." Those two traded off with Dynamo Dreesen for the rest of the night, swerving through house, electro, techno and garage, all of it banging, all of it at least a little strange. Dreesen dropped Fantastic Man's latest one, "Trance Sexual." Fett Burger followed a long stretch of obscurities with the night's only anthem, Donna Summers' "I Feel Love." Sotofett played the ghettotech burner "Seasons" by Six Foe—heard near dawn on a sticky July night, the hook ("every summer, the freaks get dumber") felt like a taunt.
Sometime around 5 AM, things got weird. Dreesen played something that was all rustling, unquantized drums. Sotofett dropped what might have been a Busen record—pure tones in an anxious loop that went on forever, as if daring remaining stragglers to just leave already. The wobbly few who stuck it out were rewarded with the sweetest moment of the night: Aphex Twin's "Iz Us." Beyond the walls of the darkened room, chuckles echoed through the courtyard. Out front, by the building's bizarre concrete awning, people unlocked their bikes and set off through the foggy morning, sweaty and satisfied.