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SPEAKER_01: They said like wear black, so I was wearing everything black, like black t-shirt, black jeans, black socks. I said, you know, just in case, I'll wear black underwear as well.
SPEAKER_03: Even with the black underwear, Alex didn't think much of his chances, but the doorman waved him through.
SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden you're in this environment where the music is penetrating you. And I was just like, wow.
SPEAKER_04: The club is in a former power plant, and it still has that rough and industrial look. There's reporter Kevin Caners who lives in Berlin. It's a huge hall with massively high ceilings and different floors. And filling the building, of course, is the sound of techno pumped out through an enormous wall of speakers. It was just the sound and I just got fully into it.
SPEAKER_04: Alex lives in London and he'd been clubbing there plenty of times, but this was something different.
SPEAKER_01: Everyone can do their thing as long as everyone respects each other. If you see someone naked dancing next year, cool. If you see someone wearing a suit, cool. If people are having sex, okay. And I could have done whatever I wanted in that club, but I made my decision to just dance.
SPEAKER_04: Fourteen hours later, Alex was still dancing. It was like he'd been put into some kind of trance.
SPEAKER_01: And I danced until about six in the morning. That was my trip. It was a very joyous, introverted experience for me.
SPEAKER_04: Now Alex tries to come back to Berlin every year, in large part to visit the clubs. And there are millions of people like him. Berlin has become a destination for techno fans from all over the world.
SPEAKER_03: In this music scene that the city is most famous for, it developed because of the thing the city is most infamous for. The Berlin Wall that divided the city into East and West for almost 30 years. Germany was divided at the end of World War II and so was the city of Berlin. East Berlin was socialist and controlled by the Soviet Union.
SPEAKER_04: West Berlin, on the other hand, was capitalist. It was a strange island outpost of democratic West Germany that was floating in the middle of socialist East Germany.
SPEAKER_03: Then in 1961, the city became divided not only politically, but physically as well. The East German government built a huge wall with checkpoints to prevent its citizens from fleeing into the West.
SPEAKER_04: And soon, divided by a wall and living under completely different political and economic systems, two distinct cities emerged. Each with its own unique culture and music scene.
SPEAKER_11: Yes, hello. My name is Mark Reader. I'm British, now German.
SPEAKER_04: Musician and record producer Mark Reader was a young man from Manchester when he came to West Berlin 17 years after the wall was built. And he immediately fell in love with this strange divided city. What I found was a city that was like unlike anywhere I've ever been before.
SPEAKER_11: I was like, wow, what's this? I have to stay a few more days.
SPEAKER_03: For most West Germans, West Berlin was not considered an attractive place to live. There was hardly any industry and you were essentially cut off from the rest of West Germany, surrounded by a wall on all sides.
SPEAKER_04: And so eager to attract people to the city, the West German government dangled a few incentives to get people to move there. The first was money.
SPEAKER_11: The city was heavily subsidized because it wanted to be attractive. Food was cheap, rents were really cheap. I paid for my hovel, I paid 80 marks a month, which is 40 euros today.
SPEAKER_04: The second incentive was that if you lived in West Berlin, you were exempt from the otherwise mandatory military service in West Germany. You know, if you didn't want to be drafted into the West German army, you could go to
SPEAKER_11: Berlin and then you were exempt from the army.
SPEAKER_03: All this made West Berlin a haven for misfits, hippies, queer people and artists of all kinds.
SPEAKER_11: So anybody who was kind of weird or didn't fit into what was perceived as West German society, you went to Berlin and you met everybody who was just like you.
SPEAKER_04: West Berlin became a place where you could experiment. The artistic side of the city was kind of really off the wall.
SPEAKER_11: You could do whatever you liked and no one kind of questioned that because we were all in the same boat.
SPEAKER_03: West Berlin hadn't really been known as a musical city. It was known for its wall and its Cold War politics. But by the early 1980s, with these new arrivals, an eclectic scene started to develop.
SPEAKER_11: Loads of like little clubs and bars started to open. It just kind of started to manifest itself into something which was really a proper scene.
SPEAKER_04: On any given night, you could hear disco or hip hop or new wave music. And then there was the experimental rock scene full of a constantly changing lineup of bands.
SPEAKER_11: In West Germany, they called it the Berliner Krankheit, Berlin illness, because it was so unconventional. It was kind of just kind of this crazy rock music scene. And it was a thrill.
SPEAKER_03: But while people like Mark were playing in bands and throwing parties in West Berlin, just behind the wall in East Berlin, it was a completely different world.
SPEAKER_04: In socialist East Germany, music was viewed as a potential danger to the state and was heavily regulated. The only publisher of music was the government-run label. They didn't allow anything subversive.
SPEAKER_04: Fola Neugebauer lived in East Berlin back in the 1980s. And he says if you wanted to be a DJ, you had to be officially trained and licensed by the state. The same was true if you wanted to own an electric guitar or perform in a band. And you couldn't just hold a private dance party. Fola said that also required official approval.
SPEAKER_04: There were still parties, though. Fola, for example, got a job helping to organize dances for the official socialist youth organization of East Germany. But he says there was a crazy bureaucracy you would have to navigate to make one of these parties happen.
SPEAKER_03: First you'd have to explain to the powers that be exactly what you would be doing and what political and cultural goals you hoped to achieve.
SPEAKER_04: So Fola would write up an official justification, something along the lines of, we're helping to make the youth better socialists through the ecstasy of music.
SPEAKER_03: The application would wind its way through official channels and often months later, you'd be approved to host one of these dances. Everything in East Germany took its time.
SPEAKER_04: So two different Berlins, West and East, meters apart, but inhabiting starkly different realities, both musically and culturally.
SPEAKER_03: But while they couldn't take part in West Berlin's club and music scenes, many East Berliners like Fola knew about it. And that's because they could pick up the West Berlin radio stations, which beamed over the wall.
SPEAKER_04: One show in particular was SF Beat with Monica Dietl.
SPEAKER_05: Every Saturday night, Monica would play acid house music which had started becoming popular
SPEAKER_04: in West Berlin. The music was electronic, repetitive, and perfect for dancing.
SPEAKER_03: And during these shows, Monica would often say where this music was being DJ'd live. She'd say come tonight to the UFO club if you want to party.
SPEAKER_11: And all these kids in the East, they were thinking, you know, that there's a massive techno scene happening in West Berlin. And they imagined this kind of like club thing that happened. They had no idea what a club thing was because they just heard the music.
SPEAKER_04: But even though the UFO club that Monica most often mentioned was only 100 meters from the border, it was completely out of reach for Fola.
SPEAKER_03: For him, West Berlin felt so inaccessible, it might as well have been the moon.
SPEAKER_04: But that was about to change. Beginning in the mid 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev became the new leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev favored an approach called glasnost, the Russian word for openness. He was much less authoritarian than earlier leaders, and he started allowing for more transparency and dissent.
SPEAKER_07: The main achievement of Gorbachev's policies was that in the space of a year or two, he made the fear disappear, as if by magic. People had lost their fear of speaking and acting freely.
SPEAKER_03: At first, the ruling East German socialists didn't share Gorbachev's enthusiasm for openness and they were in no rush to follow his example.
SPEAKER_04: But as the 80s dragged on, the East German government was being put under more and more pressure by its own citizens to make similar changes.
SPEAKER_02: Fola says people were becoming braver and more willing to speak out.
SPEAKER_04: By the fall of 1989, there were increasingly large public demonstrations taking place,
SPEAKER_03: something that until recently would have been unthinkable.
SPEAKER_04: And Fola says there was a growing sense among citizens that they might be able to actually change things. But when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, Fola says it still came as a complete and utter shock.
SPEAKER_04: He says he can still remember the night very clearly. He and his girlfriend had been out at a party when they decided to call it a night. When they got home, he turned on the TV and they saw the news.
SPEAKER_03: What they learned is that the East German border guards, overwhelmed by huge crowds that had gathered at the border crossings, were simply letting people through to West Berlin. Suddenly, there were no more controls.
SPEAKER_04: And although it wasn't clear what exactly was happening, Fola's feeling was, finally, we can visit the moon. Finally we can see for ourselves all the things we've only heard about. He said to his girlfriend, let's go to the West. So they went to the border and with thousands of others, they crossed over into West Berlin.
SPEAKER_04: They bought a bottle of champagne from a gas station and went to look for a friend they knew on the Western side.
SPEAKER_03: In the days and weeks that followed, everyone was euphoric and parties started happening everywhere.
SPEAKER_11: Right at the very beginning, right after the fall of the wall, the first thing that people wanted to do was go out clubbing.
SPEAKER_03: They wanted to visit the clubs they'd heard so much about on the radio.
SPEAKER_04: Fola was filled with an enormous sense of freedom and possibility. He says suddenly everything that had been so strictly regulated, including music, was now open.
SPEAKER_02: For the first time, these kids in the East had the opportunity to choose what kind of
SPEAKER_11: music they wanted to listen to. It wasn't music which was being dictated to them by the state of East Germany. This was music that they could decide for themselves.
SPEAKER_04: And the fall of the wall happened to occur at a moment when music was going in a brand new direction.
SPEAKER_03: The acid house scene of Berlin was quickly moving towards what's known as techno, a darker, more propulsive style of music created by black electronic musicians in Detroit. The harder Detroit sound had a huge influence on European musicians, especially the Germans.
SPEAKER_04: And a few weeks after the wall fell, Fola heard these new, harder sounds at a small party at the UFO club.
SPEAKER_04: As he remembers, this music was hard, driving, and psychedelic.
SPEAKER_02: And he knew right away, this is my music.
SPEAKER_03: The whole political system had just crumbled. The future felt unwritten, and this new techno music fit that sense of newness perfectly.
SPEAKER_04: But these techno parties were still relatively small. UFO, the main West Berlin basement club where this new music was being played, was tiny. It couldn't hold more than 100 people at a time. Fola wanted to organize something bigger.
SPEAKER_03: Freed from the restrictions of the East German state, he wanted to throw huge parties with fog machines and strobe lights and with techno music that would play all night.
SPEAKER_04: He called these parties techno tea parties. And as anyone who was there will tell you, it was on the dance floor that East and West really came together.
SPEAKER_11: The unification of Germany happened on the dance floor. It didn't happen in politics until much later. Everybody was on the dance floor together. And it didn't matter where you came from, whether you were from the East or the West, how much money you were in, what kind of job you had, didn't matter. Everyone was dancing on the same drug to the same music on the same plane mentally. And everybody loved each other. And we were all unified, you know, in that way. For me personally, I think techno is definitely the sound of the Berlin Wall coming down. You know, it's definitely the reunification soundtrack.
SPEAKER_03: But as the scene exploded, party organizers faced a problem. They needed bigger and bigger venues to accommodate the growing crowds. And unlike West Berlin, which was cramped and claustrophobic, East Berlin had plenty of space.
SPEAKER_13: Everybody was exploring spaces all the time. That's basically what we all did. It was like a sport for people to run around and check out where do we have empty apartments.
SPEAKER_04: Der Spiegel journalist Tobias Rapp was a teenager from West Germany who had just graduated high school when he decided to move with a friend to East Berlin just a few months after the wall fell. They quickly found a place to squat. It was just empty and we went in.
SPEAKER_13: It was like a big house.
SPEAKER_04: Actually an entire apartment building.
SPEAKER_13: So all in all, it was like 30 units. That's how this went down. Pretty basic. Empty building, get it.
SPEAKER_04: For Tobias, the whole city was like a big playground of derelict buildings. It wasn't just the abandoned apartments. There were also former military sites and factories that had been shut down and buildings that had been condemned. You're in a huge space, you know, you just discovered it.
SPEAKER_13: It's empty. You open up the door, enter a building, it looks fantastic and it's empty. Nobody asks any questions. So you have to ask yourself a question, what do I do with it? And the easiest thing to do is, oh, we make a party. That's the core impulse where this whole Berlin nightlife club scene comes from.
SPEAKER_04: Not only were there tons of empty buildings, usually it wasn't even clear who owned them. That's because decades before the Nazis had seized property from Jewish citizens. And after the war, the communists took away lots of real estate from what they thought
SPEAKER_13: were Nazis or bourgeois class.
SPEAKER_04: So you had these multiple layers of expropriations going back decades.
SPEAKER_13: Everything was theoretically cleared in the contracts that led to the German reunification, but to clear on the ground which property belongs to whom. That took years.
SPEAKER_03: And while this chaos over ownership was a headache for the state and of course for the descendants of the people whose property had been seized, it was a godsend for the underground techno music scene. You know, we had a lot of people from West Berlin who had the experience of making parties
SPEAKER_11: in West Berlin and doing events in West Berlin. They realized like now we have places we can do parties in, we don't have to pay any rent, you know, we don't have to pay any fee.
SPEAKER_04: With a huge amount of abandoned space, parties started popping up everywhere, usually just for a night or two and then moving on somewhere else.
SPEAKER_11: At the beginning it was always like changing locations. It was always, it would just be a one-off party, one-off event, then never again kind of thing.
SPEAKER_04: And you would find out about these parties through word of mouth. And sometimes you'd have like secret things where it'd be just like call this number at
SPEAKER_11: this time and you'd phone up and find out where a party was at.
SPEAKER_03: But while all this was fun for the people involved, it could only really happen because Berlin's economy was so messed up. There was all this confusion about the ownership of these old derelict buildings and there wasn't a lot of demand for them.
SPEAKER_04: Many older East Germans struggled through this period. They watched as the whole system they had grown up under collapsed.
SPEAKER_13: Sometimes the 90s in Berlin looked so idyllic and ah, times of freedom and blah, blah, blah. For lots of people it was not like this at all. They lost their job, they lost their status and they felt overwhelmed. A historical development that nobody had seen to come.
SPEAKER_04: Entire industries were shut down or sold off as the East was converted from socialism to capitalism at breakneck speed. Lots of people had their lives completely upturned while the techno kids had their run of things.
SPEAKER_03: Berlin's techno scene might've been just a blip, something that disappeared as the post-wall euphoria faded, were it not for a guy named Dimitri Hegemon.
SPEAKER_04: Dimitri helped turn the city's chaotic underground techno movement into a permanent club scene that would change the landscape and economy of Berlin completely.
SPEAKER_03: Dimitri was a West Berliner and it was his tiny illegal basement club, the UFO club, that had been at the center of the small club scene in West Berlin. But now that the wall had come down and the techno scene was expanding, he wanted something bigger.
SPEAKER_04: And so with a couple of friends, about a year after the wall fell, he started exploring East Berlin, looking for a larger venue where he could put on his parties.
SPEAKER_03: Lots of buildings in East Berlin were empty, but many of the most interesting to explore were those that were right by the now unguarded Berlin wall.
SPEAKER_04: And one day in 1990, while Dimitri was stuck in a traffic jam with two friends right by the former wall, they noticed one of these buildings and thought, why don't we try here? And we went there and there was an elderly person with his big keys, you know, and he
SPEAKER_10: let us in.
SPEAKER_04: The building was small, concrete, and kind of shoddy. It was nothing special. But the elderly maintenance man left them with keys. And that night they went to check it out a second time, which was when they happened to notice some stairs hidden behind some shelves.
SPEAKER_03: These stairs led them down to a massive iron door, beyond which was a strange underground room.
SPEAKER_10: We smelled the old air and we touched these old lockers and it was mysterious. It was like opening a pyramid. For me, it was completely clear. This space has the quality for something great.
SPEAKER_04: What they'd found was an enormous vault filled with safety deposit boxes. It had served as the in-house bank of a grand apartment store called the Wertheim.
SPEAKER_10: The wall was like one meter thick, you know, there was just concrete and steel and it was impossible to break through.
SPEAKER_03: The Wertheim had been the largest department store in all of Europe. And while the huge main building had been destroyed by bombing during World War II, this underground vault with its meter thick concrete walls had survived.
SPEAKER_04: They asked the maintenance guy, so who's responsible for the building? And he gave them the East Berlin address of the Bundesvermückensamt, which was the federal property office.
SPEAKER_03: When East Germany joined with West Germany and began transitioning to capitalism, all the communal property and state-owned industries of the former socialist country had to be sold off or managed in the meantime.
SPEAKER_04: And the address Dimitri had been given was one of the government agencies that had been put in charge of this task. They were unorganized and they said, okay, if this is the address and we work out something
SPEAKER_10: for three months, you know, and they told us, you cannot expect that you stay longer if the owner comes and says it's mine.
SPEAKER_04: But even armed with a three-month lease, Dimitri was ecstatic. I was so happy, you know, that I could find in the heart of Berlin this space.
SPEAKER_04: They spent the next few months cleaning it up. And in March 1991, they opened up a club. They called it Trezor, the German word for vault. Now, you didn't have to call a secret number to find a techno party.
SPEAKER_03: On a Saturday night, you knew exactly where to go. The scene was evolving from fleeting parties and scattered places to something bigger and more established. Large unusual spaces like Trezor were starting to take hold.
SPEAKER_04: Trezor quickly became known for its hard Detroit inspired techno parties that would go all weekend. With the fog machines and strobe lights and loud beats, people seemed to forget time and space.
SPEAKER_03: Trezor didn't just help popularize this new harder version of Detroit's techno sound. It also helped build a real connection between the Berlin and Detroit techno scenes. Dimitri started the Trezor label and began releasing the work of many of these Detroit musicians throughout Europe.
SPEAKER_04: For many visitors like Tobias, going to Trezor for the first time was like a revelation.
SPEAKER_13: I thought, okay, this is our zero. Everything that I used to believe in musically is the past. And I'm right here right now in the present. This boom, boom, boom that wipes away everything else. That was my feeling.
SPEAKER_04: Trezor's three month lease was extended for another three months and then another. And meanwhile, a whole network of clubs began to develop nearby in the empty buildings right by the former site of the Berlin Wall.
SPEAKER_03: And over time, the techno scene continued to grow and began driving an economic revival in Berlin. Dimitri says people felt empowered to experiment and to use the city's empty spaces in creative ways.
SPEAKER_10: Nobody made big plans. We do something for the next 20 years or so. We just said, okay, for one week, that's great, for one month or just for one day, let's get together and have a good time. That was the beginning of many, many small startups.
SPEAKER_04: People began opening not only clubs, but bars and art galleries and all kinds of small businesses. And all of these new businesses could basically fly under the radar. There was so much else going on with the politics of unifying the city that for the most part, no one was really checking to make sure anyone was paying taxes or getting the proper permits to put on events or serve alcohol. And that was the case for years.
SPEAKER_03: In many ways, Berlin hadn't had a stable identity since World War II. The city had been occupied and divided and never had much of an industry. Plus the shadow of being the capital of Nazi Germany still lingered.
SPEAKER_04: But the new culture that started to grow up around the techno scene helped to change that. And as techno migrated from the underground to the mainstream, it began to drop people from all over the world.
SPEAKER_03: Word had gotten out. If you like techno and sweaty dance parties that last until dawn, you've got to check out Berlin.
SPEAKER_13: You hear that a friend of a friend of a friend of yours tells crazy stories about this crazy club he was to. And then you go and check out for yourself and you realize, hmm, it's really amazing. And the more crazy the stories are, the more power they tend to get.
SPEAKER_04: This was helped along by the fact that in the early 2000s, flights within the EU had gotten significantly cheaper. You didn't have to be rich anymore to visit just for a weekend. And while tourists used to come to Berlin for the historical monuments, Where's the wall?
SPEAKER_13: Where's the Brandenburg Gate? Now they were coming for the clubs. Where can I go out? Where are the techno clubs?
SPEAKER_04: And over time, some of those travelers decided to stay. And with all the new energy, the nightlife became a real economic force.
SPEAKER_11: 2018 generated 1.4 billion euros. That's the only thing that we have in this city is the entertainment industry.
SPEAKER_03: And it wasn't just the direct impact of the club scene that was changing the city. There were lots of additional effects as well. Tech companies related to electronic music like SoundCloud, Ableton, and Native Instruments were founded in Berlin. Other tech companies, not always related to music, followed.
SPEAKER_04: And finally, after years of being famously economically challenged, Berlin was growing faster than the rest of Germany. And for Tobias, much of the credit goes to techno. I think the influence of techno music and the subcultural nightlife that comes along
SPEAKER_13: with it is much, much bigger than anybody imagined.
SPEAKER_03: Today the techno scene is so important economically to the city that even the conservative Christian Democratic Party of Berlin talks about the need to support Berlin's club culture despite all the drugs and hedonism that it involves. And just recently, the German federal parliament decided to reclassify nightclubs as cultural institutions, meaning they're granted the same legal status as museums and opera houses.
SPEAKER_04: This kind of mainstream recognition can sometimes be weird for the people who were involved with the scene back when it was just starting, when everything felt wild and subversive and completely new.
SPEAKER_13: Techno is 40 years old now, so it has grown up.
SPEAKER_03: The people who run the clubs now, they're professionals. They know exactly what they're doing. Most of them are really smart businessmen.
SPEAKER_13: They know who their audience is. They know that they're not planning just for today, but they're planning for their life, that it's a real career.
SPEAKER_04: Which is not how it was back in the 90s. Back then, Tobias said, you never really knew what was going to happen next.
SPEAKER_13: I'm sometimes nostalgic for the 90s because of the freedom and all the craziness and chaos, but I'm not nostalgic for the German-ness of the 90s. I find this international city that we have now way more attractive than this German city I had back then.
SPEAKER_04: And he's just waiting to see what this new international generation of Berliners comes up with.
SPEAKER_13: Berlin is a very inviting city and techno is one of these tools that gives out an invitation to the world and says, hey, you can come here and you can be part of what this city is about to become.
SPEAKER_03: That story was produced by Kevin Kainers and edited by Delaney Hall. Coming up after the break, we talk with Kevin about the origins of the Detroit techno scene and how the music eventually made its way to Berlin. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. Article believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geom sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. Visit article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_03: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com slash invisible. So we're back with Kevin and Kevin, the story that we just heard was all about Berlin and Techno's influence on the city, but we also mentioned how the sound originally came over from Detroit and that's like a whole other story.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so Techno first emerged in Detroit in the 1980s and I was curious about how that happened. So I called up two of the important early techno musicians from Detroit, one Atkins and Blake Baxter, and they both described Detroit in the 80s as a rough place to live. It was an industrial city that was quickly becoming post-industrial. The population was shrinking. There was a lot of white flight and people were losing their jobs. Here's Blake Baxter.
SPEAKER_08: Detroit was dark. I lived downtown and it was like an abandoned city with tall skyscrapers. I mean, six o'clock, you didn't see no one on the street. Like the storefronts were all closed, totally empty downtown. So yeah, Detroit was a hot mess in the 70s and 80s.
SPEAKER_04: While the city around them was economically depressed, Blake and Juan both came from middle class black families and they say that they and their friends were part of a very particular social scene. They were into all kinds of music, including a lot of stuff from Europe. Here's Juan. So they would do these parties where they play disco music and Italian import music
SPEAKER_09: and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_08: I think black teens were just into whatever was good and creative. And for me, I was just soaking it all up, trying to incorporate it all.
SPEAKER_03: And so what kind of stuff were they listening to? Like what is he talking about?
SPEAKER_04: Well, a lot of it was electronic or synthesizer based, like everything from Parliament, Funkadelic and Giorgio Moroder to new wave bands like Devo and Depeche Mode. And they really loved the German band Kraftwerk.
SPEAKER_08: We loved Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk was one of the main engines that fueled electro in Detroit. Everyone was Kraftwerk. I love Kraftwerk too.
SPEAKER_03: It doesn't seem like it's very much like the techno music that we heard in the piece. Like how did they get from Kraftwerk to what they were creating?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it does seem like a pretty big leap. So right around the same time, the early 1980s, was when all these new consumer electronic instruments started becoming available. There were new synths from manufacturers like Korg and drum machines like the TR-808 and 909. Sure. And while synths and drum machines had existed before, these new models were cheap enough that a lot of people could actually afford them. And this opened up a whole new world for kids like Juan and Blake. It meant that they could make music at home.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, because before that it was like going into a studio, having a drummer play the beats. And then when the 909 came out, it made music production affordable. It had everything on it. And it had a big sound too. I would record like a rhythm track on one cassette, then play it back and record a bass
SPEAKER_09: line and catch it on the other cassette. And I would ping-pong back and forth until eventually I had a song.
SPEAKER_04: And Juan and Blake were by no means the only ones. Tons of young kids were experimenting.
SPEAKER_08: Every kid my age, I knew they were doing the same thing, like wanting to make electronic music. Yeah, it just caught on like wildfire.
SPEAKER_09: And it just got to a stage where just everybody started making music. The manufacturers made this a technology available and we picked it up and ran with it.
SPEAKER_03: So there's all these technologies like drum machines and synths, but what was it about Detroit? Like all the musicians and people who are promoting parties in Berlin in your piece are talking about Detroit. Like what was distinctly happening in Detroit? Yeah, well, it's not like these machines or instruments were only being used in Detroit.
SPEAKER_04: There was also Chicago house music that used these devices like the Roland 808 and 909. But Chicago house music was more influenced by disco and soul music. And there was this really big party scene around Chicago house music. But musicians in Detroit seem more attracted to harder, more industrial sounds.
SPEAKER_08: That was just what Detroit was into from day one, this electro-hard industrial combination.
SPEAKER_04: And there was this one Detroit collective in particular called the Underground Resistance. And its founders, Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, and Mike Banks were really pioneers of this darker Detroit sound. It was kind of like their city's answer to happier Chicago house music. And this was a distinction that became really clear in 1988 when Virgin Records from the UK decided to put out a compilation album with artists like Blake Baxter and Juan Atkins featuring this new Detroit music. They were going to call that album The House Sound of Detroit.
SPEAKER_09: And I submitted a track called Techno Music. And I said, no, my music is techno music. My music ain't house music. And so that submission made them change the album to the techno sound of Detroit.
SPEAKER_03: Wow. Like rarely do you get a moment where you're like, okay, we're going to call everything techno from here on. That's just great. Yeah, I mean, it's a bit unclear if it's like this moment because in Germany they also use
SPEAKER_04: the word techno, but techno was more like Depeche Mode or like it wasn't like what we think today is techno. That's interesting. So yeah, so Techno, the new dance sound of Detroit came out and helped solidify techno as this unique genre.
SPEAKER_03: And is that album how the music made its way over to Europe and Berlin? Well, it certainly helped.
SPEAKER_04: But maybe more importantly for Berlin was the fact that there was a record store owner here named Mark Ernestus. And Mark had a really big hand in getting many of these Detroit records over to Berlin and noticed by the DJs here.
SPEAKER_03: And so the music comes over and you also mentioned the piece that musicians eventually came over to, like, how did that all happen?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So March 1991, Tresor opens and quickly becomes known for its love of hard Detroit techno. And already within the first few months of the club's existence, its owner Dimitri Hegeman, this is the guy that we met in the main story. He invited many of these pioneering Detroit techno artists over to come to Berlin and play Tresor. Juan came, Underground Resistance came, and Blake came.
SPEAKER_08: Berlin was messed up. I mean, it looked like right after the war because the buildings were tore up. The wall was still partially up, but I really love the look because I came from Detroit. So I always saw beauty in decay and just looking at how Berlin was, it was amazing.
SPEAKER_03: And so did they say what it was like playing their music, like across the ocean in this completely different context?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So it was definitely somewhat strange for them. When they played at Tresor, it was mostly, if not all white crowd at Tresor.
SPEAKER_09: Whereas in Detroit, the parties we played in Detroit was all black kids. But they say it was also exciting to see the enthusiasm that this other culture had for
SPEAKER_04: their music. It was so many more people into what we were into and we were like shocked to see that.
SPEAKER_08: And then how they partied in these old, dirty spaces, finding old bunkers, old basements, and you know, these loud sound systems. We were doing that in Detroit, but they took it up to a great insane level. Yeah, it was like Detroit on steroids. I really loved it.
SPEAKER_04: And at least for Blake, he found this kinship between the vibe of Berliners and Detroiters. It seemed like people in Berlin, they were on the same wavelength.
SPEAKER_08: You know, Detroit wasn't into formulated sounds. It's like you get a keyboard, you mess it the hell up. You mess up the parameters, the frequencies, and you just find the most f***ed up sound you can and you make it work. And the German people, they love experimentation. So it was a great match. And the crazier we got, the more they loved it.
SPEAKER_03: He's so good. I mean, obviously, as he mentioned, Detroit had gone through sort of this strange abandonment downtown in difficult times. And Berlin was going through this. I mean, is this what he attributes to why they were all on the same wavelength?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think so. Because, you know, Detroit had racism and job losses, while Berlin had the division and the war. You know, both really kind of dark, difficult pasts. And Blake says that created a shared desire of the young people in both cities to kind of step out from those shadows.
SPEAKER_08: You know, wanting to express yourself and wanting to let go of the past and step into the future, I think that was something, being from Detroit and being from Berlin, I think we had that in common.
SPEAKER_04: And almost from day one, this bond between these Detroit musicians like Blake and Juan and the city developed into something much more than just coming to play for a night and then leaving. And a lot of this was specifically because of Dimitri Hegeman. You know, he ended up putting out albums of theirs on the Trezor label, and so they stayed to make these albums. So some of the Detroit guys ended up spending a lot of time in the city. And so what was it like for them to go back and forth between the two cities?
SPEAKER_03: I mean, well, one kind of difficult part of it was that while Detroit and Berlin were
SPEAKER_04: both in rough shape at the beginning of the 90s, when they first started coming, Juan and Blake watched as Berlin started to rebound while things in Detroit stayed pretty much the same.
SPEAKER_09: Berlin kind of went leaps and bounds past Detroit since then. I mean, when the first time I went, it was like it looked around the same size as Detroit, you know, kind of bleak, cold all the time. Then next time I came, a year or two after, it's like the sky was full of cranes. Like everywhere you look in Berlin, there was cranes. And now you don't even recognize the place.
SPEAKER_03: So Berlin is rebuilding with all these construction cranes, but the same thing isn't happening in Detroit.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, exactly. And while Berlin is becoming this techno city world famous for its clubs, this was also not happening in Detroit.
SPEAKER_09: To this day, we don't really have a real purpose built club for techno music in Detroit, of all places.
SPEAKER_04: And Blake and Juan say that while the Berlin government sees the value in the nightlife and its club scene, the city of Detroit doesn't view it nearly as favorably. And of course, unlike Berlin, where there's no curfew and you can sell drinks all night, Detroit has a last call of 2 a.m., which makes it far harder to open up a financially successful club.
SPEAKER_03: You can't have the three day parties that you talk about if you have to close down at 2 a.m. Yeah. But are there other efforts to change that to sort of to enliven the techno scene in Detroit?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So for a while now, Dimitri Hickman has been involved in efforts along with local Detroiters to bring more of a nightlife economy to the city. As we talked about in the first half of the show, he's a strong believer in how the night culture has helped Berlin and its economy. And he thinks, at least to a degree, it could do the same for Detroit. So he's visited Detroit many times over the years and worked with local politicians there to see how they can bring more clubs to the city. So I said, let's try it out.
SPEAKER_10: Let's make an experiment. Let's get an art zone, a zoned area where the venues open till six in the morning or eight. Because you lose the night, you know, and the night is an important time. It made Berlin very popular and attractive, and it would create a lot of jobs, a lot of jobs. They have space. What city has space, you know? And it's still available, I think.
SPEAKER_03: That's fascinating. And so what do Blake and Juan think about these efforts to create this nightlife mecca in Detroit?
SPEAKER_04: Well, they both are pretty positive and think it's a good idea, but also acknowledge that there are definite hurdles standing in the way. The problem is the amount of people.
SPEAKER_08: See, Berlin has way more people living in the inner city and way more young people going out than Detroit has. Detroit is still like young in its Renaissance stage. So it can happen, and it's a really great concept. But it would take time and a lot of funding, but, you know, Dimitri's a guy that comes up with ideals, and some work, some don't. But when they work, they really work. And people here in Detroit, they really love him. I mean, when he walks down the street, he could do no wrong. This quirky guy, you know, people love him.
SPEAKER_04: So yeah, we'll see what happens. These efforts have been underway in some capacity for years, and there's even an official organization called the Detroit-Berlin Connection that works on these things. But whatever happens, the bond between the two scenes is still strong. Juan, for example, lived in Berlin in 2018 for half a year because it makes sense with his DJing work. You can fly to London or Paris in just an hour or two. Compare that with a whole day trip from Detroit. And Blake regularly visits Berlin, and at least in non-Corona times, DJs at Trezor several times a year. And actually, it turns out that he has a daughter with Dimitri's daughter. Wow, okay. So they are close. Yeah, so there's the real Berlin-Detroit connection for you. And so yeah, however you look at it, the 30-year connection that Techno forged between Berlin and Detroit is here to stay.
SPEAKER_03: Well, that is so cool. Thank you so much for bringing this other aspect to the story, Kevin. I really appreciate it. Yeah, it was my pleasure, Roman.
SPEAKER_03: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Kevin Caners, edited by our executive producer Delaney Hall, music by our director of sound Sean Real, mixed by Bryson Barnes. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director of the rest of the team. It's Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madon, Vivian Lay, Joe Rosenberg, Katie Menkel, Emmett Fitzgerald, Chris Berube, Sofia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. We are a part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find other shows I love from Stitcher on our website, 99pi.org, including The Dream. Season one is a brilliant investigation of multi-level marketing. Season two takes on the wellness industry. Search for it wherever you're listening now or follow our link at 99pi.org. 3 days later...
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