Each month we invite a leading voice in the Berlin club scene to spill the tea on what tasty events they have lined up in their calendar. From delicious parties to quirky dungeons, prepare for your weekends to be entirely curated and your calendars to be spicier than ever.
For this edition, we asked none other than podcaster, producer, author, and all-around creative dynamo Paul Hanford to take the reins of the segment, and boy, did he have some terrific recommendations up his sleeve.
Make sure to check out Paul Hanford’s podcast Lost and Sound and his recently published book Coming to Berlin online or at your local Berlin store. Also, why not swing by Echo Bücher on October 13th to catch him in conversation with DJ Fuckoff and our very own founder Jonny Tiernan? We’ll see you there.
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What: AL.Festival
Where: Festaal Kreuzberg
When: 14th Oct, 16:00
AL returns for its third annual all-day celebration of West Asian and North African contemporary music and art.
It brings us a rare opportunity here to dance to Palestinian DJ Sama’ Abdulhadi, whose sets I’ve been super keen to experience for a while now. As a child, Sama’ discovered dancing to techno in her bedroom under house arrest as a way to release anger from Israeli oppression. An unknown before her 2018 Boiler Room set went viral, in which she played surrounded by friends in a city with a severely restricted dance culture. The set has so far amassed an incredible ten and a half million streams and counting. Since then, her music and parties have upset conservative, religious authorities, and an arrest, followed by death threats, has affected her mission to get both her music and her fellow Palestinians heard.
The day-long festival itself starts at 4 pm on Friday. Three different stages and an outdoor bazaar area will host an eclectic yet carefully curated mix of musicians, DJs, performers, visual artists, and designers of the region.
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What: Lunchbox Candy 1 Year Anniversary Bash
Where: ÆVE
When: 15th Oct, 22:00
I really love the way Lunchbox Candy has come together. The entire event feels rooted in the values that make Berlin so special. Founded one year ago by DJ and producer Elninodiablo and filmmaker Adam Munnings in 2021 initially as a gesture of gratitude to friends and prior collaborators of the duo, who had been working on music videos together during lockdowns. This queer, sex-positive party is all about inclusivity, playfulness, and fun, but what rings most true to me is its concept. I love that this is a community of creatives that have come together and decided to share a journey through a collective experience. In a nutshell, Lunchbox Candy is a celebration of the values of clubbing that make Berlin still special. One of the main criticisms for the relaunch of Tresor this summer has been the come-and-go nature of the lineups that have created airport transience where people often turn up for the DJs they want to see and then fuck off somewhere else. You don’t get those kinds of in-and-out patrons at Lunchbox Candy. Why? Because once you’re there you simply won’t want to leave.
I’m looking forward to going, and also revisiting ÆVE for the first time since the space reopened. Back a decade ago, I had a formative club experience here back when the ramshackle spree-side altbau was known as Chalet. I was still visiting Berlin at this point and wound up here when an OkCupid date escalated into an all-night Thursday dance. I met a few people that night amongst the bare plaster that I still know. Ah, the memories.
What: Bubble Bath
Where: Re:Mise
When: October 22nd, 23:00
I’ve been keen to go to Bubble Bath since my pal DJ Fuckoff played there around a year ago, I missed that night as it was slam in the middle of writing my book.
Held at Re:Mise, ever so slightly more at the Schlessi end of Köpenicker Str than the Kraftwerk and Kit Kat stretch, the night promises to be Berlin’s steamiest party, but I really love the cute vibes of how they curate underground talent, to which I don’t know any of the DJs playing, other than a little bit of Soundcloudery as I write this, and you know what? That’s how it should be sometimes.
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What: Jack Your Body
Where: Berghain, Panorama Bar
When: Friday 28th Oct, 22:00
“Berlin has been incredible to me” Honey Dijon announced on her Instagram about her new monthly Friday residency upstairs at Pano, over in the Big House. The night’s moniker Jack Your Body could be way more than a surface not to Steve “Silk” Hurley’s groundbreaking 1986 anthem: that stuttering title phrase signaling one of the first house tunes to cross over out of the Chicago underground into some kind of pre-acid house mainstream is also a link to Dijon’s roots.
A Chicago native herself, one time mentored by legends like Derrick Carter, this night feels like it could be a multigenerational, ever-morphing homage to the superstar’s roots and lifelong dedication to house music. Now dividing her time between New York and Berlin, Dijon manages to be that rare thing of being an artist connected to a proud lineage while being extraordinarily contemporary and this echoes across how I speculate this night might feel – mixing up heritage acts and newer talents and like Dijon’s new record, mainlining into a long lineage of house music without feeling overtly nostalgic.
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What: Mount Kimbie pres. Kai Campos, Actress, Afrodeutsche, Bjarki, DJ AYA, DJ Spit, Kush Jones
Where: RSO
When: Friday 28th Oct, 23:00
Another exciting curated night by a cutting-edge artist is Mount Kimbie. These English producers have always combined frequency-shaking club sonics with experimentation since their early deconstructed dubstep-influenced work through to brittle, melancholic collaborations with King Krule and Mica Levi. Their new double album, on Warp, does a bit of a Speakerboxx/The Love Below, with the duo separately tackling an album each. In Berlin this month, it’s one half of the project, Kai Campos, that seems set to take a similar level of experimentation across to Schöneweider and into RSO for this curated lineup where highlights for me include Actress (the enigmatic Ninja Tune artist’s collab single with Mount Kimbie this summer AZD Surf was an almost Motorik landscape of grains and bleeps) and the Manchester-based Afrodeutsche, whose last single Can’t Stop felt like it took elements of Detroit pure techno and breathed modern bass manipulation into it.
This is going to be a deep night, expect left-field sonic curves, and don’t be afraid to tread off the 4/4.