It was hard to know what to expect from last weekend's Sex Tags Mania party in Berlin. Anyone who's heard their records or podcasts knows that DJ Sotofett and DJ Fett Burger are about as gleefully unconventional as it gets, and the only other artist on the bill was Hops, a clerk at Hard Wax with a heavy bass streak. The venue was Horst Krzbrg, which, though nicely straight-forward for Berlin (it's basically just a square room with a meaty sound system), can be a bit spotty in terms of attendance, and a label like Sex Tags might have been too esoteric to fill it out. But that was alright—driven more by curiosity than anything else, I was content to listen to clangy, semi-danceable records in a half-empty club for a few hours then call it a night.
Which isn't to say I wasn't relieved when just the opposite happened. The party turned out to be precisely that—a party—with a happy crowd dancing to oddball club records til sometime past 6:00 AM. Far from whatever artsy thing I'd pictured in my head, the scene was very relaxed and upbeat, not least in the DJ booth: Sotofett and Fett Burger (the two brothers who run Sex Tags) went back-to-back all night with Hops, dishing out a set that sounded distinctly like three friends drinking and playing records. The music would stay on one tack for a while—dirty old house tracks like Mike Dunn's "Pressue Cooker" or Steve Poindexter's "Work That Pussy" set the tone—then swing in wild arcs, veering through jungle, bass music, disco-not-disco and whatever you call the stuff that comes out on Sex Tags and Wania (Sotofett's remix of Madteo's "We Do" sounded punchier than I would have expected). The flyer actually summed it up pretty well: "ROLLIN' AND CHUGGIN' ON TECHNO - JUNGLE - HOUSE." Someone told me the night started out with ambient and experimental music, but I hadn't gotten there yet.
Saturday's event was actually the second one at Horst with this exact lineup in just a few months. Let's hope it becomes a regular thing.
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