- During the day it would be easy to miss Renate. A tall wooden fence and a canopy of tall trees mask the club and its courtyard entirely. The venue itself is a former apartment building, untouched on the outside and mostly blending in with its neighbors. Inside, narrow corridors, numerous dance floors and seemingly endless small spaces for hiding away mean that two people could have very different experiences there on any given night. On this occasion in August, still firmly in Berlin's beloved open-air season, plenty of people were happy to lie in the courtyard and soak in the charm the space has to offer.
Daniel Avery's appearance in Berlin had been a long time coming—his hectic schedule has landed him in Berlin just once since his well-deserved rise to fame. With his stellar fabric mix, a popular show on Rinse.fm and a much anticipated debut album due in October, it was easy to see why revelers were pouring into the upper level of Renate for the beginning of his set.
Avery began by going back-to-back with Headman, a fellow alumni of Relish Recordings, which released Avery's Airstrike EP back in 2011. Headman got a great reaction to his remix of The Units' "High Pressure Days" before he handed the controls over to Avery, who teased in portions of his beloved "Taste," slipped into Alejandro Paz's "Duro," then moved onto "Drone Logic," a track that's lost none of its acid-filled punch since it came out last summer.
With the first hour or so of Avery's performance attracting everyone within earshot into the room, it soon became difficult to move. My only real complaint of the evening is that Renate's wonderfully bizarre layout makes for a constant flow of people either trying to get to the bar or simply make their way around to explore. Still, as long as you could secure a safe spot, there was little doubt that the long wait for Avery's return to Berlin was well worth it.