SVN in Berlin

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  • SUED's most recent club night at OHM in Berlin started at 10 PM, but the first kick drum didn't touch down until just before 1 AM the next morning. The rhythm gave some danceable shape to the soup of ambient noise that preceded it, and the audience responded. It began with a girl who had spent the last hour wiggling like an interpretive dancer to blobs of electronic sound. As the beat dug in, her enthusiasm coaxed others to join her. Just as the crowd loosened up, the drums vanished once again, and the dance floor cleared. Peak time was over by 2 AM. The SUED crew repeated this dynamic a few times throughout the night. None of the artists on the bill were particularly concerned with tending to the needs of the dance floor. They didn't seem interested in setting and maintaining a vibe, playing the sort of music that encourages dancing, or transitioning seamlessly between tracks. Their disregard for all this wasn't surprising, as SUED and its closest friends—a group of experimental labels that includes Acido and Sex Tags—produce records that seem as inspired by minimal house grooves as they are by noise jams and avant-garde film scores. The lineup at OHM included Dresvn (a collaborative project between SUED boss SVN and Acido's Dynamo Dreesen), Sex Tags co-founder DJ Sotofett, and a new inductee into the Acido camp, Takashi Wada. The live sets were more likely to inspire meditative musing than movement from the bodies who absorbed the music. The tenuous groove that had finally encouraged the audience to start dancing around 1 AM took a sharp dive into sub-bass frequencies a while later, and for 15 minutes the soundsystem rattled the walls of the club with tremendous low-end. Following suit, Wada made no attempts to liven the crowd. Instead, he used a guitar and the gear spread out before him to create a melancholic dronescape. The dance floor briefly picked up steam again about an hour later, when SVN dropped a gaudy commercial house remix of what sounded like a European folk song into a stream of mangled jungle rhythms and theatrical Aphex Twin-style breaks. It wasn't the sort of tune one would expect at a SUED club night—but then again, as the performers had proven countless times throughout the evening, these artists are keen to defy any expectations.
RA