- Will Lynch raves to Mala, CCL, Carista and more at the Berlin club.
- Mother's Finest, a party at Griessmuehle run by Franklin De Costa, has always had a knack for head-turning lineups. Their parties balance local and international DJs, house and techno with more dub-inspired sounds, often resulting in a musical offering that puts most weekends at Berghain to shame. For their most recent event, De Costa and friends outdid themselves. I'd not planned on writing about Mother's Finest Weekender, so I strolled down there only for the final day and night, by which point Surgeon, DJ Bone, Josey Rebelle, KiNK, Hodge, Gesloten Cirkel and many others had already played. (The full lineup, too long to list here, is worth a look.) Even just that fraction of the weekend made for a pretty special party, one that could scarcely happen anywhere else than Berlin.
By the time I got there, CEM, a resident DJ at Herrensauna, was in Halle, Griessmuehle's main room, treating the remains of last night's battlers to a galloping set of fast and futuristic techno. In the sunny hours, though, it was hard to stay away from Wintergarten, a more casual dance floor in a ramshackle addition to the club's main building, where broad windows look out onto a dystopian playground of a garden, complete with empty grain silos, a bonfire and an impressively slimy canal. On Sunday morning, CCL was out there connecting the dots between pitched down UK garage, the demented end of Maurice Fulton and, at one point, Outkast's "Wheelz Of Steel." The perfect antidote, a stranger on the dance floor told me, to a night of techno in the pitch black main room. When they finished, someone in the back shouted, "DON'T STOP!"
At that point the day was grey-skied and the crowd a bit weary, this being the changing of the guard between last night's ravers and today's fresh batch. By the time Carista played that evening, the scene was very different. Wintergarten was as packed as I've ever seen it, with the last light of the day passing through tinted windows to give the dance floor a cozy red glow. The Dutch DJ blew through a soaring blend of party-rockers, from fast and thumping deep house through gnarlier bits of acid, some speed garage, and things like Pangaea's "Bone Sucka."
As evening descended the action moved back towards Halle. Darwin, the promoter and resident at Griessmuehle's UK-inspired REEF parties, played angular beats that set the stage for the night's main act: Mala. Silhouetted in the orange light of the booth, the dubstep innovator wove patiently through different shades of sub-heavy sounds, then went large on the home stretch, reloading the classics to roars of approval, killing the volume for the crowd to shout "Skeng!" and dropping the Digital Mystikz remix of "Cay's Crays" by Fat Freddy's Drop to a sea of bobbing lighter flames. Ben UFO watched from the side of the booth, and wisely changed gears when he stepped up, departing from Mala's lurching rhythms with a set of fast and dynamic grooves.
Meanwhile, down in Silo, Gigsta charted a less traditional course through dub-inspired club music, moving from haunting rollers like Sleeparchive's remix of Jah Cotton's "Dem Never Know" to rowdier cuts like The Black Dog's "Virtual" and some bonkers edit of PM Dawn's "Set Adrift On Memory Bliss," all of it perfectly suiting the submarine-like atmosphere of the room. I left sometime around 2 AM, an hour before Batu played (work on Monday morning etc.). As I walked down the seemingly endless alley that connects Griessmuehle to Sonnenallee, 50 hours since the party began, droves of people were still headed toward the club.