- A major city has space for more than one musical tribe, but in the techno capital it's easy to forget this. Entering OHM, whose tiled space was already pretty steamy by 1 AM, it was clear that a different kind of cool reigned. The crowd was colourful, heterogenous and already loose. Mutations of footwork, hip-hop and grime elbowed their way out of the speakers, and the dance floor swayed like a ship's deck on choppy seas. The night was Creamcake, a party which sashays through musical spaces ignored by Berlin's larger club institutions. Visit their website and you'll hear a celestial remix of a Drake anecdote, and see a girl splashing about in a swimming pool, happy as Larry. The pool might symbolise the internet, or maybe pop culture—Creamcake bookings tend to be ducks to water in both.
The DJ, Mo Probs, finished with an appropriately sloppy spinback, and was followed by Vienna's Battle-Ax, who stood in the murk behind the booth and scraped out 20 minutes of gloomy chords on a viola. She was a last-minute addition to the lineup, and while stranger things doubtless happened at Creamcake's recent 3hd festival, in this case the risk felt miscalculated. The packed dance floor simply talked over the music, and we waited for something loud to happen.
London's Manara got things firmly back on track, starting somewhere around 100 BPM and slogging steadily uphill, picking up dancehall, R&B and what might've been a bunch of Bollywood classics on the way. As things got faster they got weirder—at some point we ploughed past a drum-heavy rendition of Christmas carol "O Come, All Ye Faithful"—but the ascent was impressively focussed, and the view from the top, a spread of kinetic garage and grime, was worth it.
New York's Jubilee took over after an hour, yanking the tempo back down for another ascent. Her set was less oddball, and mostly stayed on US soil: Bmore, Jersey club and ballroom house formed its syncopated foundations. Over the top came a succession of lightbulb moments. The instrumental of Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot" appeared early on, pitched way, way up, and a remix of SOPHIE's "Lemonade." Shortly after came something which sounded like, but surely couldn't have been, a UK funky remix of Rotterdam Termination Source's "Poing." The set peaked with a string of recent hits—Beyonce's "7/11," Rae Sremmurd's "No Type," Tinashe's "2 On"—each teased and then obliterated in a pileup of drums. We all splashed around, happy as Larry.