- "That escalated quickly," a tatted Glaswegian muttered at the bar as the crowd pressed in on him from behind. Minutes earlier the dance floor at OHM had seemed nearly empty, as you might expect at 11:30 PM on a Sunday night. The 100 or so early arrivals mostly sat along wooden benches on the perimeter of the box-like room, biding their time while DJ Sotofett sank deeper and deeper into an ambient murk. Now, after a long stretch without one, a kick drum had arrived—slow and unquantized, but a kick drum nonetheless. Right on cue, people poured onto the dance floor, appearing as if out of thin air. "Power of the doof, I guess."
Indeed, even for the crowd that turns up to a party as weird as this one—a joint showcase by FIT Sound, the Detroit label run by FIT Siegel, and Wania, one of several offshoots of Sex Tags Mania—the doof remains essential. This is the interesting part of having your night soundtracked by DJs like Siegel and Sotofett. While not uninterested in making people dance, both seem to reject most conventional forms of dance music, beginning with contemporary house and techno. Dark curios were the norm. Wheezing melodies played off scuzzy, mechanical rhythms. Taking turns every half hour or so, the DJs zig-zagged unpredictably through the night.
The vibe of the party was nicely embodied by Siegel's first big record: The Residents' "Kaw-Liga (Prairie Mix)," a surreal Hank Williams cover with searing electric guitar and the bassline from Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." Much of what the Detroit DJ played seemed of a piece with Est. 83' Records, the no wave-y sub-label to his clubbier FIT Sound. Sotofett's arsenal drew mostly from the nether-regions of synth pop, leftfield disco and early house, from Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express" to what I think was an odd remix of Modern Romance's "Everybody Salsa." It felt like a club party in an '80s film set in 2016, the retro-futuristic records lending a cyber-punk feel to OHM's white tile and exposed concrete.
By the time Stallone The Reducer rolled in, the dance floor was teeming. He took his position behind a rambling array of hardware and quickly struck the same tone as the other two, beginning with a single unintelligible word said repeatedly into a vocoder, eventually joined by a string of greasy kick drums. Like Drug Pusher, his debut EP on Est. 83' Records, the set was dissonant, uneven and full of punk-ish energy. This was strange music, even grating at times, but it had a packed dance floor ticking over nicely in the early hours of Monday morning. Could it be that Berlin, a city saturated in cookie-cutter dance music, is craving something more offbeat? Sure, clubs here often fill up easily in the summer, but a guy can dream. Either way, this one was too good for a school night.