- As evening fell on Berlin's hottest day of the year so far, the atmosphere at Funkhaus was like a festival. The enormous brown-brick building, formerly home to the official radio station of the GDR, has an understated sense of grandeur. Once inside, it's a sprawling network of elegant, high-ceilinged rooms and studios.
On Thursday, people gathered at Funkhaus to watch a rare live jam from electro-acoustic trio Ambiq (AKA modular synth expert Max Loderbauer, jazz clarinetist Claudio Puntin and percussionist Samuel Rohrer) in collaboration with Ricardo Villalobos. Scheduled around the main event was a screening of Romuald Karmakar's new electronic music documentary, Denk Ich An Deutschland In Der Nacht, a post-rock guitar warm-up by Martyn Heyne, and a set from Margaret Dygas, who DJ'd at the afterparty.
When the headline quartet walked onstage, taking their place among a semicircle of machines and instruments illuminated by a purple spotlight, the room filled with boisterous cheers. Villalobos jokingly put his finger to his lips to hush the crowd. From there, they locked into an almost two-hour-long jam session, which mostly followed a cyclical format. Periods of busy, sonorous tinkering were split up by passages of sparse ambience, in which the blip-blops of the modular synths were most effective.
The quartet rarely made eye contact with one another, so engrossed was each in his own work. Instead, they relied on instinct to determine where the music would go next. This initially created multiple moments of freeform discordance and confused sounds, though this was quickly shaken off. From there, the group moved fluently between patches of jazz, noise and, at one point, into a confident groove at roughly house tempo.
As the session appeared to reach its natural conclusion, Rohrer laid down his drumsticks to loud whoops from the crowd. Villalobos, though, had other ideas. Unwilling to call it a day, he remained the last man playing, urging the others to rejoin him. Another 30 minutes of experimentation followed, which, for some, seemed like a bridge too far. Before the unofficial encore, Funkhaus had been a picture of relaxation, with members of the crowd lying down, shutting their eyes and swaying to the rhythms. Slowly, though, restlessness crept in, pushing Loderbauer to wrap things up with a coy smile. As the four of them linked arms and took a bow, the room erupted one final time.
Photo credit /
Diego Castro