- "Deeperama," a three-hour performance by DJ Sprinkles at the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum in Berlin, began at 9 PM on Sunday night, the exact ending time of another Sprinkles-related event, also at Martin-Gropius-Bau, that was ten times as long. This earlier performance was "Soulnessless," a presentation of a 30-hour piano piece that appeared on Thaemlitz's album by that name. A rotating cast of pianists played the piece in two-hour shifts for a crowd that ebbed and flowed over the weekend, most of them laying swathed in blankets, sleeping or looking at the ceiling of the grandiose room.
The final pianist in the rotation was Thaemlitz. Just as the others had done, she moved between two chords, both sweet and sad in a way you recognize from her records, waiting for one to go silent before hitting the next. Outside the main hall, Mark Fell leaned against a stone wall and joked about having a panic attack five minutes into his turn at the piano. "I thought, 'I can't do this! I can't sit here for two hours playing these two chords!' Then I realized I could put my hand down between each one. That made it a lot easier."
Thaemlitz played the last chord just before near 9 PM, then disappeared—by the time it faded out, her piano stool was empty. Next door, clubby lights glowed in an oblong gallery space with white walls and high ceilings. In here, Thaemlitz would shed her role as avant-garde artist to become DJ Sprinkles, indulging her crowd in three hours of ghostly piano house. As with many of her sets, the music could have come from her catalog entirely, although it was beefed up with a few more jacking numbers than I'd heard from her in the past.
The atmosphere was a little dry, the sound a little muddy—this was very much a gallery, not a club—but the show was sold out, and the people up in front danced blissfully with closed eyes and loose limbs. Anytime you needed a break, you could slip into one of the nearby rooms, where projectors played video essays from Soulnessless—haunting, provocative meditations on (when I happened to walk in) capitalism, religion and gender affirmation surgery. The strength of these pieces, and in particular Thaemlitz's voice as an essayist, was a reminder that, amidst her many talents, house music is only the most commercially viable.
As midnight approached, the crowd thinned, and the remaining dancers took more and more space to themselves, wiping sweat from their brows as they carried on to the last note. This turned out to be "Admit It's Killing You (And Leave) (Sprinkles' Dead End)," the final track from Deproduction and a quintessential Thaemlitz track. After 12 minutes or so, the beat dropped away, leaving just cascades of piano and a sample of the comedian Paul F. Tompkins joking about the homophobia of so-called "traditional family" values. The night ended with the final words of this extended piece: "…they're very pro-traditional family, which is under attack by gay people just being around. Like, just the idea of them is corrupting families, where they're like, 'Wait, there's another way!?' And then families break apart."
Photo credit /
Camille Blake