“Hmm, I’ll start this by admitting I’m not the biggest Doppler fan. But to say this gig was Live is a bit untruthful, from where I was sitting it was a cd playing with the occasional bit of keyboard playing, you can see in the video his hand counting the beats from the backing cd, and playing a few bits here and there.

I know the promoters did a lot of work to organise this etc and I’m not bad mouthing them etc. I’m sure for the big Doppler Fans it was great, but I wasn’t too impressed.”

You’re right, calling it “live” in the sense that it’s a band, or group of people actually performing the music for you would have been a bit of a stretch. Like I said in my review of the first time I saw Dopplereffekt “live” (in Malmo, Sweden last year, check the archives, it was just the girl on her own that time, same deal with the keyboard and her not really doing anything), it wasn’t really a live show, it was more like a showing at a gallery where the artist also makes an appearance. You don’t get to see him paint the pictures again, but you get to seem him present them.

Normally I’d feel slightly cheated by this, but there are a few extenuating circumstances in this case:

a) I’m the world’s second biggest Dopplereffket fan (Stephen Rennicks being the number one fan

b) I think Dopplereffekt’s music is of such a quality and calibre that hearing a CD of about 50 minutes of their unreleased music while watching them sitting there is worth me flying from Berlin to Dublin for (yes, they also played a few released tracks, bringing their total set up to 70 minutes)

c) It’s Dopplereffekt!!!!! DOPPLEREFFEKT!!!!! In the flesh!!

You’re right Buzz, it wasn’t really live, like most gigs we go to. But I thought it was a very special occasion and personally don’t feel cheated at all, and it seemed like most of the crowd there enjoyed it too. One piece of worthless anecdotal evidence for you that wouldn’t stand up in court: I invited a friend from work along who’d never heard of them before and he enjoyed the music and the show, but understood that to call it live was definitely stretching it.

Also to quote SImon Conway’s dad: “How much did you pay them? Yous feckin’ eejits!”

If they played Dublin tomorrow I’d book a flight tonight and go see them again. They’re/he’s a unique artist in a world of of increasingly watered down techno, in this fanboy’s opinion.

PS to Buzzer, sorry to hear you got ejected from the Alden/Intergalatic Gary gig! I was there for a while and enjoyed what music I heard, but found it to be much too packed and my rarely seen claustrophobia kicked in so I left early and went to that new Andrew’s Lane place where Simon F was playing.

Here are some videos of Gary and Tyrell in action:

This Saturday, the 5th of July, sees Dopplereffekt perform their first ever show in Ireland. Their live appearances are rare so I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to see them and have flown over to Ireland for the weekend (where I’ll also be heading down to Lunar Disko’s birthday party afterwards where Alden Tyrell and Intergalatic Gary will be taking us on a trip through faraway disco galaxies).

If you’re reading this and you’re in Ireland, I urge you to come to the Dopplereffekt gig tomorrow, it’s a once in a lifetime experience to see my heroes play live! (Well actually they’ve been playing around Europe a bit more frequently these days so you may catch them elsewhere if you’re lucky, I saw Dopplereffekt myself last year in Malmo but it was just one member, the Vietnamese girl, this Dublin show will also have Gerald Donald on stage). They’re on in The Sugar Club, doors open at 7:30pm (it’s an early show) and I’ll see you up the front!

I won’t even try to begin to explain the whole history and connections involved in Dopplereffekt, Drexciya, The Elektroids, Der Zyklus, Japanese Telecom etc, but a great source of information for all things Drex and Dopp is Stephen Rennick’s Drexciyan Research Lab, it’ll take you about a year to read it all!

Stephen (Rennicks, not me, its confusing isn’t it!?) also has a six minute video being shown as part of the “Underground” exhibition running in the basement of Road Records (Fade St.), his video is called “Find Your Own Story” and to quote the artist it “takes Drexciya as subject and context as theme. To a soundtrack of Drexciya’s ‘Birth of New Life’ from ‘Harnessed The Storm’, I run a sequence of roughly 40 or so James Stinson quotes and titles of tracks and albums etc. The texts are all black on a white background and I hope on the surface level I have managed to design it to intrigue people not familiar with Drexciya and their world.” This Sunday (the 6th) is the last day of the exhibition so I’ll have to pop down before I fly back to Das Berlin.

Hope to see some of you Dublin people over the weekend!

The next night after a late dinner (I’d actually planned on bringing the lads to a really good French restaurant called Le Crapule that I’d been to before but it had recently closed down, so we went to the one beside it instead) we decided to check out Watergate before we went on to Berghain as Bren wasn’t on until 4am and neither of the lads had seen Watergate’s famous flashing lights ceiling yet. When we got there the three of us were stopped by the bouncer and asked what we were coming in to see, whereupon Simon Conway smartly rhymed off several artists that were playing, the labels they were on and the promotion companies that were involved to which the bouncer replied “Actually no that was last night”, but after a bit of friendly haggling he let us in. It was only 11:30pm or so, native Berliners wouldn’t normally be seen dead in a club before 1:30am, but we checked out the flashing ceiling (I’ve seen it a few times and it’s still pretty impressive!) and got our vodka and orange juice orders in. I forget who exactly was playing that night, but the warm-up DJ wasn’t the best.

Eventually we made it to Berghain, Bren kindly negotiating us past the hundred deep queue as “friends of the artist”, and then proceded to get the whole main room dancing with his laptop + access virus combo live set. Berghain nowadays is the stuff of legends, however I still think it’s a bit overrated. Or maybe I just don’t like how big it is, I was always a fan of smaller 250-ish capacity places. I’ve always had better nights when it was just the Panorama Bar open on its own (although even that’s a bit big!)

A belated thanks to Bren for the guestlist! He’s living in Barcelona now (the Berlin of the Mediterranean) and is doing gigs almost once a weekend, check out his Myspace site for dates.

Thursday: Rap History at the University of Bohannon (Dircksenstr 40). This month they’re doing 1986!

Friday: Bit of record shopping?

Saturday: Mathew Jonson at Berghain (expect a two hour queue and a 50% door refusal rate!)

Sunday: Sunday Adventure Club Minus party (where everybody in the world and their dog are playing all day and all night long)

I didn’t get my records shipped over, as the plan was to encode them all (done!) and then use Traktor Scratch to play the files. I managed to spend some time over the weekend getting myself aquatinted with Traktor Scratch, it is close to vinyl, but obviously not the same thing. I’ll take a bit of getting used to I’m sure, hopefully it works well on other people’s set-ups because I’ve got a gig this Wednesday evening at my local bar called Dr. Pong (no, that isn’t a description of how the place smells, it’s called Dr. Pong due to the ping-pong table in the middle of the bar). If anybody’s in Berlin then drop down and say hi, I’m playing all night for about 10pm until the place closes (so, about five hours or so!).

This weekend I’m heading off to Prague (it’s just a one hour flight from Berlin!), it’s been two years since I last visited the place. I’ll have to check out the Kross Club if it’s still there. I’ll keep you posted!

Next up we popped into Da Capo Vinyl which is also about five minutes from my house (the other way though!) which is a good second hand shop, not much in the way of techno, electro etc, but a great collection of older electronic weirdness, I think Simon was eyeing up a few Tangerine Dream things, I picked up the “Circumstantial Evidence” album by Shalamar! Some great sampling material there! I also got Fatback - “14 Karat” and a bit of disco cheese in the form of Gene Chandler - “Get Down” on Chi-Sound Records!

Still on the second hand tip, our next visit was to Franz & Josef Scheiben (can’t find a website for them) which is at Kastanienallee 48. A lot of newer stuff here and a great collection of 80s/new wave/synth pop/what have you. My best find was Blancmange - Blind Vision, I’d still like to find the instrumental version though. Also in the bag was the classic Arthur Baker production “IOU” and Patrick Cowley’s “Megatron Man” album.

Our last stop was the mighty Space Hall, saying this place has a massive techno collection is an understatement. I can see myself spending a lot of weekends down there working my way through the archives. They also have a large electro section where I picked out things I’d been after for a while. Records bought included the new Autechre album, the new Cristian Vogel album on Tresor “The Neverengine”, an old Direct Beat one: Munchman - By Design (classsssssic Detroit electrobass!), and a few Databass Records (I like to drop the odd bit of ghetto tech into an electro set, I couldn’t stand a whole set of the stuff though!)

All in all a good day’s shopping, it’s dangerous really having such a great collection of record shops in the city you live. At least I’ll save on the mail order fees from Juno though!

But apart from that, electro seems a bit short on the ground here. But last Thursday night my cowbell related hunger was finally sated when I stumbled across the best club night I’ve ever been to in ages, a club/project called Rap History. For a while now they’ve been running monthly shows where they concentrate on a specific year of the history of rap music. I believe they started on 1979, the next night was 1980 etc, and last Thursday night I was lucky enough to make it down to their 1984 night, where who else but the king of electro himself, The Egyptian Lover, was invited down to DJ, work the mic and fiddle with an 808.

Before the music started there was a showing of the classic (a word I’ll probably be using a lot during this post!) hip-hop breakdance movie (and the East Coast’s answer to Breakin’) Beat Street. The club itself had posters up all around the place of classic 80s hip-hop/rap/electro (it was all pretty blurry back then) artists, and for the cheap sum of 5 Euro you could buy a little box set for each year which came with a mix CD of tracks from that year and a neatly constructed fanzine with articles about all the major acts of that year (all in English so I was able to read it!). These guys really put a lot of attention into the night! Lots of people there were dressed up in old school costume, chains, white gloves, Adidas runners (oh hang on, we all still wear Adidas runners today!) The support DJs, were trying to stick to their rule of only playing tracks released that year , although there may have been some slight deviation. We were treated to such gems as Aleem - Release Yourself (a personal favourite of mine!), CDIII - Summer Jam, The Fay Boys - Can You Feel It, Whodini - Friends, Mr. Groove - One Way, The Beat Box Boys - Eat Em Up, Dough E Fresh - Just Have Fun, and a whole load of other amazingly Fr-Fr-Fr-Fresh b-boy related jams that I couldn’t train spot. It was like all my electro Christmases had come at once, and then The Egyptian Lover came on an rocked the place, with a live show that just about beat his Dublin one I supported him at in June ‘07.

An amazing night which left me grinning like a big eejit, my own gripe was the tendency of Germans to stand around right in front of the stage and not dance, what’s with that? Admittedly it wasn’t all of them. Oh, and running this on a Thursday night is definitely going to affect my Friday work attendance! You can get a short 1983 DJ mix from one of the residents here: http://www.raphistory.net/. Unfortunately my camera’s out of juice and the charger is still in Ireland (I’ll be getting my stuff shipped over any day now, of course they’ve been saying that for the past three months, argh!) but here’s a crappy camera phone video to keep you going: The Egyptian Lover apparently likes girls

The Environ night at the Panorama Bar would be the first one. A night of DJ sets from Morgan Geist, Darshan J and Daniel Wang alongside a live set from Kelley Polar was just too good an opportunity to pass up so I headed into Berghain extra early for this one, extra early being 2am. Unfortunately half of Berlin had the same idea and there was a massive queue outside, bigger than a normal Berghain queue even! It was moving pretty fast though, mainly due to the harsh door policy of turning every second person away. As luck would have it (hey a 50/50 chance is a pretty good one!) I was one of the people not turned away and managed to catch the end of Daniel Wang’s set which full of disco/house gems you’d expect to hear at an Environ night. Kelley Polar had a band with him, a dude on bass, a shaded loretho on keyboards + vocoder and Mr. Polar himself (I believe, or is that the name of the entire band?) on vocals and violin. I’m positive that was the first time the Panorama bar saw live violin playing! They pulled it off incredibly well, it was the kind of thing that had the potential to fail horribly but it was great. Morgan Geist played a much tougher set than I’d ever heard from him, lots of Chi house, plenty of jackin’ acid stuff. Unfortunately I couldn’t last past 7:30am, but there were still people arriving as I was leaving.

Berghain too popular right now unfortunately, it’s pretty big but there’s no way that everybody who turns up can fit in. I don’t like their pick and mix rules of admission, I’ve been lucky so far but I’m sure there’ll be some time in the future when I’ll be refused after waiting an hour outside, it’s not really their fault they’re so popular I suppose. Also, I’m not sure I really like the concept of clubbing when it starts getting bright again. I’ve always hailed the arrival of the sun as the time to start thinking about going home. 6 or 7am, that’s a sensible home time, right? :) Not for most Germans it seems!

The second highlight was Skerries finest Donnacha Costello at Watergate last Saturday night. I’ve seen Donnacha quite a few times now, mostly supporting some other people and mostly on at a pretty early time, 11/12am. Here he was headlining at 4am! A few of us met up for dinner and some drinks beforehand, Donnacha being sensible and heading back to the hotel at 1 to catch a nap before the gig, the rest of us trying to drink responsibly so we’d be sober enough to make it to the club. The Watergate is quite a fancy club! They’ve banned cameras in there now (although I remember taking loads of photos of the place back in 2004, check the skkatter archives!) but I managed to get a small camera phone video of Donnacha in action featuring the fancy schmancy lights in the ceiling upstairs. It was also the best set I’ve heard Mr. Minimise play, the later time definitely suites him and the excellent sound system there also helps! Once again I wimped out and left at 6am, the two Irish girls in our group stayed on until midday the next day!! Madness! We’d all be dead if they let us do that in Dublin, seriously, if you do eventually get your opening times sorted in Ireland you’ll need special “extended hours nightclub” fitness classes, all hours dancing techniques coupled with how to pace your drinking.

Here’s the little video of Donnacha at Watergate!