Sorry this will be quick, only got 20 mins Internet time.
Melt Festival 2007… OMG! What an amazing location for a rave/dance party, out in the middle of nowhere, amongst a heap of gigantic, massive, old, rusting, industrial, mining, digging, steal processing machines, all lit up with fantastic lighting, excellent sound and lighting everywhere, market stalls, diverse music line-up, lots of food and snacks, and cheap drinks. We stayed in a nice little German country hotel, and managed to get our own personal taxi driver Frank to take us to/from Melt, and to/from the hotel, and train station, he spoke no English, and we only know about 20 words of German, but he gave us his mobile number, and we managed to organise pick up and drop off times. The area where people camp for the Melt Festival must be at least a 6km walk away from the event, 1000s of tents! We passed it by on the way to the entrance.
Check out the location for Melt!
http://www.ferropolis-online.de/ferropolis.html
Awesome music from Onur Ozer Vs Mathias Kadan, Troy Pierce, Alex Smoke [live] (I had a nice chat with him before he played, great guy!), Tiefschwarz, and Richie Hawtin as the sun came up. Autechre [live] were very abstract, and very drum and bass, and played in the dark, requesting all the lighting off, sorry couldn’t get any photos of them. Magda was all throbby bass and bleeps, not very interesting sounds. It was a very cool event, so much better than Awakenings, and we thought that was fantastic.
Worst DJ set award of our travels so far goes to… DJ Koze at Melt, who in the 15 mins we watched him… made a mess of each mix, took the needle off the wrong (playing) record twice, attempted to cover it with bad skipping needle/record scratching, and track flow was all over the place, quite dull sounds sorry to say.
Anyway… We decided to only do day 1 of Melt, and came back to Berlin yesterday to go to the new Tresor, where we saw Suzi Wong, Stewart Walker [live], and… Daniel Bell on the Batterieraum Floor, as well as Liquid and Dry in the damp bunker/underground Tresor floor.
Tresor is inside that huge industrial building, but with the renovations/fit out they have done, it feels like they’re using only about an 1/8th of it. Really dissapointed with the sound there. Crowd was very mixed, ethnic, lots of young excited kids who looked like they were hearing techno for the first time, we felt like we were in Sydney’s Gas or Home clubs. Enjoyed the music though. Berghain is a much better venue for that huge industrial building vibe. The new Tresor would have been so much better if they didn’t do anything to the building! How it was originally…
How it looks now…
Batterieraum Floor – Pics
Tresor Floor – Pics
Around 4am, we went to a club called Maria, and saw Dan Curtin playing… to about 30 people (this club got raided by Police the weekend before, so maybe that’s why it was empty). We stayed for an hour and a bit, and got to meet and chat with… Jeremy P. Caulfield, we were dissapointed he had alraedy played, but… he’s coming to play Sydney later this year, woo! Great sounds from Dan Curtin, nice tough minimal and techno, great mixing and track flow.
Around 5.30am, we went to Berghain/Panorama Bar for the last time of our Holiday and saw… Ben Klock, Paul Brtschitsch [live], and then Len Faki Vs Ben Klock playing in Berghain, and upstairs in Panorama Bar… Jesse Rose. Such a fantastic vibe in this place, awesome venue, the sound systems are amazing. Lots of man love in that place, we’ve been warned, don’t venture into the dark corners/rooms you may see some very strange err…acts. The boys in Berghain banged it out with some hard techno sounds, and cleared the floor in no time at all. Upstairs in Panorama Bar Jesse Rose had a packed room jumping to his electro-house/minimal-tech-house sounds, a bit too cheesy for us at times.
Arghh, Internet time is running out… We went to the Zoo today and saw Knut, such a cute playful little polar bear. Berlin Zoo is awesome, very green, lots of shade, and you can get a lot closer to the animals than any other Zoo I’ve been to. Heaps of baby animals too! Cute!
Well… we’re off to UK tomorrow to catch up with family and friends… Hope everyone is well, thanks for reading and all your comments. Can’t believe this is the last week of our holiday.
Oh and sorry for complaining about the wet and cold, it was actually a hot 35-37 degrees in Berlin our last 2 days there.
Quite a party trip you got going on there – Melt, Tresor, Maria, Berghain – couldn’t be more complete!
Comment by Stylewalker — July 19, 2007 @ 9:21 pm
[…] “Melt Festival… OMG! What an amazing location for a rave/dance party, out in the middle of nowhere, amongst a heap of gigantic, massive, old, rusting, industrial, mining, digging, steal processing machines, all lit up with fantastic lighting, excellent sound and lighting everywhere, market stalls, diverse music line-up, lots of food and snacks, and cheap drinks.” Read about a whole tour involving Melt, Tresor, Maria am Ufer, Berghain/Panorama Bar AND Knut in only three days at decoded_ […]
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