I’d been looking forward to this Berghain night curated by Lorenzo Senni, because when I first listened to his music last year at the Helsinki Flow Festival, it was a musical surprise.  Although his set was to despair, completely overlapped during Aphex Twin’s performance, the audience who decided to show up for Senni was enthusiastic to get a taste of this innovator’s sounds.

When Senni started playing oddly familiar arpeggios from his computer, the crowd seemed confused, but at the same time ravingly turned on. After say ten minutes into his set, people started madly dancing.  It really didn’t make sense to be able to dance to this kind of music, no one’s appearance sold Second Summer of Love (it’s 2017 after all and most of us were too young), I had no clue what this music was doing or where it was going, and yet we found ourselves dancing.  I was completely captivated and couldn’t leave.

For a short listen, his music sounds like epic trance riffs.  The old school sparkly synth sounds of 90s rave and happy hardcore. But then, you notice that the composition of his tracks are something completely different.  First of all there is no 4/4 kick. There is a build up, which leads to not an anticipated drop, but to an unexpected unusual metric modulation or some sort of polyrhythmic weirdly danceable experimental turn out, and more tension.  To say it bluntly, he takes the idiotic crass consumerism of breaks and drops out of trance music, but still leaving the magical dirty vulgarness of it that we are so drawn to.  Euphoria.  Aggression.  Melancholy.  Betraying the anticipation of the buildup gives the rave anthems a new meaning, and revokes an energetic aggresion.  It’s a reinvention, and an artistically and emotionally tactic composition.