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.
The concept of endless buildups reminded me of a performance I saw earlier this year, the ‘St. Francis Duo’ by guitarist Stephan O’Malley and drummer Steve Noble, where Noble would play an incredible endless drum roll to O’Malley’s stretched out drone sounds. Just like an endless continuous fill, never coming back to time, ruthless cressendo, building and building…
It completely made sense to learn that earlier in his life Senni was a drummer for a hardcore band, later played drums for free jazz improvisation (his band made a split cassette release with Talibam!), and that he went on to study musicology. In an interview, he talks about being in between the Gabber scene and also the Straight Edge hardcore scene as a youth, sort of as a neutral, calmly and soberly observing what was going on around him in the music he and his friends enjoyed. He openly avows that he doesn’t like trance music, otherwise he would be doing trance music.
I’m interested in different things that are making the trance or this genre so emotional. But it’s not that… I don’t like trance. (…) No, I don’t like… It’s recorded that I don’t like trance. Because if I was liking trance, I was doing that. I’m not doing that.
http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/lorenzo-senni-lecture
“When I started, my colleagues at university would warn me not to use the word trance in public. It was such a vile reference. That doesn’t seem to be the case today, but if that’s anything to do with me, it’s purely unintentional. I was never standing up in defence of trance. I don’t want to make trance great again.”
http://truantsblog.com/2018/interview-lorenzo-senni/
But from the curation tonight, one could feel his respect for the scene. This night at Berghain, was not only featuring him as an act, but also curated by Senni himself and showed his talent as a curator by painting a musical vision of what rave music is/to-be. When I arrived Italian modular synth composer Caterina Barbieri was just about to play her meditative minimalist machine music. (She will also be playing at the EAVESDROP FESTIVAL coming up next weekend at the #musikbrauerei.)
Senni’s one hour performance followed, with a laptop sending out MIDI sounds to his JP-8080 synthesizer and a mixer. He danced a funny dance here and there. It was completely Lorenzo, his language, his signature, his music. The audience was also each and all dancing as they wished, freeform, inventing the space around themselves. The best kind of dance floor.
The contrast with the acts that followed; ’Gabber Eleganza presents The Hakke Show’ which features Gabber dancers faithfully celebrating the old school hardcore rave culture, and a legend in the Italian acid/hardcore techno scene Lory D, made it more so clear the context of where the music Senni produces comes from. His roots.
The next act, Vipra, on the other hand, maybe represented the to-be side, who’s sounds clearly resonated with Senni’s ideas on innovating the acid sounds. Vipra’s way is by screwing the acid house sound into a sluggish bpm which opens up the creative space to funny sonic ideas. The night was closed by a dj set by Evol (also to perform at the Eavesdrop Festival).
There is a signature track of Senni called “Rave Voyeur”. On occasion in many of the interviews Senni has answered, he refers to this title and explains that he himself is the rave voyeur. Growing up in between the opposing youth groups of his Gabber raver friends, and the Straight Edge hardcore band members he played with, he was always the weird one, the outsider.
The only way he was able to be accepted by both scenes, as he repeatedly emphasizes, was always by being himself and being true to himself. I could not help but relate, and to be awed by these words. The sense of belonging or having a place to feel safe and accepted, is a universal theme for the restless lost souls. And here was one good answer.
In my personal soul search, I feel that I love too many different things. I would go to contemporary concerts which play music way too smart for me to completely understand. Then again I’d hedonically enjoy dancing to funky disco and house. And then again I would be in the mood for some loudness and go to a Noise gig or some hardcore techno party. I felt kind of shallow and unprincipled for my taste of music going all over the place.
After listening to Senni’s play, utterly satisfied, I allowed myself to take a sneak upstairs at the Panorama Bar and to dance under the house grooves provided by King Britt. To my surprise, here I ran into one of the people that I’d often meet at the ‘smart’ contemporary concerts. “You like the music playing downstairs? Nuh-uh, it’s not for me,” she replied to my explanation to how Lorenzo Senni brought me here this night. Apart from the surprise of meeting someone who I’d meet in totally different contexts of music, her response was totally inside my frame of expectancy. After all the music playing downstairs, was down right hard core gabber. I couldn’t really find the words to explain at that moment, so I just shyly laughed and said yeah.
Now and then checking in on the time table not to miss how the sounds down in Berghain went on, I enjoyed the rest of the night still feeling the satisfaction of Senni’s music, dancing away in Panorama Bar doing my own weird self satisfactory jiggly dance. A big black man who saw me dance, came up to me and told me he digged my dance. He told me he had come from Chicago, and that he enjoys this club very much. I told him I like it too. I don’t think we had really much in common, and outside of a club I might have been too intimidated to engage in a chat with this big man. He watched me dance for a bit and soon left, but before he did, he left me with a suggestive remark, pretty much out of nowhere, that I think will stick with me for a while. “Don’t you ever change who you are!! You got that?”
Yes, I think this night is going to stick with me for a while…
