Scene: Berlin Techno, 2000s

Berlin couldn’t have turned out more remarkably had Italo Calvino merely imagined it as one of the improbable burghs of his book Invisible Cities. When the wall that divided it for 28 years finally came down in 1989, Berlin underwent an anarchic renaissance that has left it unlike any other western capital.

Reunification gave the world a city full of empty buildings and abandoned lots but almost no industry – just politics and culture, pent-up energy and a deeply entrenched survival instinct. And it coincided with the arrival of techno, whose underground intensities flourished in Berlin’s squatted basements and empty warehouses, where curious kids from both Berlins came together to draw up a new psycho-geography in place of the city’s suddenly obsolete street maps.

Or perhaps that should be psychoactive-geography: techno brought with it MDMA, or ecstasy, an empathy-affirming drug that did as much to lubricate the transition as any top-down political decision.

Musically, Berlin matured into one of the world’s most dynamic scenes, a global hub for electronic music of every stripe. In the ’90s, techno ruled; local DJ/producers like Basic Channel and Thomas Fehlmann struck up close relationships with the music’s Detroit originators and developed their own variants of the form. The Tresor club and its in-house label became synonymous worldwide with a certain strain of relentless, pummeling machine funk; labels like BPitch Control established Berlin-centric identities and developed into powerful brands and profitable businesses. (BPitch founder Ellen Allien herself hails from the former DDR; it’s intriguing to wonder if Berlin’s unique situation, post-re-unification, is related to the fact that the Berlin scene boasts far more female DJs and label heads than is typical for electronic dance music.)

In the new millennium, Berlin’s musical culture diversified, as a wave of producers, DJs and hangers-on from around the world settled in to enjoy the city’s cheap rent and endless club nights. Minimal techno (or simply “minimal”) was the city’s defining style throughout the ’00s, thanks to the worldwide infuence of Berlin imprints like Perlon, Get Physical, Mobilee, Vakant and dozens more. But deep house, disco and dubstep have all flourished as well, both on their own and in increasingly hybrid forms. Perhaps Berlin’s history leaves it uniquely positioned to exploit the tensions between connoisseurship and iconoclasm that define the omnivorous culture of 21st Century dance music.