GET SOME UK UK MUSIC, ART AND CULTURE

Paul Rose, aka Scuba, waxes lyrical talks about Berlin, London, Hot Flush and himself to Intruders.tv, check it out.

Black and whites in music are irresistible. Indie and dance. Rhythm and melody. 4-4 and broken beats. Even though some of the above are arguably the same meta category (the big one, er, ‘Africa versus Europe’, ‘black versus white’ if you’d rather) they’re still useful in defining some sort of polarity that tells us who we are, what we like.

Problem is, increasingly the black and whites that I used to depend upon are deserting me in favour of a confusing agenda of preferences made up of other prejudices: memory and nostalgia, shock and awe, plain old quality. When you no longer fall into any of the camps around which popular music forms its allegiances you need to find an agenda for every circumstance. The one on my mind right now is head vs body. This one I reserve these days for nightclubs, particularly Berlin’s Berghain (a body club in every definition).

On last visit I was struck by how listless the crowd at the club’s top room house outpost, Panoramabar, seemed compared to the ruthless clarity of purpose evident on the main Berghain dancefloor. I’ve always enjoyed Panoramabar; it does housey decadence with more class and intelligence than most places. At its best it’s a place where hetros happily rub shoulders with exhibitionists, muscle Marys and the club’s obligatory weirdos. Where you can sashay around with a rum and coke at some ridiculous hour, get offered fresh fruit at the bar, exchange beatific grins with fellow late night travelers and whoop and holler your way into the next evening. All this listening to sets by Carl Craig, Andre Galluzzi, Efdemin.  Bliss.

But nonetheless, it’s always been a more blood-pumping experience for me plunging into the quadrant of Function One piled high in Berghain. Down here you don’t just sashay around elegantly wasted, you tend to jump up and down or stand mesmerised in the mist. The music isn’t appealing to your head, your waist, your ego. It’s after your body, your Id. It’s primal. It’s body music. And the body music that thunders through you from that incredible soundsystem is, of course, largely driven by pile-driver 4-4s.

Increasingly, though, the DJs entrusted with that floor – the Marcels, Ben Klock, Norman Nodge – are looking to the broken grooves of dubstep to punctuate their strain of intensely reduced techno, finding in it the scale and physicality the space demands. Scuba, who runs Berghain’s regular dubstep night, Sub.stance, is charting a perverse mirror of their journey as his production and sets become more and more pinned around the metronomic 4-4. Surely it’s no coincidence that this dancefloor is the common ground of all these experiences.

So, with the polarities slowly dissolving but dubstep and techno still just flirting with each other, trying to figure out how to reconcile their differences from Bristol to Berlin, it may be a safe bet that the answers reside in the body and not the head.