Nightclubbing: Munich’s Ultraschall

Upstart

Late 1991 we started organising parties. Initially, once a month. These were called Ultraworld.

Richard Bartz

Ultraschall and Ultraworld are inseparable, they were more or less the same thing.

Upstart

The first Ultraworld parties were held at Kulturstation.

Captain Reality

Kulturstation was an autonomous youth centre, just outside town.

Upstart

Its youth leaders liked us very much because we made a lot of money for them with the bar.

Captain Reality

Because they got to keep all the takings from the bar.

Upstart

Usually the venue hosted grunge, punk and hardcore evenings. Those fans really despised us. For them, techno was not music. That always amused me: people used to say the same of punk, and now it was the punks themselves who were the traditionalists, claiming it was just a fad that would fizzle out in three years, blah, blah, blah. It always made me laugh. Sooner or later some of them ended up as regulars at our parties, too. Irreversibly converted.

David Süß

We weren’t really part of the usual Munich scene. Well, at least I certainly wasn’t.

Upstart

The scene was really small in 1991/92. The biggest events were the ones organized by Konstantin Wahl, who booked Moby or Underground Resistance for the Parkcafe. Of course these events were a must. They’d attract audiences of perhaps 800 people.

DJ Hell

Apart from that there was the Babalu and Pulverturm, where some legendary parties and afterhours took place.

David Süß

Dorle and Upstart weren’t sure whether they should continue with Ultraworld. It was a lot of work and didn’t make any money. We said, “Are you crazy? You can’t put the only regular really cool party there is in Munich on ice! We’ll join you, let’s do it together.” So we met for dinner. Captain Reality made apricot dumplings. They were so delicious that we continued as a team from then on.

Monika Kruse

Back then, I organized illegal parties from time to time. We played mainly house music. At some point Dorle and Upstart asked me whether I’d play at an Ultraworld event. From then on, I became a resident.

Richard Bartz

I was still quite young, maybe 15, and always had to sneak into the parties or climb in through the bathroom window. Then I’d hide behind the bass speaker the rest of the evening. Once, Upstart caught me. I thought I’d be in loads of trouble. Instead, he thought it was great that I was there and so enthralled by the music. So he took me under his wings and was like a kind of mentor to me. He fed me with records and I guzzled them up, so to speak.

DJ Hell

Richard was Munich’s Wonder Boy. He totally immersed himself in the music and became one with it.

Upstart

We had international guests more or less right from the start: Blake Baxter, Robert Hood, Jeff Mills. But also Electric Indigo and DJ Hell. One evening we felt we’d made too much money – 300 marks each or something. We couldn’t reconcile that with our conscience, so we hosted a free party in a squatted villa in Munich-Bogenhausen. With Robert Hood. He found the location unbelievable.

Monika Kruse

At Kulturstation there’d always be these “airing breaks.” They were legendary.

Richard Bartz

This tiny room had no air conditioning and was far too small anyway for so many people.

Monika Kruse

At some stage you’d almost suffocate in there.

Upstart

The record covers would become wavy because of the humidity. Lighters didn’t work anymore.

Richard Bartz

So we had to open all the windows at regular intervals. But because it was a residential area, we turned the music off first. We’d make an announcement: “Airing break, airing break!” I later recorded a track with these vocals. We’d open all the doors and windows, switch off the smoke machine, to get as much oxygen into the room as possible. And to get the inside temperature down.

Upstart

When the break was over, it was always like a restart. It was fantastic!

David Süß

At Ultraworld it was the norm that the decorations were new each time. We’d seen that in Berlin, at Planet and E-Werk. We wanted to recreate what Elsa For Toys did at these two clubs, we wanted the same in Munich.

Upstart

But the constant putting-up and taking-down really got on our nerves. And that the toilets were always wrecked. We soon realized that we needed a club of our own.

Captain Reality

We then got an offer to host parties in the halls of the former airport in Munich-Riem. From Wolfgang Nöth.

Upstart

In those days, Wolfgang Nöth was the “halls mogul” in Munich. He set up Theaterfabrik (one of Munich’s most important concert stages in the ’80s), before that the Fraunhofer, a left wing bar where Munich’s Green Party was originally founded. He was an ingenious busy bee and managed to clinch a contract for the airport when it was no longer in operation.

David Süß

So that’s where we continued with Ultraworld. Until we finally found the actual Ultraschall location.

Richard Bartz

These events were more like raves.

Captain Reality

The halls were pretty big and fitted about 800 to 2000 people. It was clear that we’d only be able to fill them if we adapted the music to the audience’s wishes, and that was by no means our style. We didn’t want to do that. For many people back then, techno meant Westbam and Marusha and that kind of thing. We associated something completely different with techno. Luckily, after a few parties, Nöth offered us an area in the airport that we could turn into a proper club.

Upstart

I’d known Nöth since the ’80s already. He thought we were wonderful because we put so much love into what we did. He saw that we are idealists. So he showed me the airport’s former canteen kitchen and said we could open a club there if we wanted. He’d get the takings from the bar and would finance the basics for us. We’d organize the program and get the takings from the door. We didn’t have any money at all. And were really happy. That’s where it all started. Wolfgang bore all the risk and invested around 200,000 marks. For lighting, the music system and air conditioning. Everything that needed to be done. He was the kind of person who never waited for official approval from the authorities. He just did it. A Bavarian anarchist who’d rather pay a fine later than wait for the official go-ahead. In fact he looked like a tramp, actually. He was really unconventional. A true stroke of luck for us. After all, we weren’t exactly the sort of people who would’ve approached investors and the like. We came from a politically left wing background. That was reflected in our music tastes, too, which were very much influenced by Chicago and Detroit. We were more for Alec Empire and Force Inc. than Marusha or Westbam.

Acid Maria

A few days before the club opened, I went there with Upstart and he showed me the dance floor and DJ booth. He was so unbelievably excited and enthusiastic. It was great. He was a visionary who knew it was going to be a mega success.

David Süß

The very first time I entered this former kitchen I knew immediately that this was our club. I had no doubts whatsoever.

Richard Bartz

It was fantastic. I had the feeling we could now break free from all these set-in-stone structures, this established nightlife system. Putting a club into such a kitchen was pure anarchy.

David Süß

For Munich it was something totally new: turning a space that was originally designed for something completely different into a club. In Berlin that was normal. In Munich it was a première.

DJ Hell

The thing that was so unusual about it was that everything still looked like an airport. That made it so special. Being able to party in such a place. Similar to the Dorian Gray at Frankfurt airport.

Upstart

We were really excited. We thought we were the avant-garde. Futurists of Modernism. For us, so many things felt outdated. Archaic social structures, imperialist politics, the end of rock ‘n’ roll. We felt that with our radically new music, with this feeling of being a family and with our occasional MDMA consumption, we were light years ahead of the mainstream. A lot of conventional things didn’t concern us anymore or bored us. Maybe we were simply a bit arrogant in some ways.

David Süß

Dorle always did the deco really well. And she knew someone from the film industry who had worked on the set of Enemy Mine. Through him we were able to buy the set for very little money. And had it fitted in our club.

Acid Maria

The DJ booth looked like something by HR Giger.

David Süß

With regards to fire safety, Wolfgang Nöth helped us a lot. In his typical way. The fire services came, saw the deco and said, “Hey, but that’s highly flammable.” So Wolfgang held his burning lighter against it and said, “You see? Nothing’s burning. It’s all specially treated material.” And that’s how we got away with it.

Richard Bartz

It was our spaceship. In Munich. We went in there and basically left the normal world.

Monika Kruse

The futuristic design, the tiles, absolutely everything went really well with techno.

Richard Bartz

If you were part of the crew, you could leave the club and get straight out onto the old runway. It was wonderful. If you were really fed up, you could go outside, stand on the runway and look at the stars.

Acid Maria

There was an old lounge made completely of teak, which we sometimes used as a backstage area. The whole airport had been done up for the 1972 Olympic Games. I loved the design.

David Süß

At our parties in the halls in Riem, in total about 1,000 people would come. So in that sense it never occurred to us that it wouldn’t work in the club. We were a bit naive, I guess.

Acid Maria

On the opening night, I worked behind the bar. Jeff Mills was playing and yet hardly anyone came. There were hardly any guests at all.

Upstart

We opened in summer 1994. The first few months of Ultraschall were brutal. We’d booked Jeff before. At the Ultraschall opening gig he played again and only 120 paying guests came.

Captain Reality

The airport was somewhat out in the boonies. You had to travel down the Autobahn quite a long way and so you needed a car. It was very difficult to get there by underground and bus.

Upstart

Jeff decided not to charge us anything. He returned his fee. He didn’t want to have it. I’ll never forget that. We almost had an argument about it. The same thing happened with Monika Kruse, who was already very well known in Munich. 80 people came. We were speechless.

Barbara Preisinger

The opening night passed me by somehow. A few weeks later a friend of mine told me that a club had opened at the old airport and that we should go there sometime.

David Süß

We made no money at all in the first six months. Just put money in and everyone did other jobs elsewhere. Otherwise we wouldn’t have survived.

Upstart

We really struggled the first year. Then it clicked, and the club was a grand success. For everyone involved. For Nöth, who had taken the risk, and for us as well. The whole thing really took off.

Barbara Preisinger

For me, the club was an “aha” experience. That you could stay there until ten in the morning. That’s the first time I actually lost myself in a club and totally forgot the time.

Richard Bartz

You went in there and time turned into thin air.

Barbara Preisinger

You could listen to almost all types of electronic music there. I learned an unbelievable amount about music in a really short space of time there. It was a wonderful learning process.

Monika Kruse

The sound they played at Ultraschall was very Detroit and acid-orientated. Trance, for example, was hardly played at all. Perhaps one record now and again, but far and few between.

Richard Bartz

The Ultraschall sound worked closely together with Upstart’s record shop Optimal, where two other residents, Captain Reality and Lester Jones, also worked. A large part of the scene that frequented Ultraschall regularly bought records at Optimal. It was a kind of meeting and crossing point. That’s where you got all the information you needed. Due to its punk and indie background, the Ultraschall version of techno was raucous and loud.

Captain Reality

Relief, Djax-Up, Underground Resistance and Serotonine from New York were labels that we played a lot.

Richard Bartz

It didn’t matter if what you played ended up clearing the dance floor. It didn’t have to rock nonstop. You didn’t have to be a crowd-pleaser. It was a free space. You could do whatever you wanted. Ultraschall didn’t even have a fixed timetable in the beginning.

Acid Maria

I used to enjoy telling everyone my opinion, whether they wanted to hear it or not. And eventually I wanted to DJ since I’d so often thought I wouldn’t have played this or that record.

Telstar

The ambient floor and main floor had equal rights. The ambient floor was totally creative and, ideologically speaking, perhaps also amounted to overkill sometimes. It wasn’t meant to be a party. In the musical sense. That’s where you’d play the experimental stuff you had.

Richard Bartz

Ambient and chill-out were an important musical element for us. On the one hand this fast and hard, ecstatic sound, and on the other these chilled and spherical sounds. They belonged together.

Upstart

Some of our guests came purely because of our chill-out floor. Not for the techno party on the main floor. You could hang out there, listen to music, philosophize, smooch, have sex, fall asleep.

Barbara Preisinger

Sometimes we used to lie down in the ambient floor area and sleep for a few hours. Then we’d continue.

Monika Kruse

One of my best experiences at Ultraschall was at one of the “What Is Ambient?” parties.

Barbara Preisinger

They went on from Friday to Sunday. Nonstop.

Monika Kruse

They put a big bed on the main floor. People would come with their bongs and mushrooms. It was a real happening. And people like Air Liquide, Mixmaster Morris DJed.

Acid Maria

The Ultraschall had an incredibly stringent program. That totally set it apart from other venues in Munich. There was something like a research character to it, I felt. It was a true music lab. Sound research and entertainment.

Monika Kruse

One day Robert Görl from DAF was standing in the entrance area with a synthesizer and a small system and spent the whole night messing around with sequences and programming patterns, while people walked past.

Richard Bartz

It was the little things that made this club so special.

Monika Kruse

The Ultraschall was also the first club that had occasional toilet parties, i.e. a DJ in the loos, spinning records.

Barbara Preisinger

It was so different to the rest of Munich’s nightlife.

Upstart

We had ace residents, but we didn’t want our club to become a resident location. We were curious to see what else the world had to offer. It was very important to us back then to bring new ideas, crazy stuff and unusual sounds to the city, because Munich seemed very old-fashioned in my opinion. Ideas and visions that came from totally different places. This exchange was so important and inspiring. We were really interested in all these creative people on a personal level, too. The social aspect was really important to us.

Telstar

What we enjoyed most was inviting the whole crew. Rephlex, the Bunker Posse or the Cheap Boys from Vienna, for example.

Upstart

Suddenly we had friends and like-minded people in Vienna, Berlin, Detroit, Sheffield, New York. It was something quite global. I’d never experienced anything like it before. And at the same time it was so uncomplicated. On top of that, the music, which was totally revolutionary. For me, the atmosphere was almost more intensive than the pioneering spirit of the punk and new wave era around 1980.

DJ Hell

I had lived in New York for a year in 1993 because I had a residency at the Limelight. At the same time as Jeff Mills. In Manhattan I also met Abe Duque and Patrick Pulsinger. Soon after my return, I booked them at the Ultraschall. That is how a whole network and a very specific sound evolved around the Ultraschall and Disko B, where some of the people I just mentioned also released their first solo albums.

Upstart

I ran an indie label in the ’80s called Sub-Up Records. Disko B was the dance department, so to speak.

DJ Hell

The first record on Disko B was the reissue of Silicon Soul’s “Who Needs Sleep Tonight,” an obscure wave and disco record from New York from 1981. Upstart and I planned and realized it together.

Upstart

When we opened the Ultraschall, the label had existed for a few years already. The club and label were meant to be separate projects. But of course the club was quite practical for Disko B. We’d get to know people at night and then sometimes make a record together. That’s what happened with Blake Baxter, Patrick Pulsinger, I-f, Unit Moebius, and also with Abe Duque.

DJ Hell

I was heavily involved as the A&R because I knew many DJs personally. And of course also as an artist. Usually together with Richard Bartz.

Upstart

When Richard and Hell later started with Kurbel and International DJ Gigolo, we passed on all our knowledge and our experience, even took on all the administration in the beginning. After all, the infrastructure was already in place thanks to Sub-Up and Disko B.

Richard Bartz

The club was the test platform for all Kurbel and Disko B records. We did quite a lot together, too. Me as Acid Scout or together with Hell. We often stood on the main floor, listened to new tracks and then decided what to release.

Upstart

Around 1995 commercial organizers started homing in on techno in Munich, people who’d had very little to do with this kind of music before, and organized massive raves in the large halls of the airport.

Acid Maria

Sometimes there were 10,000 people, which is hard to imagine now.

Monika Kruse

They were called Rave-City and Unity-Rave. The halls were connected with the Ultraschall by a tunnel. And sometimes they teamed up.

Upstart

It was quite absurd at times. The rave audiences couldn’t warm to the music that was playing in our club. We were always the outlaws and always made sure to keep up that appearance.

David Süß

When the club started really taking off, news came that they wanted to demolish the airport and that we had to move out.

DJ Hell

We had known that from the start, but then it all happened so quickly.

Upstart

The good thing was that Wolfgang Nöth had a new location for us already.

Barbara Preisinger

During the last weeks there was quite a lot of hysteria around the Ultraschall. Because it was clear it would soon be over.

Upstart

People from as far as Berlin and Frankfurt came to the Ultraschall during that time.

Tobi Neumann

I’d known Upstart since the Sub-Up Records days. Back then I had produced the Milch project for his label, amongst other things. He was one of the people who had introduced me to techno and rave in the early ’90s and was incredibly enthusiastic about it. But I was suspicious of it at first. I’d been to the Ultraschall a few times but it was the closing party of the first Ultraschall at Munich-Riem on May 31, 1996, when it finally clicked with me.

Barbara Preisinger

The closing party was legendary. Also because everything was destroyed in the end.

Tobi Neumann

That night was the first time I really partied. In the morning at around 7 AM, I went home to bed. Four hours later I was awake again. Still pretty out of it. “That can’t have been it,” I thought. So I drove out there again. The party was still in full swing. In the late afternoon, DJ Hell spun some records for the last time. At some point he lost his voice and croaked at me that he had played every single record, including every B-side, that he had brought with him. The immense passion with which he and all the other guests at the Ultraschall said goodbye really made an impression on me. In the end, people started tearing the decorations down from the wall as souvenirs and there was a lot of crying going on.

Barbara Preisinger

It started quite harmlessly, with a few guests wanting to take home little parts of the spaceship deco. And then it escalated. People tore everything down from the walls and ceiling and trampled it to pieces. Everyone was really out of it, of course. I think for some of the club organizers it was pretty hard to bear watching that. The way their club was being demolished right before their eyes.

David Süß

It broke my heart. I thought, “Let’s leave the room in a dignified manner.” For me, ripping everything apart was like desecration. I didn’t want to join in. I went home earlier than everyone else, rather depressed.

Upstart

They ripped everything out, destroyed it and flooded it. People on ecstasy had tears rolling down their cheeks. Others were carrying pieces of the decorations home. It became totally manic.

DJ Hell

Upstart turned on all the taps and flooded the place.

Monika Kruse

I didn’t join in. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I found it bad enough to be watching. But I took some pieces home as souvenirs. They stank to high heaven, it was unbelievable. One week later I walked around in my flat asking myself where the stench was coming from.

Upstart

It was really crass and wasn’t planned to be a demolition party. But we couldn’t leave the club standing there as it was and lock the door. We had to put an end to it.

Monika Kruse

In the end, Captain Reality played an ambient track, a track that was particularly melancholic. It made me burst into tears.

Acid Maria

I think it was Upstart who played the very last record: “All Tomorrow’s Parties” by The Velvet Underground.

David Süß

The next day I went back because the sound system wasn’t ours but rented. I was so tired and went in there rather depressed. Seeing the chaos, what the others had left behind, was quite healing. With that I was able to write the place off and get over it. We went back there one last time after that and took out the stuff we needed. But it was the final cut. The first Ultraschall was destroyed in every sense of the word. Ultimately, it was good because it left us with energy to create something new. And I never looked back. It was so trashed and wrecked that it was irreversibly over.

Upstart

For ages we pondered what we would call the new club, and then decided on Ultraschall 2.

David Süß

It was an interim solution again. In a former factory of Pfanni, a German potato mix producer.

Barbara Preisinger

The new location was in that part of the factory where the semolina and potatoes used to be stored. It stank quite a lot sometimes. Of rotten potatoes. It took quite a long time before we got the smell out.

David Süß

For the conversion work we actually invested proper money this time.

Upstart

The cash that came in didn’t go to Wolfgang anymore but we could keep it.

David Süß

That suddenly gave it a totally new dimension. It made me quite dizzy at times. I was now the managing director and when I went to bed at night, sometimes I’d lie in bed still calculating how much money I’d spent that day alone on screws and building materials. What if it all goes wrong? And who’s going to pay it all back? Will it be down to me because I’m the managing director? Only then did we realize that we were a company.

DJ Hell

The conversion work was pretty quick, actually. It only took six months until the opening night.

David Süß

We included friends who were designers and artists in the conversion work. Chicks on Speed, for example, designed the entrance area.

Captain Reality

When we reopened, we had really long queues right from day one. Full throttle right from the start. For people from the southern part of Germany it was THE club to go to.

Tobi Neumann

From the moment we opened Ultraschall 2 in summer ’96 I was there every single weekend. I was totally spellbound by the music now. I was around 30 years old by now but sat on the main floor speakers every weekend like a little boy and sucked everything in.

Richard Bartz

This time the chill-out floor was almost the same size as the techno floor and completely covered with green shag carpet. So it was called the Green Room.

Tobi Neumann

The Green Room was legendary for its ambient sets. When Patrick Pulsinger and Erdem Tunakan were there, they played a ten hour mix of DJ and live set. It was phenomenal.

Richard Bartz

I once played there live for 24 hours. Nothing but ambient music, drones, and really slow stuff. In the beginning I still had someone else there, but as the night progressed he got so spaced out on drugs that he wasn’t able to get it together anymore. So I continued alone. Making music. On my own. Though from time to time I’d go to the bar and lean back while the machines did their thing.

Barbara Preisinger

For me, Ultraschall 2 was like the first one, like a living room again. Sure, I was also there a lot because of my job at Disko B and also very much involved. But Upstart really had to fight for the old Ultraschall guests.

Monika Kruse

Quite honestly, I was a little disappointed. Well, it was totally different. I missed the futuristic aspect. Yes, the new main floor had a lovely wooden floor and also the chill-out floor was beautiful with that green shag carpet everywhere. But somehow the madness was lacking.

Richard Bartz

Ultraschall 2 was a well-organized club. It wasn’t as colorful and open anymore. Techno had established itself by now. But I had my studio in the club now, too. Because of that, I was there every day, unless I happened to be on tour. That was pretty cool. I had my own key to the club. I could switch on the sound system whenever I wanted and listen to music on the main floor. No matter if it was Tuesday morning at 2 AM or 6 PM in the evening.

Monika Kruse

I didn’t like the premises where the club was located.

Tobi Neumann

Kunstpark Ost was a real party ghetto.

David Süß

It was a big industrial site where there were all sorts of clubs and bars.

Monika Kruse

You’d come in and before you even got into the club you’d be accosted by some idiots at least four times – and were instantly in a bad mood. In Munich-Riem we were alone in our own little world. It was like a sanctuary. At Kunstpark Ost you had to deal with all sorts of different people.

DJ Hell

There was a lot of criticism. We used to call Kunstpark Ost (Art Park East) “Spaßfabrik Ost” (Fun Factory East). For example, there was also a ghost train and next to it bratwurst stands and a so-called “Wiesnworld” (Octoberfest World) – all with totally different interests in mind. So, many guests from the first Ultraschall stopped coming.

Acid Maria

I found many of the other clubs on the site very cringe-worthy. They were not my world at all.

David Süß

As far as electronic music was concerned, there was also the Kraftwerk, where Sven Väth and Paul van Dyk and people like that played when they were in Munich, a Goa trance club, and all sorts of discotheques. Sure, there were people who called it “Commercial Park.” But they were the kind of people who were no longer satisfied with anything anymore. For Munich it was an immense step forward having such a site at all. As a result, the politicians finally realized what the city needed. Everything we have in terms of club culture in Munich now would be unthinkable without Kunstpark Ost.

Upstart

Nonetheless, the club was an area of total freedom.

Tobi Neumann

I didn’t have such an affinity with the first Ultraschall. I had only been there a few times. For me, Ultraschall 2 was the club that got me interested in techno music. And I noticed that success usually ends when people start saying that everything was better in the olden days.

Upstart

Many of them said that they stopped coming because they didn’t like Kunstpark Ost. That made me really angry. I just thought, “For fuck’s sake, get over yourself!”

DJ Hell

The same way as there are people in Frankfurt who say that after Omen they never went to another club in Frankfurt again, there are people in Munich for whom Ultraschall in Munich-Riem was the most important club in their life.

Acid Maria

There were a lot of people who felt everything was better in the olden days. I didn’t see it that way at all. I immediately had that Ultraschall feeling again.

Tobi Neumann

For me, this era was incredibly inspirational. I was given the honour of contributing an installation for the big two-day Ultraschall “Art Meets Techno” event (1997). I had noticed that the people at the door always told the most absurd stories to get into the club for free. So I installed a mic, a camera and a lamp in the entrance area and projected the scene live on monitors and speakers for people to see who were standing outside. Eight hours’ ticket booth, live. It was highly amusing because eventually people caught on and understood the medium, and crowds started gathering by the stairs to watch the scenes of people wanting to get in for free.

David Süß

The door was more important now, sure. There were louts who we didn’t in the club. At the same time it became clear that people who had come in by chance and were then bombarded with Jeff Mills records usually left pretty quickly again – and didn’t come back because there were enough alternatives on the site.

Acid Maria

In the Ultraschall 2 we gradually got older than the rest of the people there. It’s a Munich thing that you don’t go out so late. I felt it was a pity that lots of my friends missed what was going on there simply because they stopped going out. But that’s how it is: ways of life change. Not everyone is so keen on that kind of music.

Barbara Preisinger

Munich is different to Berlin, for example. People in their mid-20s already think they’re too old to go clubbing. University, having kids, and building a house are more important at that age. Time to become staid. I’ve never been able to get my head around that. I thought, “I’m not too old for this yet, everything’s still A-OK.”

Monika Kruse

Despite all the criticism, it was still the leading club in Munich, in the whole of southern Germany, in fact.

David Süß

We started getting in art projects and worked together with the Art Academy. We wanted to be more than just a party location, we saw ourselves as a living gallery. For example, the “Slacker Night”, which we hosted once a year, a purely media art event. We made a lot of contacts through that. With the Chicks on Speed, for example. Or the Munich media artists M+M, who are still active all over the world. It gave you a chance to stroll around in the club, look at the installations, but you were in a club and not in a traditional gallery.

Tobi Neumann

After I had spent every single weekend at the Ultraschall for six whole months and noticed that Fridays were always a bit slack, regardless of who they had booked, I asked Upstart whether I could play house once a month. The kind of house I liked.

Upstart

Tobi Neumann had this fresh new energy. After all, he had only just discovered his affinity with this kind of music. I felt we should give him a chance and free rein.

Tobi Neumann

The typical Ultraschall sound consisted of hard techno and traditional electro à la Aux 88. But what they didn’t play was the sound of Heiko MSO, Ata, Steve Bug, Ricardo, or Tobias Thomas and Michael Mayer, music that was somewhere between house and techno and more minimalist. Upstart and Dorle said, “You know what? We’ll stop doing our Fridays. Why don’t you just do your own party?”

DJ Hell

So Tobi Neumann set up the Flokati Club in the Green Room on Friday nights.

Tobi Neumann

I had only just started buying records and was not what one could call experienced. I was a total rookie. At the closing night of the Ultraschall 1, I’d met this guy who everyone called the “Kanzler” (Chancellor) and I invited him to my place a lot after that. He introduced me to the world of house music. During the week he’d drop by with records from Prescription, Balance, Relief, Touché, Playhouse, etc. and I mixed them live at home. The result was a sound that no one else played in Munich in those days. You had either the strictly hard programme at Ultraschall or commercial house, like the sort of stuff Tom Novy played.

Barbara Preisinger

Tobi and the Kanzler were a team. Friday nights soon became a grand success.

Tobi Neumann

Kanzler didn’t have a very good reputation at Ultraschall. When Upstart made me the offer of having my own night at Ultraschall, it was instantly clear to me that I would only do it together with the Kanzler. To start off with, there was a massive front against him on the part of the club, but eventually I managed to persuade them. After all, it was Kanzler who had introduced me to this music. Without him I would never have been able to do it so quickly.

Telstar

Through the success of the Flokati Club, the Green Room turned into more and more of a house floor on Saturdays, too. Ambient and experimental things slowly but surely started disappearing altogether.

Tobi Neumann

November 1997 was the first time Upstart and I spoke about it and in February 1998 our first party opened: Flokati – with Chez Damier. Half a year later, in about August 1998, Flokati totally took off. We were dumbfounded. We had up to 700 guests in the space of one evening and the party became firmly established in Munich. The Flokati became a fixed regular event.

Upstart

In around 2000, we kind of lost our enthusiasm, it didn’t seem fun anymore. The music had changed, too. Somehow we got the feeling that the people who came weren’t open to experimental things anymore. I remember an evening with Rancho Relaxo and the guests complained that it was too soft.

Telstar

The club was too big for that. The gravitation was different. Content-wise it didn’t fit together that well anymore.

Upstart

We, the organizers, had gone our separate ways to a certain extent. The club was successful, and we played it safe. The enthusiasm was gone. Everyone wanted different things.

Tobi Neumann

In January 2001, after three legendary years in Munich, I moved to Berlin, but continued the Flokati for another year by flying to Munich every Friday. However, eventually that wasn’t possible anymore because I had more and more bookings as a DJ elsewhere. In early 2002, the Kanzler took over from me completely until the end in around 2007. At some stage it wasn’t special anymore because by then about ten to 15 other clubs with similar concepts had set up in Munich. We were lucky in that we were the first to host that kind of party with that kind of music program.

David Süß

In the end, Wolfgang and the owner, the Pfanni heir, couldn’t agree on the use of the site anymore. And so the owner kicked us out. We tried to prevent it by taking a lawyer, but since we didn’t have a contract with him there was no chance. That really opened our eyes. Wolfgang would never have done something like that. You’d make a handshake agreement with him and that was it: sealed. And then some millionaire heir comes along and rips you off. In January 2003, it was all over. And in April it was clear that we wouldn’t open there again. So the question arose whether we even wanted an Ultraschall 3. And so we decided that we wouldn’t continue together. We had grown apart a bit. Which didn’t really come as such a big surprise after ten years.

Upstart

I didn’t feel like it anymore. We were starting a family, my girlfriend Dorle was pregnant, and after so many years of intensive club life we wanted to distance ourselves from that.

David Süß

I was set on starting another club. The location next to Kunstpark Ost, which again Wolfgang found for us, was much smaller. In August we opened the Harry Klein. The Ultraschall had an area of 1,000 square metres, the Harry Klein had 115 square metres. Totally new dimensions. That’s why we called it Harry Klein (Harry Small). And it probably wouldn’t have been to Dorle and Upstart’s taste.

DJ Hell

The Ultraschall was the nucleus for lots of other projects and careers. In Munich, it was the starting point for everything – for the “new sound of Munich.”

Monika Kruse

The great thing about the Munich scene was and is that there wasn’t such a competitive atmosphere. Quite the contrary: there was teamwork. That gave the whole thing a sense of sustainability. And that’s the reason why many of the people who started up with us back then run clubs or – in the case of Dorle, David, and Upstart – still run clubs.

David Süß

If we had been more profit-oriented back then, we could’ve made far more money. Looking back, that’s a bit of a pity perhaps, but I’m still pleased with the way we did things. We made ends meet. No more. Having a Porsche was never the aim. The club was never a cash cow that we just milked. Maybe that’s the reason why we’re all still around.

Photo credits: Photos from Ultraschall 1: Christian Seiler, Patrick Gruban and David Süß. All photos of Ultraschall 2: Marcus Zum Bansen.