The Sick Girls’ Alex Dröner on the Changing Sound of Berlin

Alex Dröner has been around for a while. As one half of Berlin DJ duo Sick Girls she’s watched “waves” of expats come and go, all while opening Berlin’s ears up to what she evocatively describes as the “wild, gripping feeling” of her favourite urban sounds since 2004. Relocating from Hamburg in 1989, Dröner was a big part of the early rave scene, booking the famous Tresor nightclub before moving on to lay the foundation for the crop of weird R&B and hip hop being pushed by US artists and promoters currently flocking to Berlin (as illustrated by a recent piece in Electronic Beats).

It hasn’t been easy – at least when it came to the sounds that Dröner wanted to hear. Johanna Grabsch and her seized the decks for themselves in the mid-’00s, in an effort to demonstrate that there’s more to music than the four-to-the-floor rhythms dominating the techno city. They emerged as an inexperienced, slightly irresponsible duo, who had nothing else in mind but to bring a bit of fun back to what they felt was an excessively serious DJ culture.

“I think, with this kind of open-mindedness, we attracted people that maybe wouldn’t have listened to this kind of music before, just because people were like, ‘Go there, the girls are crazy, just look at them,’” Dröner jokes, in a German accent, about the Sick Girls’ unorthodox approach to their sets, which was mostly a result of the fact they could “give a fuck” about what people thought: “Sometimes the music would stop because we were on the dance floor ourselves when the track was playing.”

Nearly a decade later what was once a minute scene of stylistic outsiders has become a sizeable alternative to Berlin’s house and techno norm. What Dröner calls the “new new Berliners” is not the only reason for that: From Sick Girls’ Revolution N°5 parties and Sasha Perera et al’s Grimetime, to Scuba’s Sub:stance nights at Berghain (“that was the point at which I actually started to go to Berghain”) and parties and shows by #gHashtag, Purge and Noisekölln, the growing awareness of these bass-loving, “non-technoid” forms has been a collective effort. That’s why we’ve asked Dröner to point us to some of her favourite artists and peers – people she affectionately refers to as “activists” – who carry on the Berliner tradition of toppling walls and make way for the new underground.

Jahcoozi
They are a very international band because it’s Sasha [Perera], she’s from London, Oren, he’s from Tel Aviv and Robot Koch, he’s also from some little city in Western Germany. They lived here for a really long time and they really helped build up this alternative, not four-to-the-floor, scene. I think they’re quite important for the city. Sasha Perera was part of the first Grimetime parties and she is really a huge supporter of this kind of music. She’s releasing her first solo album [Everlast as Perera Elsewhere] on Friends of Friends, the American label. Robot is also a solo act. He would be like the German, or the Berlin, Flying Lotus, if you want to position him somewhere. He’s also a producer for a lot of other acts and is still working a lot at the basis of German, non-technoid music.

Daniel Haaksman
He is actually this one guy who introduced Baile funk to Berlin, and to Germany. He was responsible for the first Baile funk compilations [Rio Baile: Funk Favela Booty Beats on Essay Recordings] and the first one who really integrated Brazilian ghetto music into his DJ sets; really supported that style and brought people over from Brazil to Berlin. He’s a real activist and he always stays in this kind of musical context, so nowadays he supports tecno brega, these kinds of styles. He’s always interested in these more Latin American, or African, or Portuguese ghetto styles.

Phon.o
[Carsten Aermes] might be a “real” Berliner but I’m not so sure either. [laughs] He is a part of Modeselektor’s Monkeytown label, and was always really interested in hip hop – in different beats, in broken beats. In the late 2000s he started out together with Chris Deluca as the band CLP [Chris de Luca vs Phon.o] and they were the first ones to really produce a whole electronic hip hop album [Supercontinental on Shitkatapult]. They also invited lots of different rappers and MCs to Berlin. After a while, they broke up and did solo things and I would say that Phon.O is the one who really likes this kind of warm dubstep-y, James Blake-y, Sampha, English garage-meets-dubstep-meets-trip hop, sound.

Patric Catani
He is also an artist who has been active for a long time. He has different monikers; he’s Patric Catani, he is Candie Hank. He actually also produces German hip hop, with German lyrics, but in an ironic way. In a very intelligent, very interesting, very articulated, very good, kind of way. He’s really one of the most interesting artists but he is also partly doing techno, or he did techno, in the end of the ’90s but he was never a guy who would play loop techno, like Surgeon or The Advent, in the Tresor basement. He was always a bit more broken beat-y and experimental.

Sick Girls
I think we added to the Berlin scene in quite a particular way. We kind of brought the fun back into music, in the way that we were so non-dogmatic. When we started out in 2004, everything was very boring; very loop-y, “techno, techno, techno, house, house, house,” “minimal” was starting to get on our nerves. We just wanted to play different music, so we just did.