An Oral History of Berlin Minimal Techno

In 1998, the rave scene that gripped Germany after reunification was at its apex. What had started in the literal underground spaces of post-GDR Berlin after the fall of the Wall had gone mainstream, with millions of young people celebrating the colorful culture of electronic dance music all across the country. But the techno utopia envisioned by many as the new millenium approached was already starting to come undone. The trend was swiftly co-opted – ironically, by some of the same capitalist forces that had defeated the communist system a decade earlier. The bubble soon burst, and many of those truly dedicated to the music were forced to rebuild. The result was something that was the opposite of rave’s over-the-top excess, a movement that idealized a minimalist aesthetic in sound, visuals and fashion. It was a lifestyle that resisted the unbridled exuberance of rave in favor of something more sustainable – and sustain it did, with tracks that filled whole sides of vinyl and parties that went on for days at a time.

Berlin became the center for this new creative community, drawing in techno practitioners and aficionados from around the world who came for the party and stayed for the ease of living made possible by cheap rents and easy access to artist visas. “Minimal” became the buzzword around this scene, and while overindulgences were aplenty in freewheeling afterhours, the “arm, aber sexy” (poor but sexy) slogan coined by then-mayor Klaus Wowereit could not have been a more accurate appraisal of Berlin’s appeal.

The Berlin of today might not offer the €100 rents of two decades ago, but it still maintains an independently-minded music community that is the envy of cities around the world, one that manages to be both pure in sound and a primary economic force for making Berlin an international destination. 20 years down the line, we talked to some of the DJs, producers, label heads and journalists – including Richie Hawtin, Ellen Allien, Break 3000 and more – who helped shaped the decade of minimal that once defined the city.

In 1997, Berlin’s annual Love Parade reached a peak attendance of 1.5 million. The hangover that followed would force the infamous party capital to redefine itself, not for the first time.

Heiko Hoffmann

The American forces abolished the curfew in 1949 to compete with the Russians, to show how liberal and open and forward-thinking they were. This is what attracted Iggy Pop and David Bowie to West Berlin in the 1970s. They could just go on and on and on.

Ellen Allien

Kraftwerk is the origin of minimal. Hysterical music filled with different sounds is too heavy for me – needless and even deranging. Kraftwerk taught my ears that less is more.

Heiko Hoffmann

Growing up as a teenager in Berlin in the ’80s was completely uncool, at least in regards to pop culture. You just had the feeling that this was a really grey city with not much interesting happening.

Ellen Allien

The first techno labels I know from Berlin are Tresor and Basic Channel.

Ralf Kollman

We all know the story after the Wall came down. We had an underground techno movement and then we had the Love Parade, we had a Mayday, it became commercial. That was ’96-’97, when I turned my back, ’cause techno was all over the place. It was on music television and in magazines, everywhere. It was a sell-out.

Ellen Allien

There was no interest in booking Berlin DJs in London, for example.

Heiko Hoffmann

Berlin had some important DJs in the early ’90s, but a lot of the music came from Frankfurt, mainly, and a little bit from Cologne and Munich. The music that came from Berlin was either early trance like Paul Van Dyk and Energy 52 – or Basic Channel. That was mostly it.

Richie Hawtin

I was inspired by Mike Ink and the Cologne sound for its rhythmic approach, and I was inspired by Basic Channel and the Berlin sound for its washes of noise and effects.

Heiko Hoffmann

During the whole of the ’90s, you had a very local audience in Berlin. You could go to a club like WMF or E-Werk and see the same faces week after week.

Richie Hawtin

The smallest town in Germany had a techno club. I’m talking Dortmund and Mainz and Hanover. There was so much more going on than just the main cities. It’s important because when you speak about Berlin today, you have to understand the foundation was being built all over Germany the past 20 years.

Ellen Allien

Many clubs were closed in the late ’90s. That’s why I started to take things into my own hands, creating my own events and founding my label. The crash induced me to do it by myself, or everything would die.

As Y2K approached and the global scene continued to contract, a new wave of artists arrived in Berlin and began to construct a sound that defied the euphoric conventions of rave.

Heiko Hoffmann

Ostgut opened in ’98, I think. Predominantly gay club, very dark. You could already sense something new happening with that club.

Ralf Kollman

There was a new underground developing around that time. My protagonists were people like Tobi Neumann, Luciano, Ricardo Villalobos and a few others who started some kind of new vibes in electronic music. And at one point, somebody gave that the minimal label.

Philip Sherburne

Not a lot of melody, just sort of burbling groove percolating ad infinitum. This very steady holding pattern became the signature of minimal.

Heiko Hoffmann

Musically, the most crucial thing happening was Ricardo moving to Berlin. His Alcachofa album and songs like “Easy Lee” were some of the first recordings he made in Berlin.

Break 3000

You got records from Villalobos that were like ten or 20 minutes long and really very minimal, not much happening. That was completely different. It was really the sound of Berlin – I think one of the first times that Berlin really had its own sound.

Philip Sherburne

This never-ending unspooling. No big crescendo breaks or drops.

Break 3000

A lot of producers moved to Berlin, then everything changed. Labels like Highgrade and Mobilee were doing this minimal sound and they were from Berlin. But the biggest were like Perlon and Richie Hawtin with Minus. They were really the major labels doing this style.

Richie Hawtin

The important decision for me was to have Minus set up an operation in Berlin. So many of our artists were inspired by what was happening. And all of our friends in Germany were spending more time in Berlin. Ricardo and that whole gang were there. It just made sense to be a part of that creative explosion.

Clark Warner

Berlin was becoming quickly the center of the universe no matter where you’re from. If it was South America, Central America, North America, even England, Berlin was the place to be.

Philip Sherburne

All of this sort of Mutek community had gotten there – Gabriel Coutu-Dumont, Deadbeat, Mike Shannon.

Heiko Hoffmann

One major change for the artists moving to Berlin was the first budget flight carriers. Before that, the flights from Berlin to other major cities in Europe were quite expensive. If you were a DJ who was playing around Europe every weekend, you would have to go through Frankfurt or Munich to get to these cities. When the budget carriers started, tourists could easily come to Berlin from more or less than anywhere in Europe – but the artists could also get out.

Artistic boundaries and endurance limits were tested in new clubs and parties that incubated the minimal community as it continued to grow.

Ralf Kollman

There was enough space for everybody and there were so many different promoters supporting each other and people going out consuming the music. I think that was the reason why the club culture developed so well, because I know in other cities it’s exactly the opposite. Where there is competition, people just make their lives complicated. Nothing is growing, nothing is developing.

Richie Hawtin

If I wasn’t off gigging, if I had a free weekend, I’d go to Berlin and go to Beat Street and these other things. Just get creatively re-inspired.

Heiko Hoffmann

Beat Street filled the void that happened when Ostgut closed in 2003. A lot of people who used to go to Ostgut were really missing that kind of music, so they got a lot of the resident DJs and the people who worked the bar and the door. That filled the gap until Berghain started two years later.

Philip Sherburne

That was the first time I’d ever been to a party like that that was populated by people that had been out all night and people who were just getting there fresh. I was blown away by that contrast and dynamic. It’s something that Berlin would become famous for over the years. That Sunday afternoon ritual.

Richie Hawtin

Partying and being with friends and open-minded people on a Sunday afternoon as the sun is streaming in, there’s nothing to hide. There are good mixes and bad mixes and old records and new records. It’s blood, sweat and tears. Because it was long and winding, you definitely had time to experiment and let records develop and mixes develop.

Break 3000

DJs were playing for six or eight hours. You had these tracks that lasted for 15 or 20 minutes and the DJs just made one big track out of a few tracks that went on for an hour.

Richie Hawtin

It’s really where a lot of the whole back-to-back thing started to happen. There were no egos involved. It was, “You play one, I’ll play one. You play two? OK, I’m going to the toilet. Oh sorry, I disappeared for an hour. I got sidetracked.”

Ralf Kollman

This was the time where a completely new generation of clubs opened, from Watergate to Berghain, Club der Visionaere and so on. And the whole Bar 25 movement was very important.

Break 3000

Bar 25 was very important for this whole minimal thing. That was one club that really had that sound. I always went there on Sunday and sometimes stayed until Monday morning. Berlin is the only place in the world where you can do this and nobody cares, you know!?

Heiko Hoffmann

The soundsystem that they had, it didn’t have any low end. It was just a shitty soundsystem.

Break 3000

There was only a beat, and when a hi-hat came in, people were screaming because of the hi-hat!

Philip Sherburne

There was Club der Visionaere, of course, which became in many ways a ground zero for the Berlin minimal scene.

Break 3000

Watergate started out as being more of a drum & bass club and evolved into real minimal club for a few years.

Heiko Hoffmann

We did these Groove parties at Watergate once a year. One night, Richie Hawtin, Sven Väth and Ricardo Villalobos all DJed together. Hawtin thought he wouldn’t make it because he was stuck in Brussels. So he just took a taxi from Brussels to Berlin to make the party. And he paid for it himself!

Philip Sherburne

Watergate was kind of welcoming to that sort of techno tourist, of which I certainly counted myself for a long time.

Clark Warner

They needed to start turning punters away that were coming to, you know, get wasted and not appreciate the culture. I don’t think that was happening until after 2005, when there was a surge in clubbing and things really started becoming tourist destinations.

Heiko Hoffmann

To my knowledge, Watergate was the first house and techno club in Berlin that didn’t work on a three months lease. All the clubs before were working on a short lease because you could go in very cheaply, but you had to leave if a new owner was found or if they want to use the building in another way. That’s why for the first decade or so, Berlin clubs usually had shitty soundsystems or didn’t invest money in interior design or proper light systems or in air conditioning, because you didn’t know if you’d have to close two months later. Watergate was the first professional staff that had a long-term lease.

Clark Warner

I remember walking into Berghain before they opened doors and thinking, “This is not going anywhere for a very long time.”

Heiko Hoffmann

I think it’s interesting that both Bar 25 and Berghain started in 2004, just two kilometers away from each other, but aesthetically they’re the complete opposite. You had people putting makeup on and wearing colorful new hippie clothes [at Bar 25], and, on the other hand, people dressed in black at Berghain. This has been copied everywhere in the world. You don’t really see any new club models other than those two – either concrete or wood. I’ve been to clubs from China to Mexico City and wherever I go, they’re either modeled on the one or the other.

With another decade of dance music approaching its conclusion, the minimal scene began to wear out its welcome.

Break 3000

I think some artists took it a bit too far. Ricardo was doing records that lasted half an hour. I don’t know if I needed that for myself, but that’s my personal taste. I know that other people really love this kind of stuff.

Philip Sherburne

It gets fuzzy around the edges, because is Berghain minimal? Is Marcel Dettmann minimal?

Break 3000

I played a lot in Panorama Bar back then and it definitely wasn’t minimal. Marcel Dettmann was already playing proper hard techno, which nobody else was playing.

Philip Sherburne

I remember going to Hard Wax and somebody pulling out records for me and being like, “Oh, you’re into minimal.” This was probably by 2009, and I had the sense in the way they said it, it wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

Heiko Hoffmann

“Rej” by Âme was released and I think that was a very important record, because while it was in a pretty standard techno Detroit vein, it had a very professional sound. That was a song that changed a lot for house music becoming much more popular again. That sounded fresher than the minimal that had been going on for years by that time.

Philip Sherburne

Making good minimal is probably as hard as far as making good anything, maybe harder, because everything has to be perfect. Every sound has to be thought about. Every silence has to be thought about. But for a lot of people, making bad minimal is easy. But making bad anything is probably pretty easy.

Richie Hawtin

A lot of things changed in the late 2000s, as minimal was waning. Facebook started to come in, photographs started to come in, DJs became more famous. It was like the minimal scene could only survive while it was really insular and private. As the whole world started opening up to electronic music, minimal was becoming a bad word. The whole thing started to fray at the edges and become a different thing. The beginning of where we ended up today.

Break 3000

I think since I moved here in 2004, there’s like one million people more in Berlin. But the lifestyle is still the same. People go out every day of the week, and that’s not the case in other cities.

Ralf Kollman

I still see a lot of echoes from that time. It made Berlin the diverse place that it is today. We have a lot of tourists coming in, but in a way they’re surfing that wave. They can choose from Berghain to Watergate to Ipse, some kinky places like KitKat and Pornceptual. All that stuff is happening here every weekend.

Ellen Allien

We are running events at a new club, Griessmuehle, now. It’s one of the best techno venues in Berlin. Why are new clubs opening? Because people move to Berlin to open clubs.

Break 3000

We’re now in August, and like 300 new restaurants opened already this year. It’s mostly foreign people opening restaurants. A lot of Americans, people from England, from Spain, Italy, Mexicans, South Americans. It’s all these young people. Club people.

Heiko Hoffmann

All these clubs, these DJs, this music, led the way for the changes you’re seeing today. Companies such as Ableton and Native Instruments came out of these things happening in Berlin. The reason why a lot of start-up companies are moving to Berlin is because they know that they can attract workers for exactly that reason.

Richie Hawtin

The energy of those parties, of the people who were hanging out in Berlin in the mid-2000s, still resonates as to why people want to spend time there now. Those events, that freedom. It’s like folklore. I’m sure it has a lasting impact on the city.

Philip Sherburne

It’s just such a weird historical accident. The postwar history. The post-Wall history. The fact that the Wall coming down coincided with techno and ecstasy. I think it’s a miracle it happened and it could probably only have happened before the internet took hold the way it did. In the Airbnb era, I don’t think it will happen again.

Ralf Kollman

I just signed Wareika, a Perlon act, to Mobilee and I asked for a remix from Half Hawaii, which is Sammy Dee and Bruno Pronsato. I was going through my record collection and I realized that some of this music was really good, but not everything was produced very well. And most of it was only available on vinyl. Now we have new distribution channels. We have a complete new generation of techno enthusiasts. Maybe we can bring that sound back in a 2018 version.

Heiko Hoffmann

It just needs a little bit more time to pass. There’s a need for it to come back in a new form, because it would be a reaction again against what’s dominant at the moment – the big Berghain techno and the Innervisions house sound. I think that minimal would be a perfect reaction to that.