(This photo isn’t from Berlin, I didn’t take any photos in Berlin. It’s from Freero, which I was also going to write about, but didn’t get round to. We’re just winging it at this stage.)

HIT: 90mil. A very cool venue, excellent lighting (strobes in the office-style false ceiling!), nice sound.

MISS: The insane levels of heat in 90mil once the ridiculously long queue of Subglow fanatics outside had been let in. My back was a river.

MISS: Trickpony live. I thought there was absolutely nothing new about this, sorry.

HIT: Crespi Drum Syndicate live. The opposite to Trickpony: fresh, spontaneous, a bit chaotic, compelling.

MISS: Pablo from Crespi Drum Syndicate almost ruining the live set by getting chaotic with the cheap filter effects on the Pioneer mixer.

HIT/MISS: Pablo and Johnny wearing hoodies despite the furnace-level temperature in the room. HIT for commitment to the bit; MISS for second-hand discomfort.

MISS: Getting stuck in a philosophical thought-loop about 3/4 vs 4/4 vs triplet time during Crespi Drum Syndicate’s set. Basically spiralling intellectually instead of just enjoying the music.

HIT: Having a good dance all the same, and leaving satisfied on a Thursday night. Berlin eh.

HIT: Berlin dog walking/bonding. For example, if you walk a dog in Neukölln you will randomly strike up a conversation with another dog owner who turns out to be one of the founders of Mechatronica.

HIT: Döner box from Dunya Gemüse Kebab.

HIT: YSY’s DJ deal for the Slinky party on Friday night including unlimited free wine and beer.

MISS: Chronic understaffing in the YSY bar team resulting in a 45 minute wait for cocktails. Should have stuck to the free wine and beer.

HIT: Sisi’s punky emo warm-up at Slinky at YSY, including a sick tune by someone called Blind Delon. I did not know I had competition.

HIT: Daniel Rincon’s swampy punky set after Sisi, including modern classic ‘Breathe’ by Shit Robot.

HIT: The 3-hour b2b with Calum in which I played all but 5 records in my bag. Efficient.

MISS: Yes the speakers are super nice, but YSY is still a cocktail bar. You have to be stationed in a very particular location to get the benefit of the subs. The music was good all night but it was a bit wasted on the setting. Apparently several people showed up to the party expecting a club night and were rather let down (though this is also pretty funny).

MISS: Calum losing his phone and spending about 20 minutes searching every crevice of the DJ booth for it, with no success. Once we’d stopped the music and called it a night, we could finally hear it ringing: it had fallen down between the records in his bag. In retrospect, it’s surprising this doesn’t happen more often.

HIT: Calum’s excellent appropriation of that Patti Lupone statement to promote the party, which I obviously reshared on IG:

And the resulting slightly confused message I received from my confused mother a few days later:

HIT: Spritzes and Haribo in Körnerpark on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

MISS: My diet going fully out of the window, so that Saturday’s food intake consisted solely of the aforementioned spritzes and Haribo, and Huel.

HIT: Migas listening bar. I did this gig for the money, which is ironic when you find out that it only pays 100 EUR, but such is life right now. I needed the cash. As it turned, out it’s a very comfortable bar with nice speakers (though you have to turn the bass up considerably past 12 o’clock for most records) and a relaxed atmosphere. I played a lot of Pharoah Sanders, Arthur Russell and Gil Scott-Heron, and enjoyed tinkering about with their Denon 2-channel CDJ-type-thing. In fact I now have a new alias for listening bar sessions:

HIT: Executing an extended key-mix between Pharoah Sanders ‘Kazuko’ and the C&J mix of ‘Return Of The Mack’. If you want this kind of genius at your function, book me!

HIT: A quick jaunt to Panke to see Crespi Drum Syndicate again, DJing this time. I’d never heard of the club before (why would I ever go out in Wedding?) and it was sick: good soundsystem, cool vibe, actual ventilation so I wasn’t dying of heat like in every other venue this weekend. Pablo and Johnny were playing slippery wonky funky tunes and Pablo was even laying off the filter. It was great.

MISS: Waking up to the double news on Sunday morning of a fatal attack on the CSD parade and another police raid on Outra Cena, the club I work for in Lisbon. Putting aside the DISCOURSE, one of the things events like this do is remind me, brutally, that I was born into a world where my human difference and desire are sanctioned by others. In some places it can still put you in prison, while in even the most (supposedly) permissive of societies, the threat of violence lingers in the wings of every public and, in the case of the club, private act of gay affection. All gay people know too well the all-pervading sadness this knowledge instils in you from a young age. On the Sunday I called it “bad vibes”, then over the days afterwards I spoke to friends about it as “generic gay sadness”, which deprecates the feeling while still somehow hitting the nail squarely on the head. And like any other sadness you deal with it how you can, in my case: I went climbing, I went dancing, I attempted that magic trick of keeping the causes for it in mind while also temporarily trying to forget it. In the end, I wasn’t so much sad as very, very angry. But the sadness is always there.

HIT: PDA. Well, I’ve written enough about this party before (in 2024 here and in 2025, when I played, here) and it remains pretty much the same, but here are some highlights.

HIT: Watching Benny aka DJ Subaru and Tam Tam spend the first 10 minutes of their set trying to get one of the turntables to turn on. It wouldn’t be a PDA without an extended equipment malfunction (where’s Michael Upson when you need him?) but I think the joy on their faces when the little on/off turret finally lit up was worth the panic. Benny, a reader of this blog and therefore of PDA reports past, gave me a knowing look.

HIT: The tunes. Italo, synth pop, acid house — with special mention to Virgo Four’s ‘In A Vision’ and Da Posse’s ‘In The Heat Of The Night’, the latter of which Benny gamely attempted to mix out of despite the tune being basically impossible.

HIT: Benny playing Cyber People’s ‘Void Vision’, which they’d heard me play at Love Muscle four years earlier (write-up here) — a nice full circle moment, but also one that made me realise I have no idea where my copy of that EP is.

HIT: Benny playing ‘Danger’, Miles Mercer’s edit of Pylon, and Justin Strauss asking about it, giving me the opportunity to wax lyrical to Justin Strauss about Miles Mercer.

MISS: Wanting but failing to wax lyrical to Justin Strauss about Justin Strauss, specifically the various versions of Adam Ant ‘Rough Stuff’ that he had a hand in. I’m sure he’s heard it all before, so I restrained myself, but I regret that now.

HIT: Justin Strauss’s look, somewhere between Edna Mode and Toad.

HIT: Everyone belting out ‘It’s Raining Men’ and ‘Voulez-Vous’.

MISS: The heat. Always the heat.

HIT/MISS: The push-pull between the boiling yet fun dancefloor and the (relatively) cooler bar full of interesting and funny people to talk to and do shots with and forget about the music oops.

HIT: Watching PDA’s Shay, through the window that connects the bar and the DJ booth, have a moment to Benny and Tam Tam’s closing tribute to the late Bonnie Tyler.

HIT: Getting home to find my Berlin hosts eating chinese takeaway and watching Phantom Thread. A less appropriate between-party film choice you could not find. I loved it.

HIT: The Mutual Attraction party at Crack Bellmer on Sunday evening, specifically the debut live show by The Chic Patina (aka my friend Eli) and Asia-James, who have a song on the next CD I’m putting out. The set was a mix of acid, house, disco and some darker pulsing moments, all underpinning Asia-James’s singing and sighing. E Molina followed the live with sick tunes including Triple Five Sol’s ‘Gonna Get Got’ (which I played at Campout last year) and an edit of The Grid’s ‘Origins Of Dance’ by Eden Burns that I’d never heard before (I still prefer the original).

HIT: Meeting some fellow British gays at the party and making a pact to go to Dollywood in August 2027. Well why not?

MISS: Leaving partway through Kathi’s set to head to Berghain because I was worried the CSD guestlist queue would be insane.

HIT: Arriving at Berghain to find absolutely zero guestlist queue.

MISS: Within 5 minutes of entering Berghain, realising I’d misplaced my keys. That is, my hosts’ keys. The hosts who were at that moment deep asleep at home, and likely wouldn’t be awake to let me in again until at least 9 in the morning.

HIT: Practicing what I felt was an inhuman level of equanimity regarding the lost keys.

HIT: Only 5 minutes later, having a lightbulb moment and realising I must have just left them in the tray when I had my bag checked at the entrance.

MISS: Going through the humiliation of having to ask one of the several giant men at the bag check, in English, whether they had my keys or not.

HIT: They had my keys.

HIT: The special CSD lights in Berghain: disco balls! Pink beams! Anime/spaceship vibes! Wish it was like that all the time.

MISS: Initially, at least, by comparison to Berghain I thought the Pbar decorations were risible: corner shop sparkly ribbon hangings that made it look like an eight year old’s birthday party.

HIT: Valley Dolly playing tunes that I would never pick myself with enough energy and flair to make me enjoy them.

HIT: Valley Dolly’s hair-ography. I don’t remember there being a fan in front of the DJ in the Pbar booth. Maybe she brought her own?

HIT: Leeon aka Enrique, the person I’d come to see play, introducing me to one of his friends just before the set, who then became my accomplice for the next several hours of classic Berghain adventures.

HIT: Boris, at the end of his set, killing the music and then gradually bringing in only the pulse of the bass and then the rest of what I thought was Minilogue’s ‘The Girl From Botany Bay’, as the lighting person went crazy with blues and pinks to make Berghain look like a disco party.

MISS: Finding out (days later) that it was NOT in fact Minilogue but the Nathan Fake remix of James Holden’s ‘The Sky Was Pink’, hence the pink lighting…duh! (In my defence they are both 10-minute-long tunes released in the mid 00s that sound basically the same. Fight me.)

HIT: Enrique taking his time over his set to build up a moderately paced, texturally varied kind of techno before letting us have it in the final hour.

MISS: The Berghain CSD crowd being constitutionally incapable of processing a broken beat. I remember this from Snax last November and put it down to the gays being restless, but even on a more ostensibly open night like CSD the dancefloor instantly began to empty at the hint of a displaced kick drum. Where’s your imagination, people??

HIT: Enrique’s friend’s ability to smoke a cigarette, crush and rack up drugs, AND hold up her side of an excellent conversation all at the same time, while standing. Respect.

MISS: The heat. Always the heat. My friend Alex even had to take a break from overheating. This weekend I felt like I would be to hot for the rest of my life, which is appallingly probably true.

HIT: Enrique finishing his set with an unreleased tune of his, which he’d sent me on whatsapp a year previously, a kind of Blade Runner-esque synthy epic with Safri Duo drums (his reference not mine lol) and a mega lead acid motif to bring the house down. Back came the bright colourful lights. We lived.

HIT: Going on a bit of a rampage for a couple of hours, taking in the sights and smells and sounds of Bergs on a Monday morning.

MISS: One of those smells being the smoking area that links Pbar and Berghain round the back, which I didn’t even know existed until this visit and hope never to have to experience again.

HIT: Revisiting Panoramabar for Steffi & Virginia and finally getting the point of the cheap sparkly ribbon curtain decorations, which, in combination with planar lasers, created a super cool split-lighting effect in the fog from the smoke machine. Intentional or not, it really worked.

HIT: Entering a toilet cubicle with six people, 50% of whose names it transpired were some kind of variation on “Joseph”. Or at least I thought they were. OK, maybe you had to be there.

HIT: Intermittently remembering, despite the rampage, that although it was unlocking something for me personally, none of it was achieving anything for the world out there, and considering what to do with that knowledge.

Postscript HIT:

Thanks to everyone still sticking around here as I go through something of a professional crisis regarding DJing, music, writing, and so on, which explains the relatively infrequency of these missives. One thing I haven’t stopped doing, as you can see by this newsletter, is going out, and I think it’s through going out and being inspired by friends old and new that I will slowly get my mojo back.