PDA (26/07/25)
PDA was a big HIT in my hits and misses of CSD 2024 (here) and I included Michael Upson from Love Muscle’s set in my best dancing moments of 2025, saying:
“Can it be described as a ‘best dancing moment’ if you spent most of it wedged up against a teetering office fan trying your best not to die from heat exhaustion? Sure it can.”
Well, history very nearly repeated itself this year as I once again hit CSD PDA for a dance, a gas and an extended period of being far too hot. The main difference was that this year I was DJing and there happened to be a much more effective office fan stationed right there in the booth. Without that I might not have made it through.
I met my friend and Welt alumnus (here) Stephen for a drink at a place called Torte, which is one of a couple of bars that have sprung up down this end of Sonnenallee, presumably to serve the hipsters being increasingly priced out of the areas further up in Neukölln. As Stephen noted, Ziegrastrasse, the venue for the party, no longer seems so far out of the way. This was the first night I learnt of the fact that the whole complex around the venue — the hotel, the apartments, the weird open air venues opening next to the water, the offices — is owned by the people who own the hotel (the largest in Berlin apparently). They’ve been trying to buy up the Ziegrastrasse alleyway too, but apparently that in turn is “owned by the mafia” and is holding out. Knowing these dynamics only enhances the frisson of going to what must be one of the last truly underground spaces for dance music in Berlin. It feels both illicit yet, at least with the PDA crowd in it, wholesome.
At midnight the party was already full, so when me and Stephen arrived we were met with the queue spilling out of the ground floor entrance and down the alleyway. We took a deep breath and started working our way up the stairs past the waiting masses, only to find a heaving scrum on the first floor landing. Shay (one of my co-conspirators on that trip to Vabali last year, here) was working the door and, together with Jonah, one of the organisers, was doing her best to impose some order on the situation. We had not expected there to be so many people so early, but clearly the party has a buzz. We missed Laurel’s opening set, which I was sad about because they had said they were gonna play Alec R Constandinos’s disco version of ‘Romeo & Juliet’, so as it was we arrived to Gala playing fun Chicago house, including a welcome revival of ‘Waiting On My Angel’.
The venue was expanded from last year, incorporating a section of the building behind the main room that included a long corridor, an extra bar and more toilets, which made a big difference. The heat was acute and soon my back was a river. There was one A-C unit in the dancefloor room that would give you the fantasy of cool air every time you walked past. People would occasionally try to open the large windows looking onto the alleyway, but since they opened inwards they became large, transparent barriers jutting into the space, so this strategy only really worked later when things thinned out. The crowd seemed uniformly friendly.
PDA is ostensibly an italo party, or at least that’s the impression they give from their mixes. Check this recording of founders Jonah and Tam Tam closing the party earlier this year: aside from a handful of forays into acid or classic disco, it’s sparkly 1983 vibes all the way. But I knew that I didn’t want to just play italo, and the lineup also had both Jaye Ward and AAGUILAA, neither known for sticking to just one lane. Last year I had heard Michael mix in some more curveballs from the 90s, even connecting the dots with acid techno at one point. I asked myself: can’t anything be italo if it hits the right mood? I packed my bag — 14 records and a rekordbox playlist of 66 tracks — with exactly that idea in mind. It was also important to me to avoid something I often notice with this kind of music, a tendency towards programmatic mixing that, at best, can be an unobtrusive yet predictable means of getting from one densely colourful tune into another but, when it goes wrong, can lead to embarrassingly tone-deaf collisions (many of the transitions in Cormac’s RA mix, for example). To get hifalutin for a moment, disco music requires musical sensitivity to mix right and I wanted to apply that sensitivity to other kinds of music too, thus making them sound like (italo) disco.
Gala finished her set with ‘Dancing In The Dark’ by Mike Mareen and the dancefloor was popping, so obviously I was in a great mood when I went on. The remarkably powerful booth fan certainly helped too. Over the course of two hours I played 13 out of the 14 records I’d brought: the only one I didn’t play was Midi Mechanixx’s ‘Robohop’ because when I put it on the turntable I discovered it was so warped that, even with the giant Mitsubishi-shaped record weight thoughtfully provided by PDA, it was too risky to cue it. (And no I sadly do not have $250 lying around to buy a new copy.) My rekordbox playlist was ordered by BPM, which is what I do when I run out of time to pack a proper ‘digital bag’, going from Lerosa’s ‘Le Stelle’ (a sedate 117bpm) to the beats of Kelly Page’s ‘A Man Like That’ (150bpm, hello WIDE function).
I opened with Patrick Adams’ ‘Jack In The Bush’, the Underwater mix, which I thought elegantly set out my stall: one of the great disco producers remaking his own 1978 classic in a new style that in 1987 was still relatively fresh, complete with jacking drums, freestyle cut-up vocals, psychedelic water effects and a fanfare that misses two beats to complete every long phrase. ‘Pulse’ by Beat Me-Ka-Nik aka Rodney Bakerr, from the year after, is one of the records I’ve played the most over the years because it is ostensibly a Chicago house record, yet the fuzzy bassline and ricocheting snares and congas come straight out of the Nitzer Ebb playbook. Aka-Sol gave me a copy of their Ta Kish Kan EP as a gift when I was in NYC earlier this year and I’ve been rinsing it since. You’d think the pick for PDA would be ‘No Más’, and indeed I did think I might play that one, but in the event I played the title track. With its huge broken beat, squalling guitar/sirens and post-punk backing vocals it could be a leftfield choice for the PDA vibe, but the fat snare that runs through the whole track is actually pure italo and the wacky sirens — which get ever more daring towards the final section — drove the crowd wild. When you think about it, this track is basically a contemporary take on the B-section from Visage’s ‘Pleasure Boys (Dance Mix)’ from 1982, itself an example of proto-electro in synth pop, and that was the whole point of playing it.
I mixed that into another staple of mine, the Miami bass tune ‘Dirty Dancin Wit Wolves’ from 1991 (the Wolf Mix with all the wolves on it), and mixed that into Kruton’s ‘Knight Lore’ from 2015. This was getting to be really fun. The rest of the two hours followed the same vibe: trying to join the dots between disparate eras but with sounds or moods that maintained a consistent vibe. The biggest reactions from the crowd were when I played Smith N Hack’s remix of ‘Moving Like A Train’ (you will be hearing this a lot this summer, sorry) into Gaz’s disco take on ‘The Good, The Bad And The Ugly’, and towards the end when I mixed Sole Tech’s ‘Techbeat Comin’ into Centerfold’s ‘Dictator’ (still the single greatest video on the internet, not sorry). I got in a bona fide hi nrg moment with Jessica Williams’ ‘Queen Of Fools’ and another out-of-time dance hybrid moment with Chris & Cosey’s remix of Erasure’s cover of ‘S.O.S.’.
It was during the latter that I noticed there was one person standing at the front looking 100% unimpressed. I can’t remember if she had her arms crossed but she might as well have. Everyone else was throwing shapes and singing along, yet there she was, her face impassive. It became my task to see if I could move her, so I tried Patrick Cowley’s ‘Tech-No-Logical World’ — probably the closest I got to genuine italo all night — followed by my current LCD Soundsystem pick ‘Too Much Love’. Who could resist that? Yet if anything her look became even more disdainful. What could I do? There were only 15 minutes left before I handed over to Richii (subbing in for an unwell Jaye Ward). It took me a moment to realise this obsession was threatening to overshadow the end of my set. I said to myself “fuck it” and played an epic closer: Prins Thomas’s remix of Ethimm’s ‘Live Large’, an authentic Sofie K banger. If the naysayer didn’t like it, she’d have to suffer through it for 10 minutes, so there. (I wouldn’t usually list vindictiveness among my DJ traits but here we are.) I think Richii was a bit surprised when I said that I was done so far in advance of the hour, but it meant I could breathe a bit, pack up my stuff, soak in the crowd vibes (minus that one person) and realise I’d done a pretty good job of what I’d set out to do. Two hours of music, descending from a 127bpm start to a 121bpm finish, and not a single 100% italo disco tune in sight.
The moment I finished my set one of the people in the front row gestured over the decks and asked: “Do you want some speed?” Me being me, instead of accepting graciously, said: “Oh I have some already”. Benny aka DJ Subaru, who was to one side of the booth, joked: “Being offered speed at the end of your set: HIT.” I added to that: “Inexplicably turning it down: MISS.” And in that spirit, here are some Hits and Misses from the rest of the party!
HIT: Richii playing gnarly driving sleazy tunes that made me think of Vitalic, among others.
HIT: Richii playing my edit of ‘Wild’, which makes two years on a trot that it’s had an airing at CSD PDA. (Incidentally, this release has now raised 1000 EUR for Gladt.)
HIT: Richii finishing her set with DJ City’s ‘I Need’, giving me an opportunity to judge whether I liked it more in a party context than when listening at home.
MISS: Trying to sing along to the chorus of ‘I Need’ but failing because the ‘Toca’s Miracle’ lyrics are off-phrase, something I simply can’t get past. I’m sorry Johan.
HIT: The soundsystem in Ziegrastrasse, which looks like it’s been cobbled together from a random assortment of components and flight cases, but actually bangs.
MISS: The ‘green room’ at Ziegrastrasse, which is essentially a storage-cupboard-slash-fog-machine-graveyard with nowhere to sit down and a toilet with a see-through door. I mean, I’m not ungrateful, it was nice to have a relatively quiet space to decompress after my set. But a chair wouldn’t go amiss.
HIT: My friends Stijn and Can appearing out of nowhere around 6am, after Stijn had played at Katerblau. Cue much chinwagging.
MISS: Said chinwagging resulting in missing a lot of the music. A story as old as time.
HIT: Manu aka AAGUILAA out-lateral-thinking me by playing Quadrant’s ‘Infinition’ and making it sound like italo, at least to my somewhat addled 7am brain. He also played LFO’s ‘LFO’, taking me back to the Luke Vibert beach set at Waking Life (here).
HIT: Discovering that I am thumb twins with Shay.
HIT: Convincing myself that Juan Ramos, who still hadn’t arrived for his 8am set, and who I’ve only ever seen in photographs, was going to be shorter than Shay, who is 5ft on a good day.
MISS: Juan Ramos being decidedly over 5ft in height.
HIT: This exchange I had with Stijn about 45 minutes into Juan’s set:
Stijn: In what category could you place this music?
Me: It’s like it’s on the very edge of tribal, but not tribal. It has plausible deniability.
[Juan mixes into the next tune]
Me: OK, we can’t deny it any longer. It’s tribal.
MISS: Running out of gas at 9am, meaning I missed the now staple three-hour closing set from Jonah and Tam Tam. In a video on Instagram you can hear them playing ‘Macarthur Park’.
MISS: Everything I own, from my backpack to my bum bag to my water bottle, reeking of smoke when I got home. That’s underground baby!
HIT: Damn that was a good party.