The Fuckparade 07: Berlin’s Mobile Hardcore Carnival

August 18 2007, I made the 10th anniversary of Berlin’s Fuckparade, self-described as “an international political network of sub-, club-, and youth cultures”. From its kick-off on Karl-Marx-Allee (formerly Stalin Allee and scene of the 1953 Uprising) I landed amidst a sensational protestival rolling its way through the district of Friedrichshain, formerly in the east and once separated from Kreuzberg by the Berlin Wall. Following reunification, Friedrichshain would become a creative hub for young artists and musicians attracted to the area’s low rent accommodation, squats and cultural centres. Each featuring its own sound system, DJ line-up and speakers positioned to the rear, about a dozen audio floats sounded out predominantly Gabba and other hardcore styles, amid Jungle/DnB, Techno, House, Electro, live bands and MCs. Throughout the afternoon and into the early evening, the motley cavalcade saw up to 5,000 tailgaters revelling in the exhaust of these crawling breakneck rhythm machines. Under heavy police presence and surveillance, the parade toured significant sites in the local alternative milieu, terminating finally at the former railway maintenance yard, the Reichsbahn Ausbesserungs Werk Franz Stenzer, now the RAW Tempel, a large non-profit alternative community arts organisation.


Protestival: Carnivals of Resistance

With the model provided by Reclaim the Streets and, later, the carnivals Against Capitalism and For Global Justice associated with the alter-globalization, peace and climate change movements, the protestival had come of age. A term coined by Sydney radical technician and IJ (idea jockey), “protestival” refers to an event combining party and protest, carnival and campaign, pleasure and militancy. Among artivists everywhere, and especially in the wake of legislation criminalizing electronic dance music cultures (e.g the UK’s Criminal Justice Act 1994 and The US “Rave Act” 2003), there would be more at stake in dancing, to a range of music, than simply the enjoyment of pleasure – if pleasure was indeed ever that simple. Throughout the 1990s, dancing became more than a recreational pursuit, and given the laws ranged against dance – especially in the open air - dancing outside would become a political performance. Disembarking from nocturnal clubs, in the mid-1990s UK ravers danced into the daylight, reclaiming the streets from routines of transit and capital; dancing for a multitude of causes: from the right to dance to ecological and humanitarian issues (see this article at MC Reviews: Global Protestival).

Around the same time (1995) the NachtTanzDemo (or “Night Dance Demo”) emerged in Frankfurt. Involving several sound systems, the first street occupation protested tight regulations and permit requirements restricting alternative club and dance culture in the city. Organised by an alliance of cultural and political projects, KulturOffensive (including alternative party crews like Club Kiew and Dionysos, the Alice-Project and Connecta, along with antifascist youth-organizations and leftwing students) and having survived brutal efforts by the state to suppress it, the now popular annual NachtTanzDemo attracts multiple causes including homelessness and squatters rights (see Wolfgang Sterneck, “Islands: Techno, Tribes and Politics”).

While this event catalyzed the fusion of party and politics in Frankfurt, German dance-activism has become enshrined in the Fuckparade. Originating in 1997 (when it was called The Hate Parade) as a small protest challenging the abuse of the right for demonstration and free speech by the organisers of Berlin’s Love Parade (now held outside Berlin and sponsored by a brewery and a chain of fitness centers) and other commercial events whose dance music aesthetics are perceived to exemplify an expressive formula dismissed as hedonistic and orgiastic, by its tenth year, the Fuckparade had become a mobile hardcore carnival of resistance: a hardparade. In its mobile and performative Fuck You!, the Fuckparade had made transit from a reactionary anti-Love Parade event to one mobilizing proactive causes such as free and autonomous spaces. Yet, as a carnival of resistance, there is no singular message conveyed by participants who, in the tradition of recent protestivals, converge to resist multiple causes; who raise their middle fingers to a multitude of conditions, and who dance in different locations: including the numerous after parties that have grown around the annual event featuring line-ups on multiple stages: from EBM, Dark Electro, Industrial, Powernoise at the RAW Tempel’s Schlagstrom Festival, to the Speedcore-dominated Fuckparade Afterhour, to a broad spectrum at the Internationales Subkulturefest, to minimal and electro at the c-base Space Station on the River Spree.

Fuck Who? Fuck You! The Parade of Terror

In many cases, paraders communicate a “fuck you!” attitude because they can, because it feels good to do so. A sea of defiant gestures comprise a negative identification: i.e. that “we are absolutely not soft”. Observing these interventions I was reminded of Monty Python’s “Knights Who Say Ni”, only here it was the “Rebels Who Say Fuck”: or even “fuck you, you fucking fuck”.


















There is an aesthetics of resistance inhabited by the rebel who, through gestures, sonics and t-shirt semiotica, finds pleasure in, and derives identity from, breaking laws and moral codes, from being an outlaw. Here “law” might mean legal statutes, codes of conduct and rules of propriety: e.g. the spitting, sneering, finger raising, outlandish piercing, noise and sexualised displays of punk. Deviant cool – its all on display at the Fuckparade. But here attitude accelerates with the bpm. In his Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige held punks as guerrilla semioticians, style terrorists, whose unruly, inscrutable and perhaps unpredictable rule breaking behaviour (in dress, piercings, language and gesture) amounted to their challenge to “mainstream society”. It follows that a guerrilla sensibility has evolved within hardcore scenes, where “Terrorcore” has emerged as an appealing aesthetic. There is little doubt that anti-terror legislation has fed this appeal, enhancing subcultural potency, rendering that which was hard harder, terrifying even more terrible. Speaking from the back of a sound truck at the beginning of the parade, Trauma XP, one of the event's organizers and DJ of hardcore material celebrating “an average speed of about 250-300 bpm”, weighed the prospect of his hardcore outfit Bembelterror (a label under which he may eventually seek to distribute), along with numerous hardcore acts and tracks using the word “terror” on “a metaphorical and self-ironic level”, becoming subject to prohibitions in the UK (and potentially elsewhere), given that a clause in the UK Terrorism Act 2006 made the extremely spurious act of “glorification of terrorism” an offence. If you were trading in subcultural capital, you’d be moving your options to Trauma XP.

Terror-chic is most curious given the global War on Terror and, in this case, efforts by the German government under Paragraph 129a of the Criminal Code. Pertaining to membership in a “terrorist organisation”, introduced in the 1970s in response to the activities of the Red Army Faction, and typically used to gather information and intimidate activists, Paragraph 129a was used following the June G8 protests in Rostock to arrest activists suspected (i.e. detained without sufficient evidence) of being members of Militante Gruppe (MG - targeted by the state as a “terrorist” organisation suspected of carrying out multiple arson attacks in Berlin since 2001). Among those detained was Andrej Holm, a sociologist from the Institute for Social Research at Berlin's Humboldt University who specialises in urban gentrification and tenants’ rights, and who has apparently published material using language federal police (in their farcical public case against Holm) claim can be found in MG texts, and is believed to have “conspired” with members of MG suspected of carrying out arson attacks on unmanned police vehicles (in meetings in which police have stressed that Holm left his mobile phone at home!). This threat to intellectual freedom has triggered condemnation from international academic associations, and domestic demonstrations under the slogan: “we are all 129a” or “we are all terrorists now”. Why? According to one flyer: you may be a suspected terrorist under this law if you are German, have access to a library, and can read and write.








In this climate, Terrorcore and associated hardcore electronica has been handed outlaw credibility as demonstrated, for example, on popular “Terror Worldwide (Kid Tested / Mother Approved)” and “Terror for Fun and Profit” hoodies, “Oldskool Terror” t-shirts and countless slogans involving the word “terror” printed on clothing and banners. But its not all semiotics, for the theme for this year's Fuckparade was “Terrornetzwerk §129a” implying that, given recent events, Germans are all terrorists now.



This might suit surf-riders of the digital apocalypse grinding their teeth and wild-styling a shock-producing hardcore aesthetic. But that which is “hard” may incorporate more than sonic and sartorial statements on the edge of style, like mobilisations in support of political actions and social movements. Anarcho-punk is relevant here. Seeking distance from scenes, which, while cloaked in noise and rebellion, were considered narcissistic and acquiescent in practice, UK anarcho-punk (which was a significant wellspring for the Reclaim the Streets movement) had adopted a form of hardcore which sought to merge the party with the political, a fusion traced to sixties DiY.

“You Are Now Leaving the Capitalist Sector”

Like RTS, the NachtTanzDemo and antecedents, the Fuckparade has become a vehicle for multiple causes: in particular the defence of autonomous spaces and cultural projects threatened by gentrification and unlawful police interventions. This year, the parade’s route took in several squats and cultural centres threatened either through eviction or rent increases under the plans of developers Media Spree who seek to transform the banks of the River Spree from the Jannowitzbrücke bridge to the Elsenbrücke bridge into "Berlin's future media and services quarter" - a transition underway with MTV Central Europe just along the river. Among those sites threatened with demolition and replacement by an Urban Entertainment Center, O2-World and luxury flats, are Köpi 137 (the long running left autonomous space outside which the parade halted to reflect on the red and black flag waved from the high roof, with a sign on its fortified gate reading “You Are Now Leaving the Capitalist Sector”), Bar 25, the Eisfabrik (Ice Factory) and the 12 year old Space Station in Mitte run by the c-base cooperative and referred to as a cultural centre for Berlin’s “off culture”. The parade's huge police escort led it to a prearranged halt outside the RAW Tempel in Revaler St which saw fast breaks ricocheting from its high tagged brick walls until 9:30 pm, and potted plants raining down from the first floor balcony of an apartment building. Curiously it was uncertain whether this guy was outraged or just being outrageous, an uncertainty echoing the parade’s essential ambivalence, and indicating why the state feels it necessary to have a small army of heavily equipped police around to monitor and control its spatial and temporal boundaries.

As it tours sites of interest within the city’s alternative milieu, the Fuckparade is a mobile anarcho-bazaar seeking support for multiple causes (e.g. queer rights, squatters rights, drug awareness). For instance, I was handed a card with “Stasi 2.0” printed beneath a stencilled image of Minister for the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, part of a campaign attacking Schäuble’s desires for increased surveillance measures, and moreover, the government’s plans to pursue EU Directive 2006/24/EG compelling EU states to retain data on citizens. The prospect of the German government profiling its citizens’ movements, contacts and personal relationships through recording and storing email and phone communications records over a period of six months and made accessible to police, public prosecutors, secret services and foreign states (already in practice in the UK and the US) is reminiscent, for many, of the secret policing tactics of the Stasi.

The Stasi 2.0 t-shirt.

Alice/Connecta Project

I arrived at the Fuckparade with the Alice-Project, a grass roots drug awareness group from Frankfurt, which incorporates Connecta, a project encouraging free cultural and educational events. With a side-banner reading “Lebst Du schon oder kaufst Du noch? Freiräume entwickeln!” (“Are you living yet or still buying? Develop free spaces!”), the first part of which is a subversion of the Ikea slogan: "Lebst Du noch oder wohnst Du schon?" ("Are you alive yet, or just living?"), the brightly painted Alice van joined the parade. I had hitched a ride with the delightful Pippi Longstocking-inspired Alice volunteer Susanne Riemann from Sonica in Italy and the Waldfrieden Wonderland Festival (Alice in Wonderland – that’s another story). Alice is the brainchild of Wolfgang Sterneck, a tireless project coordinator, advocate of free cultural spaces, and prolific author of books on German counter culture. A forerunner in efforts to combine style and politics, or, as he would have it “rhythm and change,” Sterneck has been heavily involved in numerous projects in Germany including the Cybertribe Festival and Frankfurt’s Gathering of the Tribes, the name for which was encouraged by his participation in a networking event with the same name in California in 2001 (and that event, in turn, takes its name from the momentous Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In held in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, on January 12 1967).

Back on the streets of Friedrichshain, the diversity of registers was ultimately echoed in the music. With its famous 1.3 km muralised freedom commemorating section of the Berlin Wall called the “East Side Gallery”, on Mühlenstraße I caught distinctively '80s new wave emissions escaping from one truck, sounds competing with, and drowned out by, ensuing Techno and Speedcore dedicated systems. At one critical juncture along Mühlenstraße, as gesticulating crowds shifted through creeping sweet spots and van-loads of riot police raced in from side-streets to secure a service station back down the road, a DJ on the lead float - a covered cart pulled by a paint-tagged tractor - played Spiral Tribe’s “Forward the Revolution”.

Many thanks to Susanne Riemann who took some of the photos here.

Sonica 2007: Mountains, Trees and Disposable Batteries

Sonica 2007: the third installment of the annual Italian psytrance festival. Held in mountain pine woodland in Liguria between La Spezia and Genoa 1000 metres above sea level close to the famed Cinque Terre National Park, this was a truly remarkable location with spectacular views of the Vara Valley. Here, when wheeling one’s head to the heavens from the Main Stage, you copped a face full of sky. The event featured one of the better line-ups of the European summer season: with standout performances from a range of artists including the masterful Frank E from Koxbox, the haunting melody-lines of Silicon Sound’s puppet master Johannes Regnier, along with James Munro and the sensational Elfi pizza collective. Perhaps 5000 mostly Italians turned out for this sky-high romper stomper not far from the Riviera. As Didac, a Spanish Obelix t-shirt wearing and Getafix drinking camp-mate, confirmed: “these Romans are crazy!”




Upgrade to the Longer Now

But wait, is that a Bouncy Castle right there in the middle of the festival? No, its Club Duracell. Officially known as the Duracell Powerhouse (and on its European “Power Up” tour), this is an air-inflated tent shaped like a long-life Duracell battery pitched mid-festival. With a sound system, smoke machine and dance club atmosphere inside, the Battery featured a full line-up of DJs whose set-times were listed in the Sonica booklet alongside the artists performing on the Main and Alternative stages.


Enticing young people all over Europe with the prospect of swapping their “tired batteries” for “shiny new Duracell Ultra M3s”, hustling brand loyalty and reinforcing a perma-cycle of disposability, Duracell offer festival participants a “free battery exchange.” I’m not sure what was more inflated: the tent or Sonica’s claims to be “in regard of the environment and for the use of renewable energies”.

The line comes from the promotional literature for this “Celebrating Nature” edition of the festival. Sonica appeared to have responded to past criticisms and the special requirements of the venue with their solar powered shower and lighting, some apparent investment in a “carbon sink” re-forestation program in Costa Rica, separate garbage bags for recyclable waste and cigarette butt containers, and efforts by green t-shirt wearing “eco-team” volunteers to “reduce the negative impact of human activity on the ecosystem.” But with the Duracell Powerhouse “partying into the early hours, making the music last longer, much longer” (from it’s website), is this appropriation of environmental virtue – now commonly practiced by businesses globally as “greenwashing” - justified? Can we take any of this stuff seriously?

What are the costs of making now last longer? Self-identifying as the “leading brand of batteries globally”, Duracell are among the chief manufacturers of (non-rechargeable and non-recyclable) alkaline batteries, classified as hazardous waste (potentially leaking harmful potassium hydroxide) in many parts of the world. They are a transnational corporation promoting lifestyle and energy usage practices that are inherently unsustainable, albeit “longer lasting”. With its unsustainable promise of sustainability, Duracell leaves a massive footprint given that the manufacture and use of its primary product is tied to non-renewable energy consumption, disposability and pollution. So what are we make of this bloated icon of disposability powering up and broadsiding Sonica's “neo-tribal” Duende Village, an arena for presentations, workshops and films promoting an “eco-sustainable future”? According to its initiators, Duende is “a mysterious and indescribable force, a creative fire similar to the vital lymph that courses through the roots of human sensibility, feeding the collective imagination with dreams of utopia and a better world.” Dreaming about utopia and a better world while ecologically unsound agents of the old world snore gruffly down the back of your neck requires a set of quality moulded earplugs; not to mention a strong disposition to endure this chicanery.

Then there's the nearby Healing area featuring shiatsu, ayurvedic massage, crystal healing, reiki and aura imaging (with a sweatlodge out the back). Out the front, squaring-off upon some kind of karmic battleground, a Javanese-style stone meditating Buddha’s head faced down the swollen copper-top. And what should we infer from signs hanging along a wooded path to the Main Stage presumably painted by those working for Sonica: “Leave no Trace” and “Another World is Possible”? Apparently it amounts to outrageous hypocrisy and probably goes someway towards explaining why I felt cheated, powerless, deflated, each time I wandered past the Duracell Sweatlodge, an exasperation common among many participants I met.

In a period which has seen the flourishing of rechargeable alternatives in a range of devices from digital media players to palm top computers and cell phones, and given the emergence of self-powered (i.e. shakelights, dynamos, solar powered) flashlights, radios etc (Duracell now also market their own cranklights), it appears that a light has cranked on inside Duracell’s advertising and promotions brainstrust undoubtedly responding to the mounting danger of obsolescence… Ten years from now this picture might appear more ludicrous than it does even now:



Energy Sacrifice & The Party


Festivals of varying stripes offer an intriguing lens on consumer practices (and profit making), as they also provide witness to the necessity for profitless or directionless consumption. As Georges Bataille (following the excellent work of Frank Gauthier in the collection Rave Culture and Religion) discussed in relation to sacrifice:

"The meaning of this profound freedom is given in destruction, whose essence is to consume profitlessly whatever might remain in the progression of useful works. Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates … This useless consumption is what suits me, once my concern for the morrow is removed. And if I thus consume immoderately, I reveal to my fellow beings that which I am intimately: Consumption is the way in which separate beings communicate. Everything shows through, everything is open and infinite between those who consume intensely.”

As any follower of Bataille might inform us, dance parties are natural sites of excess, for an experientially intense consumption of excess “energy”, the orchestration and performance of wild abandon, for the burning up in potlatch-like proportions that which had been translated as society’s “accursed share”. As a fellow Australian I met on the edge of the Main Floor holding a plastic bottle containing a mixture of absinthe and something unknown encouraged me: “go ahead and have yourself a party”. What are the implications for preventing or suppressing such intensive moments of mass consumption as the all-night trance festival or any of its equivalents, from subcultural revelries to more accepted social wingdings rippling across contemporary cultures participants in which periodically rally to spend themselves in sometimes outrageous derangements? What is the consequence of conserving such energies, of preventing the expression of desires for radical otherness, of merging with the Other, and thus the sacred, in ecstatic moments when one is literally outside of one’s Self in the presence of others?

In their freakish extremes, their voguish edgework and their outlandish vibe, it is perhaps these habitués of the psytrance festival and events similar who embody an answer. Unravelling their Selves amid passionate gesticulations illuminated by turbulent fire staffs, glow poi and an array of advanced lighting, and with the aid of a growing platter of psychoactive chemicals and “shamanic” herbs; modifying their bodies in simple or baroque tattoo designs evoking mystery, nature and gothic struggles, combating entropy with lobe scalpelling, staplings, dermal anchors and flesh pockets; becoming locked in nocturnal têt'à têtes with punishing Kindzadza-style dark-psy or horrortrance at 165+bpm, surfing the devil’s frequency down the front of the stacks; sonic riders seeking the perfect rave, addicted to vertigo, driven to madness. These are contexts for epic derailments of the mind, and violent interventions upon the body, which sometimes, given most unfortunate circumstances, might even be fatal: a local man died of an alleged overdose of atropine cut cocaine at Sonica 07. But in a Bataillian general economy, without these, and less extreme states of embodiment and out-of-body-ment, there might never be community, but instead, in the extreme, the state controlled sacrificial catastrophe of perma-war. In this logic, the wider implications for the repression, domestication and privatisation of Carnival and ekstasis in the contemporary United States, as for example recently documented by Barbara Ehrenreich in her Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (a good idea though questionable scholarship), are considerable, disastrous even.

Since these events are periodic, often seasonal, we might call psytrance festivals or any of their equivalents within electronic dance music culture, moments through which human communities are recharged; investments in renewable culture and identity, made renewable through collective acts of becoming “wasted”, “losing it”, getting “trashed”, going “out there”; sacrificial contexts through which the organic need for luxury have evolved. In this way, the non-productive expenditure of one’s self through lavish self-abandonment and limit-pushing ventures is productive, even if only of equilibrium and peace. But this is not the romanticised “collective effervescence” made famous through Emile Durkheim’s armchair anthropology - which now appears to be a term better approximating the sound caused as two or more cans of Fanta are cracked open - but a theory of excess which recognises the value of waste, of transgression, sacrifice, advanced munterment: the apocalypse of subjectivity. Though this is not to suggest that these aren’t intimately related to questions of revitalisation or redress in any observations of the sacred margins: their orgiastic convulsions, their mystical potency. From the perspective of deckchair or beanbag anthropology, if the aroma of a five-day dance floor adds anything to this discussion, perhaps “collective putrescence” might be a more apt description.

From the perspective of most contributions to the collection on Australian techno countercultures, FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor (downloaded from that link @ Undergrowth), the “energy” gifted in the form of resources, art, skills and time, to produce the free dance party “doof”, along with the exhaustive expenditure of energy on the dance floor, amounts to festal sacrifice essential for the reproduction of variant alternative techno-tribes. This gifting (i.e. voluntary labour, donated equipment, skillsharing, communal meals etc) to reproduce the party space operates within an alternative economy associated with a co-operative sensibility and whose countercultural ethos is integral to the visionary culture within which psytrance has evolved. Crucially these music and dance cultures demonstrate commitments to the celebration and defence of nature: a desire to reconcile with and protect the natural world considered sacred and enchanting. But FreeNRG is several removes from Sonica whose patrons demand optimised modes of luxury and expenditure and whose organisers operate without the slightest hint of embarrassment otherwise generated by their own duplicity.

The celebration of abandonment and energy consumption, as any decent festal moment might be defined, appears to have been taken literally by Sonica, whose operators accepted sponsorship and on-site marketing from a corporation whose product competes with claims towards "celebrating nature." And thus competes with the countercultural legacy of psytrance, its culture and festivals, the social aesthetic of which traditionally seeks freedom, not without contradiction, from prevailing practices of rapacious materialism laying waste to the planet. This alternative vibe is under perennial strain as it struggles to assert an identity against that which it seeks freedom from (i.e. corporate greed, ecological destruction, prejudice). And this negative aesthetic is in dispute with the directionless opening towards oblivion otherwise prevailing, the erotic impulse for discontinuity, discharge, bliss, which cares little for what happens after the orgy.

While beat freaks surrender to the pounding rhythms predominating, they are, at the same time, resistant to the consensus trance, sceptical of official culture, committed to modes of consumer opposition: an acute ecstatic/activist paradox defining identity. Given preoccupations with ecological and humanitarian crises downstream from radical forebears and “tomorrow people”, many psytrance habitués demonstrate a mounting apprehension for what transpires “on the morrow”, their disenchantment with conditions derivative of over-consumption conflicting with the desire for sacrificial consumption in the general economic logic of Bataille; their party and lifestyle also the vehicle, through drama, pedagogy and technique, for an alternative world.

Alternative lifestyle and consumer practices – including the increased popularity of self-powered flashlights - render these events a specifically resistant register. Which begs one to ask: What’s cranking in Italy?

Thanks to Susanne Riemann for some photos used here.