How about this for a fine aesthetic union? A few years back, The Black Dog went over to the Berghain to play a live set of their own material. It was recorded, and they’ve kindly allowed us to upload it onto our soundcloud to put a spot of oily techno vim into your Friday afternoon. Recorded in October 2011 when The Black Dog played alongside Xhin and Surgeon, you can feel the great depth of their sound penetrating every corner of that cavernous space. We dropped The Black Dog a line to ask about the night, their experience of Berghain… and to ask whether there could be a comparable venue in Sheffield. Here are there words:
The Black Dog: "We’d been booked to play with Xhin and Surgeon, so we knew it would be a great night of full-on spectrum techno. We actually went to Berghain in the day to fine tune our set and to hear our new tracks on their system, the sound guy helped us tune up certain parts of the tracks so they’d sound better on the system. We just practiced until it was time to open as we knew it would be another six months before we had a chance to spend hours playing on a system like that.
"Berghain is always good for us, we never had a bad reception there and even when we’ve tried new things out the crowd have followed us, which is a beautiful thing. The venue has such a good crew, sound system and knowledgable crowd that you couldn’t ask for more really.
"We love Berghain because of the scale and the brutal design, it’s very Sheffield and feels like home to us but we also love lot of other places as well, we celebrate difference. It does have the same aesthetic as many of the buildings in Sheffield, we played at Park Hill flats recently with Richard H Kirk and Sandwell District, that definitely had the "Berghain" vibe! The reason ours remain empty is it’s too difficult to start something here, Bergahin may be having problems with GEMA but we bet that’s way easier than dealing with our council and police force.
"If there were a Berghain in Sheffield, what building would it be in? It have to be pure meta, it couldn’t exist here and if it did, it would be quickly turned into Gatecrasher 2 for economical reasons. Sheffield works in a very different way, you have to keep things under 300 here or it just goes tits up. You risk pulling the wrong crowd in or being compromised by demands of money. When that happens it messes with the creative vision. It’s really a problem though, it’s something we love about the place, things are difficult here for the right reasons."
The Black Dog play Dystopia at the Rhythm Factory, London tomorrow night, August 18th. Andy Stott and Phase also on the bill, more information at Resident Advisor.
