What compels cerebral heads to seek the meta in the physical, the sweaty, shamanistic rites of dance music? Consult the bookshelves for evidence if not answers: writers such as Simon Reynolds, architect of the 1997 techno bible Energy Flash, or Kodwo Eshun, specialist in onomatopoeic dispatches from the frontiers of sonic fiction.
Move to the general section and you’ll clock the influence of acid house on Chemical Generation writers such as Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Laura Hird. Even now, on any given night in a Kreuzberg club, you might stumble into a Geoff Dyer or a Rob Doyle or a Roisin Kiberd. Or Donegal boy Liam Cagney.
[ In Berlin I became a sober Sunday morning clubber. In time I figured out whyOpens in new window ]
Berghain Nights is a love letter to the city that never sleeps; Berlin as a century-long, after-hours interzone. All blow-ins are aliens, but Cagney comes at Kreuzberg from a rural angle. Born and reared between bog and beach, bullied and uneasy in his skin, he was a lonely planet boy until Aphex Twin provided him with the epiphanic moment, a revelatory vision of “seaside psychedelia”. His elder siblings followed The Prodigy on tour like their 1970s predecessors trailed after Rory and Horslips; 1990s cyber-evangelists such as Orbital and Future Sound of London indoctrinated him with techno-utopian idealism. Rewatching the 1994 Channel 4 documentary Rave New World, he observes:
“… seen now it’s not simply poignant but devastating. For as night falls, and as the cheers rise around a towering neon effigy tumbling in flames, you realise that this utopian vision is one of the first small iterations of Burning Man… Watched from the vantage point of our twenty-first-century surveillance society, where the techno utopians have been utterly usurped by dystopian Big Tech capitalists, who have conquered and appropriated everything in our private lives and crushed the countercultural spirit – well, it’s hard not to feel mournful."
Berghain Nights by Liam Cagney: A fascinating descent into the underworld of Berlin
Elmore Leonard: the Dickens of Detroit who captured the downside of the American dream
Femonomics by Corinne Low: What does marriage do for women? The answer here is damning
Jung Chang: ‘People risk their lives to come to the West. Nobody tries to go to China’
The author takes refuge from Anthropocene anxieties by locating himself in the always-forever-now of the dance floor. Here, in the writing, he takes great stylistic risks, not just unapologetic invocations of Novalis and Baudelaire, of Shklovsky’s Defamiliarization and John Berger’s landscape theories, but scenes of anthropomorphic ecstasy in which he visualises himself transformed by the music into avian or insectoid form.
It works not because he’s writing from pharmacological or even imaginative fancy, but autistic altered reality. Tranced out by sonic bleeps and repetitive beats, he undergoes a sense of “unbecoming”, of dissolving into sound, surrounded by tribal transgender angels, self-identified deviants, beautiful aliens. He rejects easy, middle-class, apocalyptic rhetoric and dares to dream in colour, looking past the end of history into nature, finding meaning amid all the ruinenlust.
“Techno is traditionally associated with dystopian urban environments and ruins. But in the music of some contemporary techno artists – like that of Rrose, or of Polygonia on her EPs such as Living Patterns, and on the two artists’ collaborative album Dermatology – the vision is of abundant nature and rich ecology. I thought of this techno as biomorphic techno. [It] reminds us of our connection to the natural world. This makes it an ideal medium to remind ourselves that every techno city, no matter how seductively futuristic, is ultimately destined to collapse and give way to a jungle."
Ballard would be proud. Cagney is transfixed not by future shock but “past shock”, identifying as a time-travelling extraterrestrial stranded in the present. In this existential castaway state, biomorphs, post-humanists and neurodivergents sing the same blues: I ain’t got no home in this world any more; I’ll never get out of this world alive; ET phone home.
Walking the muddy paths of Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain) in Grunewald, a vast artificial mound built from WW2 debris, he notes: “ ... smithereens at times appeared underfoot of tiles from decades-old domestic interiors, the ruined everyday of those who underwent the Third Reich’s apocalypse. Rising impassive on top of Teufelsberg were three white domes, one large orb above the other two. They had an unreal presence, like the abandoned set of some 1970s sci-fi film, but these three white domes emerging from the forest were, in fact, the ruins of a cold war-era US listening station.”
Berghain Nights is a trip in every sense. It begins with a map of early electronic root systems, the ley lines that connect north-of-England electro groups to Munich, Frankfurt and Detroit, then detours through the visual artists, door-holders, DJs and dancers that make up this community of others: characters like Viron Erol Vert, clubs like Tresor and Snax, explorations of positive sex dens and kink clubs, the politics of dandyism and decadence, the philosophies of techno visionaries like Planetary Assault Systems, or Function’s Philip K Dick-like voyages into tech-gnosis prophesy.
[ An Irishman in Berlin: ‘For Germans, everything is forbidden unless it allowed’Opens in new window ]
Berghain Nights reminds us that in times of ugly hegemony, beautiful subcultures thrive in the shadows. It’s a fascinating descent into psychic and physical underworld, and Liam Cagney is a worthy Virgil. This is a visionary book.
Peter Murphy is the author of the novels John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River (Faber & Faber). His latest release is the album and prose-poem Ghost Voltage (Drunk Jack Press).
