Berlin nightlife is under threat and the city has never been more insecure about its ‘cool’
Berlin is dark. Perhaps it’s the strange barometric pressure of this city built on swampland, the sparsity of its urban street lighting or the equally oppressive weight of its modern history, but the city’s cultural milieu often delights in a kind of chic horror. As a style this befits a city that continually draws in an international cohort of misfit artists and musicians who grew up listening to Burzum, tracing over H.R. Giger drawings or furtively reading Dennis Cooper on the school bus home.
This aesthetic of chic horror, of ambient posthuman malaise, is perhaps most evident in Berlin’s still unique (recently UNESCO-decorated) music scene. Berlin Atonal, a festival established in 1982, which since its revival in 2013 has taken place in the ‘Kraftwerk’ complex (a gargantuan former power plant that also houses the Tresor, OHM and Globus clubs), is an event that consecrates this specific mise-en-scène. In recent years, Atonal has been venturing out beyond music and sound arts to incorporate interdisciplinary art and film programming, with this year marking its debut into the ever-expanding world of biennales (with the festival joining the International Biennial Association). Across five evenings, with club nights running on to 7am throughout the weekend, and showcasing 95 DJs, musicians, artists and filmmakers (though the weighting still markedly favours the first), Atonallers roam through the Kraftwerk complex as though exploring an open-world RPG (no map is provided), usually ending their night in one of the complex’s three clubs.
As the Berlin senate drives home 12 percent cuts to its cultural funding budget, and popular spaces like Renate, Watergate and Kwia have been shuttered due to rising rents and unscrupulous real estate agents, Berlin’s erstwhile branding as an inviting and affordable spot for artists and musicians to set up shop – one with plentiful state funding for the arts – seems hopelessly out-of-date. This insecurity has clearly peaked, inviting ruminations on ‘post-cool Berlin’ and the ‘club death spiral’. Add to that the news of increasing censorship and deplatforming of pro-Palestine artists, activists and cultural workers, and the picture grows murkier still. A straightforward music festival might not be expected to mediate such developments, but the expectations are somewhat heightened for biennials – which, for better or worse, tend to assume the role of the artworld’s social conscience. In search of a way through this imbroglio, Atonal 25 presented a variety of commissioned pieces that gave form and voice to the city’s current neurotic spiral (in marked contrast to the avoidant curation on display in the most recent Berlin Biennale). At times Atonal 25 was like a swansong to a city that is fading away, at others an intimation of what it could yet still become.
Atonal’s main musical performances are staged within the Kraftwerk’s immense and frankly inhuman 8,000 square metre hall, originally built to shelter machinery. It is hard to exaggerate the concrete grandeur of this space, which however packed the festival became (and most nights were sold out) never felt full. So the first question for each performer is: what to do with a space whose enormity gobbles up everything pristine and spits out a sort of impasto murk? On the opening night, the French musician Malibu flooded the air with lush, arpeggiated squalls, as an ominous smoke pyre rose behind her and a single lighthouse beam roamed the main hall. Acts like NYX and Ego Death (a stunning collaboration between Aho Ssan + Resina) channelled the gothic reverberance of liturgical polyphony (refiguring the factory as a church). On the penultimate night, Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet seemed to directly square up to this overbearing architectural domination. Their start-stop, attentionally challenged performance – offering up dopamine-intensive nuggets of recognisable hits only to just as instantly snatch them away, like a toddler merrily swiping through endless reels on the family iPad – felt like a glorious admission of posthuman enfeeblement.
The factory’s former control room, meanwhile, was transformed by PAN records into a ‘listening room’ (what were we doing in the other rooms?) – a cozy space presenting siphoned-off soundtracks from recent works by Cyprien Gaillard, Jeremy Shaw, Jenna Sutela, Anne Imhof and Mohamed Bourouissa. Downstairs a projection space screened a selection of films from Basma Al-Sharif, Kamal Al-Jafari, Nelson Makengo, Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau, and Noor Abed. And on the ground floor, the ‘Third Surface’ was a new initiative for more experimental practices that the organisers had billed as seeking to capture ‘the spirit of late-night venues from Weimar Berlin’ through a louche, dimly lit arrangement of tables and chairs. Activations of this space spanned from Richard Sides’s Where Are the Hackers? (2025), in which Sides positioned large drinks coolers rigged up with contact mics at odds throughout the space, which glowed and hummed throughout his collaborative performance; to Billy Bultheel’s ambitious The Fugue State: A Short History of Decay II (2025), which embedded a reading by Leah Marojević from Paul Celan’s Todesfuge (‘death is a Master from Deutschland’) within Bultheel’s prickly, lachrymose ensemble composition for harpsichord, flute, and cello staged around a pulpit designed by Andrea Belosi resembling a larval Eva Hesse sculpture. The act who seemed most comfortable here was Chuquimamani-Condori, whose virtuosic performance – irreverently welding together everything from Andean folk music to cloud rap – injected a much-needed emotional frisson into proceedings.
The issue with curating contemporary art for such a sweaty, distracted viewing context as a packed-out party is that it can just become an illustrative adjunct to the main (musical) event – some sculptural installations and wall-based works become a sort of upmarket club furnishing. While this was unfortunately true of Mouneer Al Shaarani’s calligraphic posters (hung in a poorly-lit, busy vestibule), Joanna Rajkowska’s pulsing Emergency Light (2025), a giant swivelling ambulance lamp on the mezzanine of the Kraftwerk, fared better. Its leisurely rotations of amber light throughout the building suggested to me the acute temporality of an urgent ‘polycrisis’ that is always somehow doppler-shifting away from us in its urgency, while also functioning well as a doomy lighting accompaniment for festival attendees taking a breather between acts. Rajkowska’s silent alarm strobing within the ever-present clamour of the festival was both inviting and disquieting. Upstairs in the main hall hung the Norwegian artist Steinar Haga Kristensen’s 27.5 metre-long PARAOSIALTVEKKELSESAPPART (Parasocial Awakening Device, 2025). The painting’s depiction of a contorted mass of warring bodies and interlocking limbs – all chokeholds and headlocks and hands clawing at eyes – was equal parts medieval battle tapestry, Guernica and hooligan pub brawl. Beneath, the enmeshed and entangled crowd of Atonallers assembled: variously making out, amicably chatting and dissociating to drone.
After the first night, rumours began spreading of something most people weren’t quite sure they had actually witnessed (and no doubt many missed). I caught it by chance in the early hours of Thursday morning. Through a cranny in some concrete balustrades a group of balaclava’d and helmeted Bereitschatspolizei (riot police; a grim fixture of Berlin’s recent pro-Palestine marches) could be seen assembled in a makeshift underground office space: conducting strange rituals, racking up lines of white powder and scrawling gnomic figures onto a whiteboard. This discrete and powerful intervention was, I later learned, We Are Numbers: a collaboration between the sound artist and performer Tot Onyx and the artist Mattia Bertolo. At one point the ‘cops’ all gathered to watch a video that many of us present had seen and shared (in the real world) only a few days earlier – a brutal and unprovoked attack by the Bereitschatspolizei on a young Irish activist. In presenting institutional control humming underneath the party, Onyx and Bertolo broke from the soft play of chic horror aesthetics elsewhere on display to spotlight the quotidian horrors of everyday violence.
George MacBeth is a writer and editor based in Berlin
