24
SatOn the first Saturday of the festival, two separate rooms at the riverside venue YAAM will host nights packed full with musical bon-vivants from Berlin and abroad.
The first room kicks-off with Berlin local Alexandra Droener, aka Kepler, who will flesh out the UK end of the spectrum and invoke booty shaking with her bass/future hiphop/grime/digi dancehall-rich DJ set. As one half of urban power house Sick Girls, Droener has been challenging Berlin's techno monopoly and remapping the city's sonic infrastructure for a decade.
Phillip Gorbachev, Russian-born artist, musician, and performer concerned with the crossroads between techno, Cómeme, and original Russian Dance Music, will bring along his "Naked Man," the moniker of his solo project's 2-piece adjoining band. The collaboration was inaugurated at Boiler Room Berlin in June 2014 in the interest of broadening the interpretation, for live ears, of Gorbachev's debut Silver Album.
The night will also see the appearances of two central ambassadors of the sound universe related to divisive London PC Music label/collective, regular collaborator SOPHIE and label affiliate Danny L. Harle. PC Music ringleader A.G. Cook has bundled together scores of artists and monikers, almost all of whom sport a glossy, eccentric, saccharine pop aesthetic, and raises questions about pop culture, accelerationism, hyperrealism, and digital community as well as gender, identity, and consumerism. On the abstract end of the musical spectrum, SOPHIE provides metallic pings, rubbery zoings, trance stabs, hardstyle kick drums, Eskibeat, vocaloid hits, and 8-bit heartbreak. Danny L. Harle, another of the resident PC Music upperclassmen, is a Machaut fan and neo-expressionist classical composer by day (his "Sonatina" for two bass viols is on his Soundcloud page) and voracious DJ and producer by night (although PC Music itself has only seen the release of one single, "Broken Flowers" by him).
Teki Latex, a member of French electro hip-hip group TTC and co-founder of the Sound Pellegrino label, will bring his party-animal skills to full effect to close the night with an extended DJ-set.
As one half of urban power house Sick Girls, Alexandra Droener aka. Kepler has been challenging Berlin's techno monopoly and remapping the city's sonic infrastructure for a decade. Her sets consist of all things bass and future hip hop, and more than anything she will challenge you to get your ass on the floor.
SOPHIE is the much-talked-about (anonymous) UK producer responsible for some of the most polarizing and out-there pop vs. club tracks of the past few years. The highly synthetic, hyperactive electronic outings—simulating the experience of a sugar rush—have been the subject of heated debate within electronic music circles: who (and what) is SOPHIE, and does his output represent pop futurism or art-school satire?
Danny L. Harle is a musician and composer residing in London. He has scored film and television productions, played in various live ensembles, and is a collaborator in the cyberculture pop-inspired PC Music label. Harle is currently studying on a scholarship with Julian Anderson at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.
French hip-and-pop hit, Julien Pradeyrol was born in Paris in 1978, and became a music sensation with his 2007 "Les Matins de Paris” internet-spun release. He is the head of hip-hop and electronica label Institubes and its Sound Pellegrino sublabel, having earned his stripes while part of the French hip-hop project TTC.