Closing: More Than Just a Timeslot
Energy and ideas that populate the early morning hours
It’s 6 am Monday. The piercing sound of your phone alarm rips through the stillness of the morning sending your mind and your body into automatic pilot mode. Without trying to think too much about it you pull yourself out of bed. The next few hours will be dedicated to your routine, breakfast, exercise, coffee, and the morning commute. At the beginning of the week, this act is harder than it usually is. You’ve been at rest for the last few days, if you’ve been partying the last remnants of the weekend may still need to be shaken before you can rejoin the labour routine with a fresh face. While this humble and predictable practice is happening somewhere kickdrums and snares ricochet around a small dark room. People of all manners are in the middle of a ritual. It’s a weekly act that has grown in infamy over the last number of years and developed a bigger cult-like status than most artists. Both unorthodox and highly sentimental depending on your viewpoint, it takes the experience of electronic music to its most extraordinary and rawest form. These people are deep into the middle of a closing set. The time frame of this reference indicates a particular closing in an old power station in Friedricshain, where for most the idea of the modern closing stems from. While Berghain has many factors in its favour such as its ability to stay open and its devoted following, closing or staying till the very end is an international experience. Whether its Unter in New York, warehouse raves outside London, or No Way Back in Detroit, ideas and similarities of the experiences intersect making this phenomenon so much more than one space’s take on it.
In the final hours of a party, a magical game begins to be played between the DJ and a crowd who have been inside a space for too long. From the crowd's perspective all reason and logic points to leaving, the guts of the night have finished and there is nothing to prove by staying longer. With this in mind, a heightened tension grows in regard to what music is being played. A DJs job is always to perform but now the role changes slightly as each song played is to keep you in the room and push that logical thought to go home out of your mind. The options for what to play opens up significantly, music that may have appeared weaker or not appropriate to the mood takes on an entirely new persona. The atmosphere of “what is going to come next” is a far more enticing one than when you know you're guaranteed to hear a high peak time energy collection of tracks. Atmospherically there is another change occurring. The party is both winding down as well as letting other elements reveal themselves. Even within a big space, the atmosphere becomes a lot more personal to the attendees. The exiting of the majority of people allows the dancefloor to open up for those remaining, the new space around you is ripe for freedom of expression and the temporary breakdown of social barriers. These barriers are always going to be maintained at the earlier and peak times of the night due to safety amidst the chaotic nature of dance events as well as the modern insistence to live inside our own little bubbles. It's in the early hours when people can feel at their most comfortable these bubbles begin to evaporate. The faces you’ve seen around you on the night are clearer and the exchange of smiles and knowing looks are passed among attendees as a common understanding is held of why you are all there and what is going to transcribe over these last few hours.
With this being a blog that’s focused on techno I wanted to consider tracks of that variety that encapsulate the possibilities of what the dancefloor is capable of in these hours. Favourites that spring to mind would be DJ HMC - Marauder a 2001 diamond that still sounds as fresh as the day it was released. Blending silliness, zest, and musical stylings that float between a comically large house track and a techno track with only a PG rating on it. Truely a bright energy re-igniter that reaks of friendliness and fun. Coming from a different angle EQD - #005B is a track that effectively demonstrates how light and heavy can sit side by side with each other with a euphoric sheen and raw clacks complimenting each other to the backing crunch of Shed's signature drums. The tempo of 128 can breathe properly in this scenario as there can be a need for slower music to match a crowd's energy levels. Oscar Mulero - CV is Dead utilises recurring rolling cymbals with a mystical aura that floats above the track. It emphasises empty space with only the lightest of kick drums propping up these cymbals. Relevant to an emptier dance floor you are not sardined into this track hits you again and again with a stylistic element of techno filed down to its bare bones to be appreciated in all its glory.
But it’s more than speciality techno tracks that make the cut. As the layers of your own ego are stripped away over the final hours you are laid bare to appreciate new musical stylings that can come your way. Attending Norman Nodge on closing duties in Berghain I watched him play out the Ben Stirling remix of Mind Dimension by Tiga. This is a song that had never been on my radar and with good reason. Simply put, Tiga and Stirling are artists who create music that's designed for a very different mood than what I’d prefer. But in that moment hovering in front of the front left stack bathed in blue and red lights this song simply became everything. The large campy vocal stole the complete and undivided attention of the room spreading smiles of delerium across faces. It was so funky and yet so silly, almost the perfect thing I didn’t know that I wanted to hear. A track like this is completely removed from the Berghain musical branding and feel that populates the space. Something like this would normally have the Saturday night and Sunday afternoon crowds wrinkling their noses in disgust. But here in the Monday hours, it arrived fashionably late to take its deserved seat amidst the revellers.
Brighter lighting is paramount to closing the closing experience. Everyone is gathered appropriately when the sun starts to show and thus sunlight or artificially created brightness has a role to play. Even in a synthetic light situation, the slow reveal of what was around you the whole time although simple is quite the intoxicating experience providing relief and release as the party moves towards its inevitable end. I attended the Large Marge party back in January 2020. A blissfully ignorant time of what was to come. Held in a small warehouse situated somewhere between Queens and Bushwick, behind the temporary booth were small windows that took up the back wall covered in a small thin curtain. As we encroached into the early hours and the sun began to rise, light ballooned and expanded across the small room coating everything there with its warm rays and leaving the unassuming space bare to see. Maybe because of the nostalgia I hold for this point in time or maybe because it was just quietly brilliant, imprinted the scene onto my mind. The energy of the ecstatic kickdrum provided by the high-tempo NRG music Marge is known for juxtaposed with the soft sunlight gave the morning a tint of surrealness. The kickdrum had always been in the room with us, but now seemed so much more enhanced almost like this physical entity filling every every part of the space. Its true presence finally revealed thanks to the sunlight.
The onset of such intense emotional feelings at this point of the party is primarily due to lack of sleep. You’re more fragile than you realise and what can be considered strong cathartic moments become a lot more real after spending so long awake exhausted but soldiering on. This if anything will make you more sensitive to the not-so-pleasant things that exist around you. It’s true what they say, the later you stay out the more likely you are to see something you don’t like. Closing is a refuge for the ugly parts and ideas to come to life. While maybe you are there for the positive impacts (or at least you're telling yourself that) others are there for much different reasons. Consumption and drug habits are put to the test and become bare for everyone to see around. This netherworld of the human psyche while horrid is very real, it has been at the party the whole time but becomes louder and less ignorable towards the end demanding the attention it thinks it deserves. There's a gradual breakdown of order that's relevant to the experience, when everyone wants to spend time in a space that you are not supposed to be in behaviours that shouldn’t be encouraged flourish. In Berlin, the phrase “cracky” is thrown around which can sum up the demeanour of a person past the point of any sort of responsible stimulant consumption. Unable to concentrate, jarred and lodged on the dancefloor the overwhelming noise of a soundsystem wraps and caresses them, shielding them from outward engagement. It’s natural to run to the safety of the music when we’re at our weakest. This point of maxed-out serotonin may be a wonderful escape but can be an incredibly lonely place to be especially when caught up in the weekly party cycle.
Lots of people will go through a period in their lives where staying to the end becomes their thing. For whatever reason, a transitionary stage begins where you will seek out in these spaces weekly. This can be looked at as a good thing, if you're a fan of electronic music or party culture it’s important to have spent enough time at this side of the party to understand and appreciate it. The full spectrum of the experience can’t be understood without at least visiting the closing hours a number of times. I have spent my life dropping in and out of this closing phase no matter where I was. While the reasons for staying there varied one thing reason would consistently bring me back above others; my longing for the innate sense of pure freedom that was impossible to feel anywhere else. On the dancefloor with others like me, we’d dive headfirst back into the same feelings from the week before recycling this lust for escapism. While you’re in that phase and fully invested in the idea of it taking a weekend away becomes this alien idea you're not interested in tolerating. When learning about dance music as you first get into it we’re told of these rose-tinted views of masses of people temporarily taking a path out of their normal existence for a world populated with cathartis and unity. The days of Manchester, the UK Acid scene, and Berlin's early years are held in such high regard they might as well have been a utopian transcendental experience depending on what you believe. These days that feeling or idea is so far away from what exists in club spaces it's hard to say if it even has any relevance in dance music anymore. The more time I have spent in the closing hours the more I have convinced myself this is the closest to the perceived ideas of that time. What's found here is the modern hybrid of this idea. It’s not exactly as described but it's far more tangible than the Saturday night clubbing experience in any major city. In the hours where no one belongs true escapism and freedom flourish.
Closing is one of the last vessels of true anarchy and rebellion. It’s a space and time frame that is aggressively anti-everything modern Neo-Liberal capitalist societies are built on. Going partying is socially acceptable, taking drugs is more or less socially acceptable, techno due to its prominence and rapid increase in popularity has changed into something socially acceptable. It’s a strange reality that we live in a world where your colleague in HR will happily tell you over lunch how they had such a wonderful time at Fabric over the weekend. Is this a good thing? That depends maybe at one point the increased normalisation of techno and club culture was beneficial and now that we’re at the point of complete exhaustion we can see it should of been stopped along the way. Staying till closing is one of the last refuges for escaping this normalisation. Pushing yourself to stay longer in the hopes of music hitting in a particular way and the atmosphere morphing into a ferrel frenzy of complete rawness and emotional release is something that's never going to be socially accepted and it shouldn’t. It’s a topic of conversation that you can only share with people who hold the same passion, attempting to translate to someone outside this circle is a waste of your time. They will understand if you like to party they won't understand why you like to stand at the furthest edge of what the party can actually be. Knowing this we can see how privacy is such a crucial part of this whole experience. Connectivity to the music is of course an important factor but what is actually occurring beyond the music is the main event. The freedom I found was both fantastic and scary. This is the way freedom must occur to be its most honest form. Outside the walls is a world where the documentation of the mundane and everyday is so normalised we forget how much of an impact it has on the way we conduct ourselves. In the closing hours, that impact is temporarily removed for a brief window of time and it’s marvellous to behold. Ego and perceived perceptions of yourself are the villains of true exploration.
In a sombrer sense, a closing set is also both procrastination of grief and delaying of the inevitable. Time starts to have less meaning in these points and hours simultaneously evaporate and hang in the air suspended in time. It can be a weird netherworld when caught in the middle of it. When the party has no defined ending what's in front of you may seem a lifetime away.
Your immediate reality is shaped by the length of time you're in the space as the repetition of the same people and surroundings bonds you to your surroundings increasing your attachment. It’s an endless moment that sometimes you don’t want to say goodbye to. But of course slowly but surely this feeling and experience has to end. Maybe the final track wouldn’t ring out so melancholic if what was waiting outside the doors was somewhat better. But here we are and it certainly isn’t. The want to delay the inevitable will always be stronger when what greets you after is anything but your ideal situation. But even if things were better or even perfect I have my doubts this would change the ritual too much. Even if you're one of the lucky ones to have your world in check the siren's call of closing is usually too fun to resist. Your choice is simply how much you wish to bathe in the early morning sunlight.