butting in

We are the fringe, and I don't mean the 70s leather-tasseled kind. Last night at the Randlage (or, outskirts) we were baptized in the smoky wonders of wires and laptops of Berlin's experimental music scene. It started out innocently, a bit like a grad-school project on campus -- we waited outside in the spitting rain until 10:15 p.m., when a shaggy-baggy jeans Berliner let us in the entryway and the club, only to shoo us back out because someone wasn't "ready."

(Show times continue to baffle us. I think we've got a short-hand down, however: music at living room-turned-rock club in residential apartment building: starts one hour or more after entritt. Music at larger, pseudo-corporate hall with required pre-purchase tickets: starts 30 minutes before entritt time, and ends before 10 p.m. Music at classic concert hall: starts at 8:00:01 p.m.)

No one was ready until 11:30 p.m., really, but this dead time with beers in hands gave us a good chance to survey the crowd from our very plush, DDR-styled couch at the back of the room. Which was a good vantage point while the room was still fluid, but (and I do mean but) by the time the place filled in, we were faced with a polite row of rear ends in our direct vision, while sitting, for the beginning and the rest of the show. One in leather, because this is Germany. Two in saggy jeans; one, female, well-formed, in wool slacks. Our vantage point only furthered our theory that the German people have an extra gene for height, and that most of those (with that extra gene) tend to be rockers, or associate with rockers; and that those rockers almost always (at least according to our recent experiences) stand right in front of us. (And look like they just came from a game of D&D, but that's off topic.) We stood on the sofa and still couldn't see over the crowd. But it being an experimental music evening, there wasn't much to see -- laptops and tangled cords like a pile of collegiate spaghetti tossed at a wall, lots of dangling greasy hair and faces lit with a consumptive pallor, not unlike the blue screen of death. (Except for the one artist on an Apple 13", of course.)

Ticks and pings and waves of riotous, prickly sound; sometimes soothing, sometimes heart-racing. Hamster pockets of MDMA seem to seep out of dusty brain corners during the frenetic, staccato beats, while snoozy, smoke-filled drones sucked whatever energy I had left sometime around 1 a.m. and pushed us stumbling, slipping on tossed butts and spilled beer, to the living room door. Packaged, polished music is nice, but there is so much about the raw, tooth-marked quality of electronic music that I find magnetic. If you have a heartbeat, or have stood transfixed while watching a bee hum and bounce from flower to flower, you can too.