What do you get when you pair up MIDI-loving, electrobeat cutting DJ/Producer duo Modeselektor with the emotive electro sounds of Berlin musician Apparat? MODERAT, the newest music collabo project on Berlin label BPitch Control. Now, take Moderat and add a pinch of Pfadfinderei, Berlin-based VJ and visual design collective (projects include on-stage visuals for Radiohead, Modeselektor, Ellen Alien, etc.) and voila; You’ve got yourself an expressionist explosion in the form of a video but not just any music video.
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Pfadfinderei worked 25/8 to birth this latest project – a series of visual interpretations of MODERAT’s first collaborative self-titled album. Meticulously tracing along songs within a matter of frames, this video series compilation a.k.a. ‘video interlude’, lets us listen with our eyes. Moderat’s album dropped on May 11th as a CD/DVD combo with 10 beautiful videos inspired by minimalism in nature to the beauty of carefully constructed graphics. Holler – it is FRESH.

Get it in and take a sneak peak at the Moderat video interlude mix below: (more…)

The Crémant bubbles kicked it off but it was the late night antics that really did me in and exactly 24 hours later, sober and alert, I wondered who, what, when, where…oh, yesss … It was last night’s Broken Hearts Club party set in Ballhaus Berlin, one of the city’s historic social clubs built in 1905 housing local music and dance lovers. So, it wasn’t the early night sparkling wine that did me in, it was what followed – late night dance, drink, dance, dance, drinkitydrinkdraaankdrunk. So what perfect way to cut straight to what’s been cooking on Parlour Magazine’s Berlin side.
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Last week I spent the afternoon over lunch with Berlin’s Broken Hearts Club party series creator, Ingrid Junker Subon. Sitting pretty in a Mitte cafe over salads, pastry and Bionade (Hollunder flavor, thank you very much), I got down with some questions for Subon, who’s an art directer and conceptual design fashionista by day and music aficionada heartbreak girl by night.

Broken Hearts Club started in 2005 at 8MM bar in Berlin-Mitte. (more…)

Berlin, a mid-size city of approximately 3.4 million people in Eastern Germany is best known for its powerful and world-shaping political history (ie. WWII, Hitler, Berlin Wall, etc.) as well as its celebrated history in cultivating the Marlene Dietrich’s of film to music, literature, visual arts, and fashion. Today, the city boasts one of the liveliest party scenes in the world, skewing more electronica but also maintaining its pulse on all things music. Don’t mess with Germans and their Salsa.
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City-wide sports include swimming, table fussball (serious stuff here), bicycle riding – everywhere (I like to ride from my bed to the bathroom) and most importantly ‘conspicuous carriageanous’, a term I coined simply stating the mere obsession of procreating miniature ‘bibsters’ (future hipsters like their parents) to trophy around in these outrageous, space-mongoring, rickshawesque carts tagged to the back of a bicycle or pushed by mama or papa. (more…)

Living in Berlin gives me the ability to be a fly on the wall detecting all things German from a scientific and cultural perspective. What intrigues me are foreign products, what they are, how they are designed, and their accompanying marketing campaigns. I tend to gravitate towards product packaging that is minimal with innovative 3D functionality, paying close attention to font usage and color palettes. The simpler and more incognito the product looks, the better. And lastly, marketing strategies (and hiccups) that reveal underlying societal presumptions. So what does one do when ingrained, psychological acceptance or refusal of products from a diverse American standpoint is met with products that in America would otherwise NEVER be allowed to reach the marketplace?

You make Obama-Fingers. (more…)