international news _ 14th May, 2007
Berlin's New Tresor- Beyond The Superclub
Text by Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)
Germany's best-known club Tresor is re-opening in Berlin at the end of the month inside a gigantic derelict power station in the heart of the city.
The hugely influential club returns with a musical policy that remains 'futuristic', Tresor founder and visionary Dimitri Hegemann told Skrufff this week, starting with four nights of parties headlined by Sven Vath (May 24). Blake Baxter (May 25), The Advent (May 26) and Rok (May 27)
"We're not running after every trend but we’ll still be guaranteeing the artists total artistic freedom," Dimitri explained. "On the one hand we're continuing to work with the big, established DJs who shaped the Tresor sound, especially those from Detroit, but we also want to build up our own residents and help them develop along the way," he said.
What marks the new Tresor out as a truly exceptional venture- and potentially the world's ultimate superclub- is the truly breath-taking nature of its location, housed inside a gigantic, semi derelict concrete shell providing 20,000 square metres of space. The new three room 1,500 capacity club will use just 10% of the available floor space, the rest being given over to contemporary art exhibitions and events as well as providing chill out space for clubbers.
Showing Skrufff round the gargantuan venue this week, Dimitri spoke enthusiastically about the building's semi derelict state, explaining they're deliberately leaving it largely untouched, apart from making sure cavernous holes in the floor are blocked off for safety.
"I like the unfinished, the rough, the ruins . . . everything is still possible in these places," he explained. "The building has so much energy and truth attached to it compared to the polished and perfectly finished world that now surrounds it, here in Mitte. Ruins carry the signs of time, of life. I have to think of a cathedral when I walk through these massive halls and pillars," he said.
Tresor first opened in a department store underground vault near the recently torn down Berlin Wall in 1990, and was instrumental in both bringing together clubbers from the previously divided populations and launching techno in Germany and beyond.
"Tresor always stood as a marker for the growth of a new musical generation - an entire new movement," Dimitri continued, "It was a major contributing factor behind the reunification of the youth of East and West Berlinm, People learned to dance together so much until they got high and felt that freedom you find through musical indulgence and that shaped the spirit of Tresor.
The music connected people that, even if they lived in a city which had one name coming from two entirely different pasts and at the end of a night they'd exchange numbers and become friends. That still makes me happy. Tresor back then was located in the frontier area of Berlin and it became a space for freedom and unity, that wasn't about being mainstream, but was for love and sharing."
"The new building is called Modem and apart from Tresor, our goal is to create a unique space where interdisciplinary expressional forms of art are present, particularly electronic arts," he concluded.
"Besides that, the idea is to bring key people together from different genres and areas such as music, arts, fashion and design and to provide a platform for contemporary, electronic and sub-cultural arts. We can develop great exhibitions here as the Tate Modern did in London. Most of the people from all the different disciplines are very excited. At the end of the year we want to gather all the top people from all the different arts and re-establish a festival which will be called ‘Berlin Atonal’," he said.
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News: Tresor Club Back In Action (01/05/2007)
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