Over a decade in, and Gegen is not close to ready to sluggish down. On the event entrance, Gegen doubled down increasing their Berlin occasion sequence from bimonthly to regular monthly, endlessly raging in their legendary property of KitKat with the addition of a new kink Rendez-vous in RSO.
On the history label front, immediately after releasing their large 30-keep track of sturdy anniversary compilation, Gegen keeps pushing the envelope in supporting queer and femme techno artists with this new assortment of 14 tracks carrying the sound of Gegen and showcasing the abilities of our group. Wanton Witch makes her mark in the anniversary compilation SPIRIT OF KINK with her eerie vocal-oriented spell-casting one ‘Beralih Angin’.
GEGEN ><
Against yourself. Around queer narratives.
Gegen is a complex word in German because it has two opposite meanings.
Historically speaking it means “against”, signifying all the counter-cultural movements since the very beginning of youth cultures but if you apply the word to time, it means “around”. One meaning is closed, defined in terms of space. The other is open and undefined in terms of time. In the contemporary moment the idea of “enemy” – in which a thought and an action can be identifiable as “against” – is not there and is not clear anymore as power relationships changed through the development of post-modernism. And this gave space to markets to regenerate themselves through the queer-counter cultural movements by producing an oligopoly of empty events repeating themselves until their fast extinction and at the same time by crystallising the institutionalisation of big “queer meccas” which exercise more and more power on the scene. This process is verifiable in Berlin as the incubator of new world trends in the arts of entertainment.
This basic tension gives the space and the times for a new proposal to blossom from the ashes of the historical and infamous queer techno party called “SABOT°AGE BERLIN” which characterised fades of mutation in some of the wildest Friedrichshain nights. The aim is to play with the solitude of the political meaning of GEGEN as a suicidal mechanism of the “self” or the sublime crisis of enemy subtraction as the aggression of dialectics. A linguistic game of pop art where the semantic putsch of “Gegen” becomes the broken mirror of its own impossibilities. The electric fear to find oneself multiple by being against oneself and unrecognisable. The dangers of being desireful in a psycho-dramatic performance. The political practice of hallucinatory love to defy hate is an antagonistic, identitarian mechanism.
Perceiving the idea of community as a demagogic form for bigger powers like religions, societies and markets to exercise their violence with the fake flag of politically correct participation, we do not wish to design a party just to give you a safe space and protection. We are not selling you the possibility to be “queer” for one night. We want to expose you to your own fears and pleasures by pushing you to understand how your own power mechanisms are produced. This is why we invite you to be GEGEN by performing your psychosis, by being the enemy of yourself, by thinking and being out of b/order and by destroying every rational thought.
GEGENDIGITAL003 / SPIRIT OF KINK will be released Decemeber 16th, 2022
Pre-order here: https://gegenberlin.bandcamp.com/album/gegendigital003
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