"Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall" [0] is a good book on the origins of the Berlin Techno scene. It's based on interviews and discussions by the people originally setting up the whole thing, making it a pretty breezy read that you don't necessarily have to go through chronologically.
No city can really replicate the absurd situation Berlin was in after the second world war. The absolute oppressive atmosphere, with one day the whole city getting flipped upside down. Anyone being able to take over a building on the East side and throw a party there. When before you could end up in a cell overnight for playing a boombox too loud on the street. The original location for Tresor (club) was the literal translation of the German word: A big old safe in a bank. That you had to climb down a ladder to get to.
An unexpected connection of cities is between Berlin and Detroit: Underground Resistance (a group of Detroit born Techno producers) among many others playing gigs in Tresor going back to the early nineties.
Kreuzberg is a borough in Berlin with 150k inhabitants, and it used to be divided into two postcodes: 36 and 61.
36 is the cooler, poorer, more political, younger half of the borough, it really was a center for non-conformists after reunification, but it's being gentrified these days.
'I’ve tried to come up with a rhyme that works in English: “36’s on fire, 61’s just tired” was one solution, but it doesn’t carry the matter-of-factness of the German.'
For a AI paradigm that gives the neural network no explicit information about phonetics, the ability of GPT to produce rhyming phrases never ceases to amaze me - especially in a language which is as infamous for its inconsistent orthography as English. Has there been any research attempting to work out how such subtle patterns are learnt by the AI?
No, I was talking about the atmosphere before the wall came down, during the cold war. That paragraph was written in a bit of a confusing way now that I look at it, though.
No city can really replicate the absurd situation Berlin was in after the second world war. The absolute oppressive atmosphere, with one day the whole city getting flipped upside down. Anyone being able to take over a building on the East side and throw a party there. When before you could end up in a cell overnight for playing a boombox too loud on the street. The original location for Tresor (club) was the literal translation of the German word: A big old safe in a bank. That you had to climb down a ladder to get to.
An unexpected connection of cities is between Berlin and Detroit: Underground Resistance (a group of Detroit born Techno producers) among many others playing gigs in Tresor going back to the early nineties.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Klang-Familie-Felix-Denk/dp/373860429...