

Like it’s 1999
25 years of No Underground
On a scorching hot Wednesday 25 years ago, Markus “Fels” Fesl and I walked into our weekly dance-impro session with Chilly Gonzales and Raz Ohara at Maria am Ostbahnhof. We were celebrating the release party of our first record as “No Underground”: Free Transform. Now, a quarter of a century later, the album released back then on Arne Gesemann’s Noisolution is finally available again on all digital platforms as Lovelab Release 002.
On the roof of a former postal administration building, a four-storey building that had been converted into a club, the word “Pop” shone in neon letters. Every Wednesday, the second floor was home to the “Flittchen Bar” (floozie bar) by the legendary feminist band the Lassie Singers. Downstairs, on a rocked-out sofa at the edge of the dance floor, the four of us played eight-hour jam sessions as the Nightline City Cruisers (NCC), named after the night train of the German bahn, until the early hours of the morning in front of a swirling hall of raving dancers. Initially, we were paid 200, later 400 marks band fee, a hundred each – and starring Peaches on her first live gig right after her arrival in the city.
One joint followed the next, while Raz poured his Prince-esque vocals onto the dance floor, and Gonzales (then under the name “Wolf”) seemed to be playing for his life a synth module featuring classic keyboard sounds. As a disciple of P-Funk and Paul McCartney Fels grooved with a grim face on the bass, while I laid down seventies loops with Gen 1 Pioneer C-DJ players and controlled the mix (mainly louder and louder). From time to time, I shouted lower pitched vocals into the mike with my VT-1 effects unit. The energy was electric. For a year, the cannabinoid-induced euphoria drove us to musical extremes – every Wednesday. Like there was no tomorrow.
Free Transform is an eclectic mix of jazzed-up groove tracks, simple pop songs with sixties quotes and rudimentary hip-hop – a hybrid of my nightly stoned compositions, tracks by Fels, guest appearances by Chilly Gonzales and Sebastian Schoenian as well as recordings by the philosopher band “Wohnung” (apartment) with Sandra Klein (keys), Reimund Spitzer (guitar), Töns Wiethüchter (drums), Fels and me – one of the nuclei of the Berlin living room scene.
In the press, Berlin’s living room scene with its illegal parties in private apartments was celebrated as a cozy alternative to the technoid mainstream, but in fact it was the musically untamed bastard of techno, born of the same anarchic attitude that characterized the Berlin underground and the Maria sessions a pleasurable alternative to the disillusionment in late capitalism of Generation X, which found expression in West German discourse pop and the apocalyptic pop exegesis of the Cologne spex magazine of the time. It was a time in which Berlin became a pulsating cultural metropolis thanks to countless vacancies, low rents and largely absent authorities. While the underground was declared a fig leaf of the mainstream by West German thinkers, the city was bubbling with untamed creativity.
And we were right in the middle of it. The single “City Boy”, a recording by the band Wohnung, was on heavy rotation on German radio. We played live in the newly opened MTV studios in Berlin, while our trash video with ecstasy chocolate, Gonzales cameo and police intervention was immediately pulled from circulation by the London MTV headquarters. With Fels on guitar and bass and me on mike, PC tower and CD turntables, No Underground finally went on a Germany-wide improv tour, first with Chilly Gonzales on keys – ironically in front of completely empty venues – and later with Johannes “Jojo” Büld on Moog Prodigy, Rhodes, Hammond and electronics. At our peak, we played an endless house dance set in front of a thousand dancing and euphorically screaming people in Chemnitz’s Atomino, surrounded by aroused fans who stayed on our trail until we reached the 5-star hotel where Jan Kummer from the Atomino had booked two suites for us.
The live recordings made during the tour formed the basis for an album that I still consider to be one of the best I’ve had the pleasure to work on. It was a groovy mixture of dance, electronica, pop and hip-hop, lyrically strong and musical at the same time, full of depth, lust and darkness, despair and spirituality, crowned by the bizarrely suicidal music video for “Donna” by Oliver Päßler, which we shot illegally in the cemetery on Prenzlauer Allee with Lia Baron as the main actress.
The video for “Truck Drivin’ Devil” followed 20 years later, a melancholy, dreamy love song – and the only German-language track that No Underground have released. This album is now finally available again under the title Golden Child (Lovelab 003).
Those were wild and productive years. And blazing success was within reach.
No Underground | Free Transform [Album]
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No Underground | Golden Child [Album]
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