New York-based collective Discwoman and Berlin-based event organisers Creamcake have organised a DJing workshop and after-party at Berlin’s OHM on August 13.
In keeping with the transatlantic project’s mission statement —”collaborating to empower women and LGBT in electronic music” —the free event includes an intensive two-hour workshop to learn how to use CDJ 2000. No experience in music production is required, participants need only register at hi@creamcake.de and bring a USB key with their favourite music.
The workshop, running 7pm to 9pm on the Saturday will be followed by a live DJ set and after party, also at OHM, featuring DJ Haram, Bearcat, HD, Ziúr and Yanling.
Keiska has dropped his debut EP Powerpoint via Berlin event-organisers and label Creamcake/3hd on July 29.
Inspired by the likes of Araabmuzik, Lorenzo Senni and Evian Christ, the record emerges from a difficult period for the Finnish producer, turning to the synth-heavy breakdowns of euro dance as a way to release. Devoid of any implied ironic distance, Keiska’s is a response to the nihilistic “post-industrial” sound of the electronic music of the day, offering instead tracks like ‘LIFE’, an ongoing vocal and a looping of synth sweeps that Keiska himself describes as “excessively melodic and colorful”.
The EP —which includes tracks titled ‘Powerpoint 1′,’Powerpoint 2’ and ‘Entrance’ —launches at Berlin’s OHM venue with supports from the likes of Ana Caprix, 333 Boyz, Blue Stork (aka Nicolas Humbert) and Creamcake DJ Larry.
The Powerpoint EP follows lead-single ‘Powerpoint 1‘, dropped on July 8, and pre-empts a string of releases and events by Berliners Creamcake in the lead up to the second edition of their 3hd Festival programme, this year running October 11 to 15.
Finnish producer Keiska has released the first single from his upcoming Powerpoint EP release, ‘Powerpoint 1’, via Berlin event-organisers and label Creamcake on July 8.
The full EP will become available on July 29, to be launched at the German capital’s OHM venue with supports from the likes of Ana Caprix, Forever Traxx and more. The first track from the four-to-come looks back at late 90s and new millennium euro dance through the lens of a contemporary online EDM micro-culture informed by bass and trap, with its signature syncopated snare drums and gun shots. There’s a tension there, between the joy and apprehension of Y2K-era technophilia and a somewhat bleak technocratic present.
The Powerpoint EP is just one in what’s to be a stream of releases and event but Berliners Creamcake in the lead up to the second edition of their very good 3hd Festival programme, this year running October 11 to 15.
Hosted by events organisers Creamcake, the event kicks off the lead up to the second 3hd Festival, happening in the German capital in October.
Taipei-based producer and rapper, Aristophanes is best known for featuring on LA-based pop star Grimes‘ 2015 Art Angels album on the song ‘SCREAM’, while Eartheater is a New York-based artist-musician working with the voice, synths, guitar and electronic production.
Finnish artist AGF and Berlin-based producer Dis Fig will follow the event with DJ sets in the WAU restaurant next door.
Together, woman-run events organisation Creamcake and interdisciplinary cultural agency Niche Berlin, along with online platform concerned with “female spatial practitioners”, Making Spaces, come together to present “new perspectives, freeing up space and presenting their discoveries in Berlin.”
Creamcake will be hosting a live music party at Berlin’s Südblock on January 7.
Anja Weigl and Daniela Seitz, organisers of Creamcake curated the music festival 3hd Festival early last month. For the event held in Berlin that merged pop culture with underground local and global scenes they also arranged discussions around topics and questions like: ‘What is the Musical Object in the 21st Century?’, and ‘Visual Pleasure, the Impact of Image Making’.
The participating artists for the upcoming party titled Sweet 20 Sixteen are SPINEE, DJ Warlord, MEGATECH, DOWNTOWN ILJA, and LARRY.
See the FB event page for times and (limited) details.**
“Maybe, the music lost the war,” posits Ji-Hun Kimat the final panel titled ‘Global and Local Music Scenes’ of 3hd Festival, running across venues in Berlin from December 2 to 5. Given the overall theme of the rather meticulously curated event programme –‘The Labour of Sound in a World of Debt’ –it’s possible to see how that might have happened.
In a climate of big brand sponsorship and accelerated media uncovering, exposing and mining the so-called ‘underground’ in the flattened space of the internet, the outlook of what could have been counterculture appears rather bleak. But then, when it comes to a project like 3hd –where its Creamcake organisers Anja Weigl and Daniela Seitz manage an international cast of musicians, producers, desginers, writers, brought to the German city on a tiny budget –it seems there is still hope.
Here, it’s the sense of community, however dispersed along the global online, that really is palpable. Attendance, for one, is healthy. Crowds vary nicely in demographic depending on the night and engagement with the discussion series –moderated by Adam Harperand including topics like ‘What is the Musical Object in the 21st Century?’ and ‘Visual Pleasure, the Impact of Image Making’ –is lively. The latter takes place in Kreuzberg’s Vierte Welt, surrounded by the art of 3hd’s The Labour of Sound in a World of Debt exhibition. It includes sculpture by Ella CB and Per Mertens, the heavily branded graphic design of Simon Whybray’s JACK댄스 night posters and Kim Laughton’s ‘TIDAL (tone-on-tone)’ video featuring a billboard screen ad for the title music streaming sitein what looks like an industrial wasteland.
Vierte Welt is also the setting for 3hd’s official opening, where the multiple wall-mounted LED screenings of Emilie Gervais’ ‘Brandon aka Kamisha’ CGI animation and Lawrence Lek’s ‘Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours)’ projection is shown up by Easter’s short but striking live performance. With it they unveil their ‘True Cup’ video, a film that’s part of a sort of distributed art project featuring the artists, Max Boss and Stine Omar, staring at their flip phones and moving, model-like, around Galerie koal where they also have an exhibition. The show features a serialised video piece, Sadness is an Evil Gas Inside of Me, running at the same time as 3hd and featuring a cast of global creatives, including voice over by Vaginal Davis and cameos by actor Lars Eidinger and Britta Thie. The latter Berlin-based artist similarly has an episodic video work, drawing on Leigh Bowery and showcasing an international art scene in her Transatlanticsweb series. It’s for that she’s been invited to join the ‘Branding–Hype–Trends’ discussion of 3hd, with its focus getting lost in the panelists’ understandable inability to identify and deconstruct the complicated, inextricable inter-relationship between creativity and capital.
That collusion, or obsession even, is unsettlingly present at the HAU Hebbel am Ufernight of performances the following day. The plastic palm trees and cartoonish props of the exotic Contiki-esque Aurora Sander-designed ‘Love Jungle’ sets the scene for Dafna Maimonand Adrian Hartono’s performing the high-life in a massage for ‘Dear Unkown One’. Conceptions of luxury, money, power, feature heavily tonight. Classically-trained cellist Oliver Coates performs the disturbing soundtrack to a live rendition of Lawrence Lek’s ‘Unreal Estate’. The 3D animation travels through the empty rooms of an imagined London Royal Academy of Art, now up for private sale. Lek’s bilingual voiceover reads English and Mandarin translations of instructions on running a wealthy household from Russian Tatler magazine: “Learn how to do everything yourself. That’s how to stop the servants blackmailing you”. Colin Self’s multimedia performance of his sequential opera ‘The Elation Series’ is a festival highlight, while Aaron David Ross (ADR)’s ‘Deceptionista’ presents an assault of noise and real-time Vine videos shattered into violent shards of visual information fed through the Tabor Robak-developed VPeeker software.
Repeatedly, a blurring of boundaries between what you might consider ‘pop’ versus ‘underground’ circulates throughout the four-day event. Malibu opens a queer, vocoder-heavy sung performance at OHMwith Justin Bieber’s ‘What Do You Mean?’. A video presentation by Nicole Killian opens the ‘The Media, Fan and Celebrity Culture’ panel live via Skype from her home in Virginia. The Richmond-based artist talks Tumblr aesthetics and self-started teen girl culture as not only a subversion but a kind of hack into the power of celebrity by not just ‘killing’ their idols but by ‘eating’ them too.
That kind of pop culture cannibalism is something that Danny L Harle and DJ Paypal do in their own way at Südblock on the last night. The former does so by weaving his high-classical background with ‘low’ pop music appreciation into the slightly manic electronic opuses he and his PC Music peers have become known for. DJ Paypal, meanwhile, hijacks dance to develop an almost aggressive pursuit of a pure high. The subject of Justin Bieber again emerges at Vierte Welt as Simon Whybray shows the global superstar’s latest Purpose album cover as an example of bad graphic design in his opening lecture for the ‘Branding–Hype–Trends’. It seems that Whybray, too, is unsure of the distinction between what is and isn’t ‘bad’ when considering counterculture and its position within the mainstream, but then that’s probably, vitally, the point. **
The 3hd Festival has announced more participants in their inaugural events programme under the theme of ‘The Labor of Sound in a World of Debt’, running at various Berlin locations from December 2 to 5.
Launched by the event series Creamcake and curated by Daniela Seitz and Anja Weigl, the festival is devoted to artists, performers, musicians, academics, and journalists who examine “the labor of sound” and question both its cultural causes and its social consequences.
Among the many new events recently announced are Parisian composer Oklou and Berlin composer Soda Plains at OHM Gallery on December 3, Berlin artist duo Aurora Sander and London-based cellist Oliver Coates at HAU on December 4, and London producer Nkisi and Berlin producer DJ Paypal at Südblock on December 5.
Creamcake are presenting New Consumerism, Multimedia Dualism, & Spiritual Madness as a part of 3hdFestival, running at Berlin’s HAU 2 on December 4.
The hybrid stage performance is their latest project, mixing a wide range of musical genres – from classical music to experimental violent sounds – with the art collective Aurora Sander‘s visual environment.
It will lead viewers and listeners to interpret not only music itself, but also the interdependence between sonic elements and “spiritual madness of modern technology”, ultimately to examine “the labor of sound” today.
It had never occurred to me to look at what the word Creamcake actually means. The top definition on Urban Dictionary calls it “A warm heaping stream of MASTURBATION! :D”. A Google search yields several baking recipes but that’s if you skip the website and the Soundcloud for the Berlin-based events organisers that come up at the top of search results – but my algorithm is biased.
If you visit the Creamcake website you’ll be met by a video of a preteen girl in a chlorinated pool swimming to the soundtrack of ‘DRAKE – OVOXO (TEAMS ∞ TRUST EDIT)’, and an impressive list of producers, performers and artists with links. The assumption is they’ve been part of the Creamcake party roster and if you’ve been lucky enough to be in Berlin to attend a Creamcake event, then you’d know that said assumption is right.
An ongoing club night organised by Berlin-based Bavarian-born DJs and academics, Daniela Seitz and Anja Weigl, the ongoing Creamcake programme has been happening with limited promotion and loads of kudos in the German city for the past four years. It’s featured the likes of Felicita,Elysia Crampton, and Club Cacao; Hanne Lippard, DJ Paypal and Kamixlo, and it’s a cog in an international art and music scene that is way ahead of the mainstream curve –one that started in bass music and expanded into anything dark, weird and, oddly, pop.
But Creamcake’s is a different kind of pop. It’s one that holds Berlin’s long-established tradition of the disruptive potential of the club, long after that potential was lost to the mainstreaming of techno culture. Now it can be found in the Twitter identity theft and cuteboy design aesthetic ofSimon Whybray, the Dutch hardcore and gabber influences of Nkisi,and the opera compositions and drag performance of Colin Self. These are but a few of the artists announced for the upcoming 3hd Festival, the first organised by Creamcake, running online and off for the coming months and culminating in a four-day IRL event across four venues in Berlin, running December 2 to 5.
The live programme (see the first line-up announcement in full here) lists performances, DJ sets, a music video premiere by Easter, and discussions moderated by writer and academic Adam Harper. Online will be a series of essays, exclusive tracks and interviews in what is better described by the 3hd press release as a “label – magazine – festival” project, focused on art, music and the “hybrid practices” that have emerged from the era of the internet. Titled The Labour of Sound in a World of Debt, Seitz and Weigl spoke with aqnb on Skype, to point straight to the theme’s core and its articulations in art: Money, capitalism and the struggle to survive within it.
These concepts you’re working with in 3hd Festival, are they things that you had applied as you were programming the Creamcake parties, or did they reveal themselves in the process of putting them on?
Daniela Seitz: Creamcake started as a party restricted to the club environment, a place that brings people from different backgrounds together in a safe place. Everyone drinks and dances, gets wasted, and happier and happier as it’s happening. This was always fun, but we’ve been doing Creamcake for four years now, and we’re also getting a little older [laughs]. We kind of felt that with the HAU Hebbel am Ufer evening [Fragments of a Scene] back in April –where we had our first chance to work with an internationally established theatre –as a team, we really wanted to get more out of the concept, out of what we always had a vision for.
Anja Weigl: Yeah, exactly. It was a very inspiring opportunity.
Do you think if you took the music out of that context, which in this case would be Creamcake and put it on MTV, then it no longer is that interesting, like it’s exactly the same thing?
DS: I would agree with this. More people are adapting to our taste, including new parties and organizations. It helps to establish our community, a certain sound and taste in music, but we’ve always pushed past the mainstream. I wouldn’t say that we would succeed being on MTV or other mainstream channels, but, that would probably help our financial situation.
AW: [laughs].
You say that all this is on the internet, and then that there are these constant shifts in your interests. Do you think, then, that change is integral to Creamcake, in the same way that for information to continue to exist on the internet that it needs to constantly be in circulation?
DS: The internet opens windows for creativity and solidarity, and also transcends genres. Music is being shared among strangers across distances of megabytes and culture. There is so much content you can click on, read, and listen to. We’re very inspired by the cultural diversity online. But this also comes at the expense of exhaustion from having to check out everything.
AW: If we hear a musical style for too long –we also DJ –we feel the need for a change. First we were in touch with artists who explored EDM-flavoured pop, then it was more dark stuff, then Vogue for a while, then we were like ‘oh yeah, now we need something else’, or ‘oh, wow that sounds fresh’. Then the PC Music bubblegum sound was really inspiring to us, but we were feeling like ‘oh yeah, there still needs to be more’, in between the windows, you know? And there’s experimental music and new club music playing in the frame. There’s always change, change is important.
It’s an interesting way to think about that in terms of dogma because I often think about there being some kind of end goal or conclusion to a pursuit but in this case I don’t think there is, and having one would be unhelpful.
DS: The approach comes from innovation and change as the biggest shift in our society. When I was in university, I had to prepare presentations and papers about change management and innovation strategies in cultural institutions. When I wrote my Master thesis, I was researching about how a museum can be a platform for social change, and what it means to be a ‘responsible’ museum. That is to say, a new area in present museum work, and it will take years to transform such exclusive institutions, especially here in Germany. You always have to ask yourself, “what’s my role in this society?” So there you go. Creamcake’s current role is to empower smaller artists of the internet, offer them a platform to perform, and connect them with others in IRL.
I’m thinking about that in relation to the theme [The Labor of Sound in a World of Debt], as much as you’re inspired by capitalism, there’s very much an anti-capitalist sentiment.
DS: Yeah, it’s very nonpolitical, but also political, if that makes sense. We love to invite artists who are discovering new paths, or have just started their career. We find them on Soundcloud and/or through our own social network. These new online sources have outpaced the older capitalist logic, and signal a movement where something quite new and groundbreaking has arrived in music culture.
So say we’re in late-capitalism now, is there something after that and is that even desirable?
DS: Hmmmm. I mean, everything we do, we do as if we were a ten employee start up company, even if it’s just the two of us (and our assistant Sam). We focus heavily on strategy and marketing. But we also really love what we do: discovering new artists either for the performances or for the images, and introducing them to our community. This inspiration came always first in curating the general aesthetic, sound and images for Creamcake. The variables of money, time and work are barely connected, and a basic income is helpful for our team.
So in terms of your marketing strategies, where you find a stylish point of difference, you’re the Apple Computers, circa 2000, of music events.
DS: Yeah, you can say that [laughs]. I thought Apple Music failed.
I don’t mean Apple now, Apple now has become the status quo, in the same way that MTV has. It started as an alternative then became mainstream.
DS: I don’t think this is going to happen to us [laughs]. This is also the money question again, connected with taste and fairness. We always pay our artists, and would like to be able to pay more, so they can actually live from making music and art. When we hear how much bigger people get paid to work with more mainstream platforms and brands, it’s insane. It’s really insane.
AW: With Creamcake we really enjoy working with newer artists because it’s more fun and inspiring. You can feel their passion and excitement shine when you’re at Creamcake night. So Creamcake as a brand will always stay niche. But maybe the new babe, 3hd Festival, has full potential to perforate the mainstream.
Your attitude towards parties reminds me of Sick Girls…
AW: Yeah, they had started when we were still discovering Berlin’s nightlife, before we started putting on nights. When we moved to Berlin in 2007, we went to a show at a club called Picknick where they played alongside Jahcoozi. We’ve presented both of them separately at Creamcake in 2012 and 2013, I think.
It’s similar to them in the way you prefer emerging styles and scenes over ones that are too established.
AW: Yeah, definitely. Actually, they started to present the first bass music events here in Berlin, but then they stopped for some reason. Being a promoter who likes to take risks is definitely not going to bring you enough money for living, and that can be exhausting. With help from Musicboard Berlin, where we got our first cultural funding for 3hd Festival, we are able to bypass the financial issues that have prevented us in the past from really creating a more diverse experience for our audience.
I heard Claire Danes mentioned the Berghain on The Ellen DeGeneres show.
DS: Haha. Anja showed the video to me yesterday. She sees it in a funny way, which I’m thankful for. I get easily offended by people thinking Berlin is only techno, using it for their image, that they here discovered it, and it was all so crazy, and people were so crazy there, etc. And then Anja is like, ‘oh, this is so funny’.
AW: This is also really funny because techno is the big thing here, especially for Americans. Come on, Claire Danes is promoting techno music on the Ellen DeGeneres show? It makes me smile. **
Event organisers Creamcake are presenting a new “hybrid project”, 3hd Festival under the theme of The Labor of Sound in a World of Debt and running offline across Berlin’s Vierte Welt, HAU 2, OHM Gallery and Südblock from December 2 to 5.
The project has emerged in response to the contemporary moment, where art practice and mediation is becoming increasingly hybridised, while aiming to provide access and open creative processes through a comprehensive complementary online programme, including essays, exclusive tracks and interviews.
In recognising these aesthetic transformations, the event is set to include a line-up of innovators and newcomers working in this new realm of art and music-making across a “label – magazine – festival” format. The programme is yet to be announced but will no doubt be impeccable given past Creamcake events that have hosted the likes of Future Brown, 18+ and Felicita to name just a few.
Graphic and web designer Jon Lucas will also be working alongsideproducer Tokyo Hands in developing the online component of the project.
Berlin’s Creamcake party is returning this month with a handful of music acts at OHM Gallery on Saturday, August 8.
The monthly Berlin cultural event series takes over the Köpenickerstr. gallery with live performances from New York-based K-pop and rap act Yen Tech and Berlin-based act Mind:Body:Fitness, as well as music from Munich-based DJ and producer Mechatok, London/Brixton-based producer Kamixlo, and Creamcake-founder Larry.
Berlin’s Creamcake is throwing another massive party, this time with ‘post-national’ group Future Brown and a handful of other performers at Berghain Kantine this Saturday, February 28.
The Creamcake show brings Future Brown as its headliner, whose sold out ICA London show we wrote about here, and the Berlin one, like everything Future Brown seems to touch, is sold out as well. The Saturday performance is also celebrating the Berlin release of Future Brown’s new album, which can be streamed at NPR here.