The May is going to be hot for the Erfurt located club Centrum. The former warehouse and today’s club in the center of the East German city is hosting a very special night of house music. No one less then Steve Bug is going to play on the 16th of May, celebrating once more the 10th anniversary of his own label Poker Flat. He is spinning the wheel on the main floor, along with DJ and producer Donnacha Costello, who contributed great tracks to Steve’s label and is very well known for the deep and formidable tracks on his own label Minimise as well as Sven U.K., whos great track “O Moresi” was part of Steve’s third Bugnology drop in late 2008.

Not that this is enough to celebrate. The Centrum recently also celebrated its 10th anniversary and will do so on this date for sure. I’m looking forward for this special event in the mid of May.

Well, the night turned out into a great journey that Kalei-doskop and me were using to record a nice one hour ping pong set. Everyone, who already played records together with someone else, either doing ping pong or just rotating knows that this can become very hard, since you cannot simply play your style by hook or by crook. You either fit together or you don’t. This was, of course, not the same like playing a 8 hour set ping pong, but I think for the first time our experiment was very successful.

I will upload the set soon. Until then, you can also download it right here.

Addition: There were also very strange people last night. Friendly but really strange. A guy asked me, whether I couldn’t play tracks in 4/4-beat. This is so funny, because he was moving head and legs for one hour to tracks that are all 4/4-beat. *g*

Then on the way home I walked through the city and three of these guys were crossing the road. All of them drunken. They noticed me from far away, shouting “Hey, this is the DJ.” and said that I’ve played bad when they were passing me.*g*

At Saturday, the 21th of June I’m going to play in the Zebra — a nice cocktail bar and open air location for hot Summer nights! The perfect location though to keep on dancing into the Summer!

Event Schedule:

Friday, 20.6. – Cafe Electronique @ Freizeit-Lounge (Luckenwalde), 10 p.m.
Tobias Lear vs. audiOptix DJ Team

Saturday, 21.6. – Tanz in den Sommer @ Zebra (Luckenwalde), 9 p.m.
Tobias Lear, B-nito

I really looking forward to this and hope to see all of you at those nights, or at least at one of those ;)

By Freizeit Lounge

The Freizeit Lounge – opened in March – is a small, comfortable bar in an arches-like location. Having a dance floor and a nice arrangement of settees makes it a good location for alternative events, lounge nights as well as providing a base for local artists of multiple music styles. And the more minimalistic arrangement (in positive sense) is also suitable for electronic music.

At Saturday three DJs have played – Kalei-doskop, Play and Hektiker. The night started with some older vocal house tracks: pretty good grovin’ and danceable of course. I’m actually not the huge fan of vocal house, although I still own some vocal house records from the days I began to buy records, but it was quite nice listening to this style though after a long time. The crowd was also pretty cool. I also met some old friends there, but the most suprising thing was, that Kalei-dokop (the owner of the bar) was a former classmate of mine :) The longer the night the more electro records were played by both Kalei-doskop and Hektiker, who then were performing a ping-pong set, and also serving well known tech-house classics like Steve Bug’s “Loverboy” from 1997 (man this record is 11 years old and still rocks!) and Guido Schneider’s “As Dry As I Can” from 2003, both on Poker Flat.

By Freizeit Lounge

My night ended around 6:30 a.m. after enjoying a nice breakfast (still being at the lounge) with the last few people. I know that this wasn’t the end at all, so be prepared for a long night if you go there ;)

Altogether it was a great night with good music, relaxing people and with old and new friends. Definitely not the last time I was there! Check out the upcoming events at the Freizeit Lounge!

A good friend of mine asked me to join him to go to the Faces, a rough night club that is famous for its Thursday night parties starting at 6 am to end up in the late evening, a good choice though when leaving the Wednesday Tresor party and you actually don’t wanna quit yet. We’d planned to go to the Faces last Friday, but appaerently the club was closed that night. Their website doesn’t seem to be that up to date.

After discarding one club after another as a compromise (we were a group of one girl and five guys, and had to find a club with a moderate door policy) we’ve tried our luck at the Watergate. The last time I was in the Watergate was around 2004/05. And it’s also while ago, since I was in a Berlin club.

The wating line wasn’t that long, so we were waiting just for about 5 minutes. Thanks to the anonym girls in front of the club, who helped us joining the club as fake couples ;)

Inside the Watergate we were first checking out the Water Floor, where The Cheapers aka Ruede Hagelstein and Fraenzen Texas were playing a 12 hour ping pong set. Fast checking the schedule of that I explored, that Mitja Prinz was playing in the upper LED floor. Since my last time here, they’ve rebuilt this floor with a nice arrangement and freaking, long spread ceiling with thousands of LEDs, controlled by a VJ. I’ve already hear about the LED lights and also saw some videos, but you have to check out this thing in real time! It’s simply gorgeous!!!

Mitja Prinz played an fine grained techhouse set with some darker influences, which generally was interessting to me. Most of the tracks he played were unknown to me, either brand new or unreleased stuff, or records I still not know. Two tracks I definitely remember were Konrad Black “Medusa Smile” and Spektre “Capacitor” (a relatively new one). After him Scarlett Etienne, an upcoming female DJ from London started between 3 and 3.30 am. I really liked the first few records, that she was playing. It was interesting that both were playing with digital setups and vinyl emulation, Mitja with N.I. Traktor Scratch (a software that also Steve Bug and Ritchie Hawtin are using) and Scarlett with a – to me – unknown software.

We (a friend and I) left the club at around 4 am, which means, that the night wasn’t so long for a Berlin club night ;) Maybe the next one will last longer, since I plan to visits the Pokerflat label night at the Watergate in April.