Home is the place where you feel at ease. Can you go out and be at home at the same time?
Berlin’s Week-End club is the place where the boundaries blur. Where life never stops. Where the party never stops. It’s the home of the smart and the beautiful. Where the best bits of music, fashion, art and design go off in a big fancy explosion. Where you want to go to again and again.
Where everybody is your friend and life is grand. Berlin has always provided a home for the eccentric and flamboyant. Why not for you?
The Week-End (ex Pogo Club, ex FUN), situated at Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of these boho playhouses. Oskar Melzer, Week-End’s Creative Director, transformed the club into a cutting edge nightlife location. Melzer comes from a Jewish family of publishers and he grew up in Munich surrounded by artists, film-makers, writers, photographers and theorists. For Melzer, nightlife always meant more than just getting wasted, the cultural aspect was essential.
Melzer is the Week-End’s curator and he decorates the club like a sophisticated and amusing museum of modern art with pictures painted by artists like Johannes Albers and Cerith Wynn hanging on the walls. The Week-End’s (and before, Pogo’s and FUN’s) guest list includes all the movers and shakers of the “Berliner Republik”, unsubsidised avant-garde, old friends and new acquaintances who meet to dance, drink, kiss and have fun. Rimbaud’s imperative “il faut être absolument modernes” (“one must be absolutely modern”) is the instruction for action for DJs (or artists) such as Tiga, Highfish, Paul Moog, Ewan Pearson, Dixon, Fetisch, DJ Kaos, Sasse, Dirt Crew, Too Many DJs, Steve Bug or Michi Beck. Be there or be square.
The now is not a fashion instance, it must always be bound to the history of DJ culture. The Week-End (same goes for Pogo & FUN) is part of the Sound of Berlin, a powerful nightlife force. On the Week-End compilation, it’s Trevor Jackson’s eclectic track where this idea is most refined. Jackson, who’s probably the record’s most mature artist, mixes acid and house, electro and techno like no other. This is exactly the sound you could have been hearing in Melzer’s clubs for the past ten years. It goes without saying that punk rock and disco, garage and minimalist experimental techno also have a home at the Week-End.
The Week-End is some kind of modern bohemian salon where contemporaries gather round the DJ pulpit for their digital regular’s table. They come to dance, to listen and to talk, and occasionally deals for collaborations and remixes are nailed. This shared experience is unmatched. New Week-End anthems are born (as from Phonique) and mind-expanding transitions are applauded. The CD compilation is a concentrated version of all the things that happen at the Week-End. When the “Geschmacksbürgertum” (the style-bourgeoisie) replaces the “Bildungsbürgertum” (the educated) in the 21st century, then this CD must become a benchmark.
Nightlife is a modern pop laboratory and the Week-End is the place for basic research. “Knowledge is King”, says Kool Moe Dee. Long live the king!
F.U.N. - DATES
F.U.N.
Currently not on tour
F.U.N. - PHOTOS
Great song, great guy:
Four Music proudly presents
Rafael Weber - Es tut mir leid
