dina.elsayed

  Andres Barlesi first picked up a guitar when he was just five years old, was in his first band by the age of 12, and went on to play and tour internationally with the Argentinian indie band Los Alamos. Today the 36-year-old musician from Buenos Aires lives in Berlin and is working on his solo project, "Atalaya." Barlesi's music for Atalaya isn't confined to particular song structures. When developing […]

  Picturing the early beginnings of a veteran DJ conjures the classic image of turntables and crates full of vinyl. But Michael Fiedler – better known as Fiedel, Berghain's longtime resident DJ – began on tapes.   "I come from eastern Germany, and there was hardly vinyl available, no turntables...I started recording tapes on the radio, and then I played tapes with two tape decks... I had long, long lists with […]

  The earliest memory Raven Chacon recalls of music-making is hearing his grandfather sing Navajo songs while working, watching television, or reading. Later as Chacon began taking piano lessons and learning about music notation, he also began experimenting with making sounds in other ways, with cassette tapes or banging on metal. Now Chacon, who is known for his chamber music compositions, experimental noise performances, and installation art pieces, will live […]

  DJ duo SpatzHabibi have been part of the underground club scene in Berlin for years.  These days, when not looking after their son, Sophie Funke and Pete Littlewood can be found performing at venues around the city and running their label Polychrome Sounds. Creating their own label in Berlin "wasn't 100% about music... it was a lot about just being involved and creating like a kind of community or […]

  “I was an only child,” said Rik de Lisle, an American radio presenter who has been in broadcast since 1976. “My brothers and sisters were the radio.” De Lisle enlisted in the Army when he was 17 and became famous during the Cold War for his on air personality on the airwaves for the U.S. Armed Forces Radio station, AFN. “Berlin was edgy, because of the wall around it, […]

  We're used to hearing music and digital sound from simple speakers. Monom, a new, state-of-the-art spatial sound studio and performance space, aims to recreate the natural perception of sound in a spatial environment.  Monom resides in Funkhaus Berlin, a former broadcasting complex built by the GDR in the 1950s, and is powered by a 4D sound system developed by Dutch audio engineers over the past decade. The result is […]

  “The inspiration was definitely how one has to deal with what’s happening right now,” says London-born and Berlin-based Sasha Perera, also known as Perera Elsewhere, about her new album. Perera talks with Marlene Melchior about the Berlin music scene, her experience performing in the same lineup as Pussy Riot, and what’s next for her. Photo courtesy Sasha Perera.

  For years, people told American DJ and producer Sky Deep that she should go to Berlin. It made her curious, so she planned a tour stop in the city with her band at the time. Now she’s lived in Berlin for three years. When asked about the current atmosphere in the U.S., Sky Deep said “as a black, queer woman,” she is terrified to return to her home country. […]

  The Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin offers a conservatory education to musicians from the Middle East and North Africa as a way to promote a more peaceful future for a troubled region. Monika Müller-Kroll talks to the rector of the Akademie, Prof. Dr. Michael Naumann. A natural continuation of Daniel Barenboim's and Edward Said's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Akademie aims to produce a generation of musicians who will "know better" […]