how to let songs walk you through their worlds (I)

sometimes i think the cities i know best are the ones i've never been to. not because of travel or film or photographs, but because of certain writers who somehow bypassed the retina entirely and built a place directly inside the body.

Ferrante's Napoli. Ernaux's Paris. Serghi's Mangalia.

there's something about the way these women write that builds a place inside my head, not a replica of a real street, but a kind of mood-city. an atmosphere. an affective geography. and recently, i realised i might have a sonic version of this too.

thought of finding the trifecta of songs that do the same (so i hope this becomes a 3-part series) after i have recently been mesmerized yet again by a call super set.

some songs you find by accident, mid-scroll or mid-set, and they snag on something. not because they're bangers. because they have a peculiar atmosphere. a place inside them. last time it happened it was with Stadtkind.

released on Ellen Allien's own label BPitch Control on the original Stadtkind album, March 5, 2001. the version of Barbara Morgenstern remix came a few months later, on the Stadtkind Rmxs EP released August 8, 2001.

which after lots of obsessive plays i think is incredible at encapsulating a sort of whole history of Berlin and perhaps the world (cold war) in music form. or at least it evokes it. a sonic manifestation of Berlin's split psyche.

and probably it also matters that all this came out in 2001, a moment when the city was very much radiating this raw, chaotic creativity that had not yet been eaten by capitalism and trends. the city was cheap, strange, full of possibility and in a messy becoming. the kind of place that felt alive in a way cities never do anymore.

allow me to explain and exaggerate accordingly.

even before reading the lyrics (and not understanding the meaning of the word Stadtkind, but perhaps i was subconsciously understanding that kind means child, i was already imagining myself on berlin streets as a kid.

the word itself — city child — does something. there's a particular kind of dream where your childhood neighbourhood stops being safe, and you wake up not sure if it changed or if you just finally saw it clearly(?), or your prefrontal cortex finally developed(?) or maybe the world changed, along with concepts such as safety and trust.

something about that dream cracked the shell of childhood memory, and Stadtkind slid perfectly into that crack.

the song unravels like a wandering, looking here and there, seeing grey buildings, tower blocks, abandoned factories. it has a very industrial look, not quite like home, but close to it. perhaps due to the repetition of the minimalistic beats that go in a sort of circular way. repetition suggests calculation, mathematics. it calls out the national emblem of East Germany, the rule and compass. it's the looking for something in a grey city, a bit traumatized, lots of emptiness created by empty land where you know something WAS.

the early beats feel like walking at dusk, those long shadows, the kind of cold air that feels like metal on your skin, the echo of your own footsteps following you. Berlin has this thing where the empty spaces are louder than the inhabited ones.

therefore, the beats in the first minute, and especially around 0:45 where a low piano key enters the composition, add a bit of soft horror, which in turn adds to the haunting feeling, the haunting of a dead city its voids of erased history, but where energy is still felt. or perhaps ideology, East Berlin, USSR, and the haunt of the socialist ideals that lived there. but we're at the epicenter of a whole new world to come. the point zero of the cold war. and we're definitely post '89 and a sense of confusion is in the air. and loneliness, trauma, division, but also hope and connection.

this is where the song feels like layers of old Berlin leaking into the new one, like you can still hear the past humming underneath the present. industry, ideology, abandonment, rebirth. techno often works like this… as if the past is still vibrating underneath the bassline, refusing to disappear. hauntology in 4/4.

the search intensifies, the city changes, pulsings of life and community reborn, there's tension, anticipation, a sort of omen to what's to come in the years to follow. that creative explosion.

then by 1:40 the first Stadt, and then finally, the warm SPARKLING SYNTHS that produce ecstasy and unknown neurochemicals. the word feels confident. it's an affirmation. now this is ONE city. and i am a kid of it. the search becomes even more pronounced as the synths that resemble alarm sounds transmit a sort of insistence. but a warmer one. the urgency is solved, because now we're also naming it. it's called BERLIN. TADA! we found it, and remade it as easily as saying TADA. childlike magic.

the child-like innocence is rapidly taken over in a city where weird tensions circulate, the same kind of energies you see in Christiane F, that mix of vulnerability, chaos, danger, the city swallowing kids whole while pretending to offer them freedom.

still a sort of tension is rising; the urgency of the alarm is still there, becoming more acute. the parallel would be that in post ‘89 the city indeed had a crisis, like most post-communist cities and countries, but this is even more true for Berlin, which has been in an identity crisis for a long time. one can also argue that dark forces have always governed this city with its bleak, self-destructive, nihilistic, sleepwalking energy.

even though Ellen was born in the west, the song has a very powerful eastern energy in it, and i can only explain it via imagining that this is the result of her exploration of eastern B. and experience of squatting in the former east from a young age. the confusion, tension, search-wandering, and affirmations that this is Berlin, now the same place that was over the wall, as well as the place she grew up in. it's an affirmation, but one that even in the little lyrics we have here contains the complex and tumultuous history that this city holds. a whole history in 3 words.

squatting matters in this affective mapping too. those buildings still held the last breaths of the GDR, leftover furniture, peeling wallpaper, ghosts. stepping inside them was like archaeology. of course, that energy enters the music.

then we have some soothing synths that take us into a trance, the body wants to dissolve into pleasure. the even sweeter voice of Barbara Morgenstern over Ellen Allien creates this welcome and hug effect in the song, which you then project onto the city and how it felt at the time to some scavengers that found their meaning and passions and community in its bleakness, perhaps under the thick walls of previous bunkers where sweat combined with ecstasy.

the pulsating warm synths come in almost like a friendly alarm, something that softens the urgency for a moment but still keeps that tension alive, like the city letting you breathe but not fully relax.

it might simply hold the sweet taste of perceived freedom and liberalism. but just like in real history, the sweet ecstatic hit comes to an end as freedom is not as sweet as imagined, and thus the song takes a more rough, serious tone again, and then pendulates again between the ecstatic hit and this seriousness. exactly like the hedonism in Berlin today.

the song also has sad qualities, which i imagine also come from the sadness of seeing easterners' identities and history slowly erased after the reunification.

Ostalgie = nostalgia for aspects of life in the former East Germany (GDR).

a longing for a simpler time, specific products, or a lost social stability and collective memory.

especially given the fact that "officially, unemployment had not existed in the GDR, but this employment security disappeared with reunification, and unemployment became endemic at around 20% of the workforce, and approximately 70% of East German women lost their jobs after 1990." – wiki

welcome to democracy, ladies! where freedom and equality are all, just not accessible to you, not via financial independence at least.

but the saddest existential part was and is the slow erasure of history, given that after reunification the histories of the two countries had to be merged into one coherent narrative, obviously with more focus on the western one.

this is why the song's melancholy feels so physical, the sound of a city whose memories were overwritten. a sort of urban amnesia, but one where the ghosts still knock from underneath.

of course, this is just a nostalgia-induced picture, Berlin is no longer how these two beautiful women sing about in only three words, but i will continue to wander through this version, even though that's not how i saw it.

i guess this might be the whole point: music, like writing, makes imaginary cities real. It creates its own geography, its own map, its own emotional architecture. a place that doesn't exist on google maps but exists in the body. a place that forms itself from loops and textures and half-memories. ambient does that in a gentler way, out of practically nothing, floating spaces, blurred borders.

Stadtkind does it in a harder, denser way, since it's about a real city, with a rich, tumultuous history. makes it feel like walking through its history and leftover ghosts. in the end, it's the same mechanism. sound becomes place. place becomes feeling. and somehow you end up wandering through cities you've never lived in, but that feel more familiar than the ones outside your window.