Monday, November 18, 2024

Hamburg: The Liminal City (And how it relates to hardcore and techno) - Part 1

a sort of an anecdote as an intro:
a friend was on a business trip from germany to los angeles, related to a computer game exposition event.
while in LA, he noted that a gabber party was going down, so he paid it a visit.
when talking with the local gabber maniacs, he mentioned that he was originally from hamburg; apparently, this sent everyone into awe:

"You come from the city of Hamburg Hardcore? Nordcore? Fischkopf?".

Nordcore Gmbh - Hartcore City

So, it seems hamburg actually has a reputation in the globally connected world of hardcore and gabber.
This came as a bit of a surprise to me. Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, are known "hot spots" in the geography of hard(est) electronic music - but hamburg?

So, let's take a closer look at this city in northern germany.

I was born in hamburg and grew up in it, and joined the "hamburg hardcore scene" in my early teenage years.
I always had the expression that this city was special and some of its almost magical ambiance sipped into its hardcore sound.

low entropy - hamburg hardcore anthem

But I initially shrugged this off - leaning more extremely towards the left wing, i felt hostile to any form of nationwide or more "local" patriotism.
But even beyond politics, I felt that being overly proud of your city / hometown was more fitting for soccer fans and their rivalries, than for the 'real world'.

Yet the left, and especially its more anarchist and / or surreal contingent had its own history of being fascinated by cities, towns, and other places, too.
Just think of the (post) situationists and their various psycho-geographies of urban agglomerations.

So, I came to the conclusion that one could see it this way:
Certain cities are not "better" than others, but special in their own way.

metatron - new urbanist

Thus, what makes hamburg special?

One point to note is the liminality which is ingrained into the city's history.

Maybe a bit similar to berlin in the cold war era, hamburg was a city which was torn apart in its geography and occupied places in, and in between, different nations and political structures.

Part of it belonged to denmark, part of it belonged to the various, often hostile mini-nations that were eventually united into "germany" in the 19th century.

Allfix - Sound of hamburg

There was the story that in those days, criminals and robbers that were pursued by the police could just run towards the hamburg district of altona, as this part was under danish administration - and the "german law" had no power over there.
Maybe this story was more of a joke; but the truth is that you could literally "walk between worlds" in hamburg, with different nations and different (political) realities being separated by merely a few footsteps.

This is barely known, but Hamburg, in its modern, current form, is a creation of the nazis which was never reversed after the war.

Even though the danish and the intra-national split had been long gone, the nazis tried to "fix" and "clean up" any remaining rifts and fractures in the geography of hamburg.

So this was the purely political and municipal liminality of hamburg.

Abwärtz - Affentanz
Hamburg industrial punk pioneer band from the 80s


But wait, there is more
Only topped by rotterdam (another important hardcore city) hamburg is host to the second most important commercial port of europe.
Which means that a large quantity of goods that pop up in other european places, like france, vienna, or prague, have passed through hamburg at some point of their "delivery route" - food, tech, furniture, medicine, everything, even drugs.

This is quite a feat, as hamburg is actually a few hundred kilometers away from the atlantic ocean.
Which actually is another quirk of hamburg; even though it's an inland city, it somehow feels like a seaport, too.
With seagulls, the constant blowing of marine horns, the occasional sounding of flood sirens.
One can almost feel the taste of saltwater on ones lips.
Or is this another illusion of hamburg?
Because there has been some "scientific" debate whether hamburg's port is made up of a larger quantity of saltwater, or a larger quantity of freshwater.

The Mover - Over land and sea

And hamburg is a watery town indeed; host to "more bridges and channels than venice" (a popular claim), the presence of water and waterways is ubiquitous in hamburg.

Add to that the regular and seasonal "flooding" which makes the sight of marketplaces, streets and cars totally submerged in water a known occurrence.

This actually inspired the band Sisters of Mercy to write and title it's album Floodland.

Sisters of Mercy - This Corrosion

Andrew Eldritch, the band's leader and singer, stayed in hamburg for the production of the album.
The sighting of this water-submerged city somehow led to a feverish vision on his part; the imaginal mirage of a city that exists both on dry land and amongst the far away ocean at the same time; perpetually floating on the seven seas.
And this, it seems, was a well enough inspiration to create a wonderful album.

These are two of the many examples for the "liminal" nature of hamburg.

marc acardipane - chaos a.d.
Marc Acardipane lives in Hamburg now.


It's a city that's "neither here nor there", a heisenberg field perpetually on the verge of collapsing (but it won't... or will it?), with uncertain and uncanny boundaries, geographically and informally fractured, split apart, contra-dictionary, and also united at the same time.

And I think it's not too far-fetched to draw some connection to the hardcore and techno scene of the 90s here.
As this music scene thrived on the crossing of boundaries too, going beyond limits, ventures into the uncertain, trespassing into undefined territories - and back again.
Smashing things up, fracturing them, only to finally mend these fragments into a new whole.
Moving between structures and (sonic) architecture.

fm einheit, john caffery - riots
FM Einheit was a member of hamburg band abwärts - and of einstürzende neubauten


I think if you look at other cities that were important in the history of hardcore (and other) music, such as rotterdam, berlin, new york... you will find similar issues, rifts, and fractures.

We will further explore these ideas and connections in the next part in this series of articles.

10. e-man - entering the unknown
E-Man aka Miro Pajic lived in Hamburg for some years.