How I Cured My Writer’s Block With Techno
I was stuck. It was early 2017 and, after closing an issue of the magazine I was editing, I had more time to work on my unfinished thriller, but no inclination or inspiration to write. After weeks of weeding through news stories for factual, structural, and logical weakness, writing fiction was harder than usual, which is to say: not happening at all.
When asked about my writing habits, I always said I couldn’t work to music. Friends tried to convince me that this was untrue with a refrain that anyone who doesn’t work to music has probably heard. It’s the lyrics, they said. Try something instrumental! I tried jazz, but live instrumentation—a palm slapping the body of a bass, the buzz of a finger sliding up a guitar string—transported me to the studio or club where the song was recorded and took my mind off the page. I tried classical music, then contemporary classical, which didn’t hurt my concentration or output, but didn’t help either. Besides contributing to the Spotify checks of Phillip Glass or the estate of Johan Sebastian Bach, what was the point?
Back then, my exposure to electronic music was limited to parties and clubs, where I gave almost no thought to what the DJ was playing. I was there to cut loose; to see old friends and meet new ones with music somewhere in my peripheral hearing. I was not a burner, not a raver, and my attitude towards those scenes was summed up by a Tweet I once read: “Love when they play music at the drugs festival.” Which is not to say that I never enjoyed electronic music. I was a year behind the band MGMT at Wesleyan, where house parties were frequently laced with the sugary synth-pop that later swept the country. In New York after college, I attended a few raves at Studio B, the beloved and now shuttered Brooklyn club, but I couldn’t tell you much about the music, except that it was loud and percussive. In Las Vegas on business, I endured 30 minutes of drop-heavy EDM at one of the Wynn’s nightclubs before deciding that everything is not for everybody, and EDM was definitely not for me.
Among my friends were a few DJs and aficionados of house and techno—the purist strains that pay homage to the dance music born in 1980s Detroit. A few weeks into my writer’s block, one of these techno-snobs got us ticket to see the Los Angeles-based DJ Lovefingers at a club out in Greenpoint. I was at the office when I first pulled up one of his recorded mixes, part of a podcast series from the Dutch label Dekmantel, and hit play. The opening track stiffened my spine. It was Chopin’s prelude in E minor, performed by a Polish vocal quartet called Novi Singers—90 seconds of haunting, soothing a cappella—followed by Andrea Daltro’s “Kiuá,” an eerie cut of Brazilian electronica, shot through with birdsong, echoic drums, and maracas like the warnings of a rattlesnake. As the mix moved through psychedelic trance-inducing house music and industrial techno, I saw for the first time how track selection, in the hands of a gifted DJ, could tell a story. I’d been working for an hour when I realized that the pulsing kick drums and glittering synths were helping me find a rhythm.
Alone in my apartment that night, I found a recorded club set; two hours of hard techno from the DJ Avalon Emerson, and sat down to write. Here, suddenly, was music I could work to, a shortcut to the kind of flow state all writers seek, the trance-like condition where dialogue and description run uninterrupted from your mind to your fingertips, where shards of your subconscious get sucked up and spit onto the page. Techno occupied the part of my brain that was forever judging, analyzing, applying the brakes as I wrote. Not only did it not interfere with my writing process, it acted as a sedative for my inner critic, or at least a shiny toy to keep it busy while I got some work done.
A 36-hour dance party with a heavy fetish bent may seem like a strange place to clear your head, but that’s what techno and “klubnachts” do for me.
After that, I did with electronic music what I do with anything that interests me: an obsessive, completest deep dive. I listened to countless tracks and mixes, bookmarked Resident Advisor in my browsers, went out as often as my schedule allowed. While reading up on clubs, one name popped up again and again: Berghain, a cavernous Berlin techno institution, and the first club in history to receive a New Yorker profile. I was writing to techno regularly by then, but still not clear on why it was working. To quote Nick Paumgarten on Berghain’s signature sound, “techno is repetitive, relying on subtle changes over time to intrigue the ear. It eschews lyrics, melody, and, arguably, harmonics. It doesn’t resolve. You don’t get crowd-pleasing drops.” There is, in other words, nothing besides brief and occasional samples to take you out of the experience of listening to techno. In a review of an album by Efdemin, one of Berghain’s resident DJs, Pitchfork contributing editor Philip Sherburne wrote that “techno has always been about the promise of disappearing into nothingness.” In Theravada Buddhism, which I was studying concurrently, the concept of nothingness is known as Suññatā—also translated as “emptiness” or “voidness”—and used to refer to a meditative state.
Six months after discovering the Lovefingers podcast, I went on a date with a Polish artist who’d spent the past six years in Berlin. After dinner, we ended up at my apartment, where we discovered a mutual affinity for techno, and spent a few hours playing each other music. My date went to Berghain often, and while setting the scene for a story, she asked if I knew Rob’s Bar, a little five-seat nook buried deep in the club. “I’ve never been to Berghain,” I said. My date was shocked. She was friends with Ryan Elliott, a resident DJ there who had put her on the guest list for an upcoming party. Would I like to join as her plus one? Yes, I would. That, we decided, would be our second date.
On a Monday morning in Berlin, I shared a bench with an elegantly dressed German couple in their 50s who sipped espresso and banana juice while we chatted—I think— about American politics and the advantages of Los Angeles over New York. The content of our conversation is hazy because it was 4:40 a.m. and we were 15 hours into Klubnacht or “club night” at Berghain, whose Saturday party runs straight through Sunday and into the following week. The bench we shared sits just outside Panorama Bar, Berghain’s upstairs dance floor, and the air was thick with smoke, sweat, and the vibrations of a pulsing kick drum under a slinky bassline. A woman wearing only a few square inches of latex appeared, accompanied by a man in a full-body gimp suit. She walked on six-inch spikes while he crawled beside her on a leash attached to the studded collar around his neck. The German couple seemed not to notice. I excused myself and went back to the dance floor, where Ryan Elliott was approaching the halfway mark of a ten-hour set. My new friends were remarkably sober and engaging, but I wanted to stop talking, stop thinking, and empty my mind for a while.
A 36-hour dance party with a heavy fetish bent may seem like a strange place to clear your head, but that’s what techno and “klubnachts” do for me. Berghain is famous for its extremely selective and inscrutable door policy, but once you’re inside, pretty much anything goes. You can undress yourself or someone else, so long as they consent. You can sample every pill and powder known to man in the packed unisex bathrooms, which look like a cross between a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape and the hyper-sexual early work of the artist Wolfgang Tillmans, whose photos hang on the walls of the club. You can also do what I did that night: stand under the speakers and close your eyes, alone and unbothered, mineral water in hand, and enter a kind of meditative state, your awareness on the beat rather than your breath.
We left Berghain at sunrise, woke up Monday night, and went out to dinner. Back at her apartment, I opened my laptop at the kitchen table. “You’re on vacation,” my date said. “Take some time off, yeah?” But all I wanted to do was put on headphones, find the tracks I’d Shazamed the night before, and get to work.
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Love and Theft by Stan Parish is available via Doubleday.
