Organic Intelligence XXX: The Baader Meinhof Bum Dungeon

In this month’s antidote to the algorithm, Luke Turner heads back a decade to a riotous and fruity moment where techno got the horn, and decided to have a massive laugh

Just over a decade ago, something seemed to shift in the clubbing firmament. Given a home by long-standing London techno nights such as Plex, venues like Corsica Studios, and released on the likes of Perc Trax, Diagonal, Killekill, R&S, Downwards, and Blackest Ever Black, a new form of techno started to take on a fresh sense of vigour and vim, breaking free of the dry constraints of minimal, embracing the workshop metal and soot of 90s Birmingham techno, the sweaty boom of Berlin, the swing of Detroit. It was not a time of sonic purity – there was acid here, the returning influence of EBM, especially the outré fruitiness of Nitzer Ebb and DAF, along with the deep sonics of Throbbing Gristle and Coil, big boot industrial, even some of the glitz of electroclash. What united it all for me was the sense of fresh attitude to techno that wasn’t head-noddy, completist, crate-digging or dour, but at times ludicrously fun and fairly horny, an embracing of entertainment, greasepaint, revelling in being utterly whacked to pieces by sound. 

 Take, for example, the Regis live set from Plex at Corsica Studios on 2 November 2012 (you can hear it here (Opens in a new window), the regular uploads from Plex (Opens in a new window) are an essential document of the scene). Karl O’Connor had played with Ugandan Methods earlier in the night, starting the familiar chugging menace of the live set at some ungodly hour, before clearly getting a bit bored and shouting “alright let’s fuck that off, let’s have a fucking disco, FUCKING POGO! FUCKING POGO!” and dropping ‘Strings of Life’ (not to mark out O’Connor as the Carry On actor of the scene, this came not long after he’d interrupted a set at the same venue by playing the theme from Dad’s Army).

That attitude characterised what was going on. There was a sense that to take this astoundingly heavy music and fairly fierce BPM on face value as being austere and macho was a mistake – it was very playful, while also being performed with incredibly serious intent. It was heady, physical, steamy. As I wrote at the time, there was something about the vibe of those nights that reminded me of that Coil concept of music and the ritual accumulation of sexual energy. Despite most of the artists being male, it was noticeable that clubs started to get a lot more mixed in terms of gender. And again, while few of those involved were explicitly queer, there was a fluidity to the energy of the music that certainly was, no doubt due to the influence of Berlin’s Berghain nightclub. This leathery slap & tickle, wit and abandon (plus it sounding vaguely Teutonic) led tQHQ naming this loose genre of our own making Baader Meinhof Bum Dungeon, in part inspired to what yours truly used to get up to on trips to the German capital, stories that are not fit for this family newsletter. So, without further ado, here are five essential slappers from much-missed BMBD: