Dietmar-Maria "Dimitri" Hegemann (born August 26, 1954) is a German nightclub owner, cultural activist and community organizer, currently living and working in Berlin, Germany.
Dietmar-Maria "Dimitri" Hegemann (born August 26, 1954) is a German nightclub owner, cultural activist and community organizer, currently living and working in Berlin, Germany.
Dimitri Hegemann was born in Werl of Westfalia, West Germany on August 26, 1954. He moved to be part of the developing art, music and social scenes in West Berlin and began studying musicology in Münster, and after relocation, at the Free University Berlin in 1978. He played the bass in the locally known band "Leningrad Sandwich". Between 1982 and 1990, he organized five Berlin Atonal featuring groups like Malaria!, Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Dept, Laibach, Psychic TV and Die Haut.
In 1986, he opened a gallery in an old shoe store, which he called the Fischbüro, a name inspired by the Dadaist movement. In the gallery's basement in 1988 he opened the acid house club Ufo. Though the basement room had a ladder for access, and space for only 100 people, Ufo hosted the after-party celebration of the first Love Parade in 1989.
After the wall came down, Hegemann and his friends opened the techno club Tresor, [1] which was located between the two infamous walls - in the heart of the reunited city. Tresor became the launchpad for a youth culture movement inspired by techno, the futuristic dance sound made in Detroit. [2] A relationship between Hegemann and Detroit artists Mike Banks and Jeff Mills of Underground Resistance began and continues to this day. [3]
In 2005, the council of Berlin sold the ground where Tresor was located to an insurance company and Tresor had to move out. In March 2007, Hegemann found a new home for the club in an abandoned power plant in the middle of Berlin. The new home is called Kraftwerk Berlin and features art, music, and cultural events across several genres.
In 2015 Hegemann launched a community organization called Happy Locals, and another called the Academy for Subcultural Understanding. The Happy Locals is a group made up of Berlin-based organizations, which help make alternative projects happen. Since 2012, the Happy Locals have shared its experience and knowledge, finding collaborators and partners to plan creative projects for cities that need them.
The Happy Locals want to expand the project nationally and internationally. Hegemann considers himself a cultural activist and calls himself a "space" pioneer - aiming to turn industrial ruins into cultural spaces. Only restorative art, he says, can save old cities from vanishing into meaninglessness. His current project involves renovating industrial spaces in Detroit as part of a group called the Detroit-Berlin Connection. He wants to help the people of Detroit, with alternative, non-traditional projects using assets that already exist in the community: the people who live there and a multitude of still solid, but underused buildings.
Hegemann wants to encourage Detroiters by building a creative hub to help attract projects that combine art, music, technology with improving the quality of life in the city's neighborhoods. [4]
Jeff Mills, also known as "theWizard", is an American DJ, record producer, and composer. In the late 1980s Mills founded the techno collective Underground Resistance with fellow Detroit techno producers 'Mad' Mike Banks and Robert Hood but left the group to pursue a career as a solo artist in the early 90s. Mills founded the Chicago based Axis Records in 1992, which is responsible for the release of much of his solo work.
Kraftwerk are a German electronic band formed in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. Widely considered innovators and pioneers of electronic music, Kraftwerk were among the first successful acts to popularize the genre. The group began as part of West Germany's experimental krautrock scene in the early 1970s before fully embracing electronic instrumentation, including synthesizers, drum machines, and vocoders. Wolfgang Flür joined the band in 1973 and Karl Bartos in 1975, expanding the band to a quartet. Since the band's formation, the band has seen numerous lineup changes, with Hütter as its only constant member.
A rave is a dance party at a warehouse, club, or other public or private venue, typically featuring performances by DJs playing electronic dance music. The style is most associated with the early 1990s dance music scene when DJs played at illegal events in musical styles dominated by electronic dance music from a wide range of sub-genres, including drum and bass, dubstep, trap, break, happy hardcore, trance, techno, hardcore, house, and alternative dance. Occasionally live musicians have been known to perform at raves, in addition to other types of performance artists such as go-go dancers and fire dancers. The music is amplified with a large, powerful sound reinforcement system, typically with large subwoofers to produce a deep bass sound. The music is often accompanied by laser light shows, projected coloured images, visual effects and fog machines.
Tresor is a techno nightclub in Berlin and a record label.
Detroit techno is a type of techno music that generally includes the first techno productions by Detroit-based artists during the 1980s and early 1990s. Prominent Detroit techno artists include Juan Atkins, Eddie Fowlkes, Derrick May, Jeff Mills, Kevin Saunderson, Blake Baxter, Drexciya, Mike Banks, James Pennington and Robert Hood. Artists like Terrence Parker and his lead vocalist, Nicole Gregory, set the tone for Detroit's piano techno house sound.
Juan Atkins, also known as Model 500 and Infiniti, is an American record producer and DJ from Detroit, Michigan. Mixmag has described him as "the original pioneer of Detroit techno." He has been a member of The Belleville Three, Cybotron, and Borderland.
Cybotron is an American electro music group formed in 1980 by Juan Atkins and Richard "3070" Davis in Detroit. Cybotron had a number of singles now considered classics and style-defining works of the electro genre, particularly "Clear" and the group's debut, "Alleys of Your Mind", as well as "Cosmic Cars" and "R-9".
Minimal techno is a subgenre of techno music. It is characterized by a stripped-down aesthetic that exploits the use of repetition and understated development. Minimal techno is thought to have been originally developed in the early 1990s by Detroit-based producers Robert Hood and Daniel Bell. By the early 2000s the term 'minimal' generally described a style of techno that was popularized in Germany by labels such as Kompakt, Perlon, and Richie Hawtin's M-nus, among others.
Savvas Ysatis is a Greek electronic musician.
German electronic music is a broad musical genre encompassing specific styles such as Electroclash, trance, krautrock and schranz. It is widely considered to have emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, becoming increasingly popular in subsequent decades. Originally minimalistic style of electronic music developed into psychedelic and prog rock aspects, techno and electronic dance music. Notable artists include Kraftwerk, Can, Tangerine Dream and Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft. German electronic music contributed to a global transition of electronic music from underground art to an international phenomenon, with festivals such as Love Parade, Winterworld and MayDay gaining prominence alongside raves and clubs.
The Belleville Three are three American musicians, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, who are credited with inventing the Detroit techno genre in Belleville, MI.
Eddie Fowlkes is an American techno DJ. He was influential to the early Detroit techno scene.
Techno is a genre of electronic dance music (EDM) which is generally produced for use in a continuous DJ set, with tempo often varying between 120 and 150 beats per minute (bpm). The central rhythm is typically in common time (4/4) and often characterized by a repetitive four on the floor beat. Artists may use electronic instruments such as drum machines, sequencers, and synthesizers, as well as digital audio workstations. Drum machines from the 1980s such as Roland's TR-808 and TR-909 are highly prized, and software emulations of such retro instruments are popular.
The Ufo was the first acid house club in Berlin. It is considered a pioneering place for the techno scene during the reunification. Residents and guest DJs at the club included, among others, Tanith, Jonzon, Rok, Dr. Motte, Mike van Dijk and the then 13-year-old Kid Paul.
Fabian Lenz is a German DJ, Techno musician and events producer, who was also known before under the moniker DJ Dick.
Berlin Atonal is an annual festival for sonic and visual art in two distinct stages. It first took place between 1982 and 1990, relaunching in 2013 under new direction and continuing to the present day. The festival presents contemporary, interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of sound art, visual and media art, installation and performance, with an emphasis on commissioned work and world premieres. Apart from the annual event, Berlin Atonal has presented other satellite events such as The Long Now, New Assembly in Tokyo, and has collaborated with Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, Dark Mofo and Berliner Festspiele.
Alan D. Oldham sometimes performing as DJ T-1000, is an American techno DJ, producer, label owner, graphic artist, and painter.
MMA Club(Mixed Munich Arts Club) was a techno nightclub in Munich, Germany, renowned as one of the best in Germany in the 2010s. It was a multifaceted establishment based inside the husk of an old thermal power plant and has hosted underground techno DJs such as Richie Hawtin, Adam Beyer, Len Faki, Ben Klock, Marcel Dettmann, Ben Sims or Terence Fixmer, among many others. The maze-like club also contained a 460-square-meter gallery space frequently utilized for a variety of theatrical, artistic and orchestral performances.
KW – Das Heizkraftwerk was a nightclub in Munich, Germany from 1996 to 2003. The techno club belonged, besides the Tresor and E-Werk in Berlin, the Dorian Gray and Omen in Frankfurt, and the Munich-based clubs Ultraschall, Natraj Temple and Millennium, to the most renowned clubs of Germany's 1990s techno culture.
"No UFO's" is a 1985 techno song by Juan Atkins under the alias of Model 500. It was released on Atkins own label Metroplex. The song was the first track released after the split of Atkins' previous group Cybotron. The music followed similar themes of the previous group with science fiction and alienation but featured less of a song structure than Cybotron's music leading the track to be often identified as one of the earliest techno songs.
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