Berlin Atonal review: Plenty of fun to be had in the dark

The venerable German techno and drone festival has imposing sounds, venues and people, but lots to smile about too

Shackleton performs in Berlin Atonal's extraordinary main venue, Kraftwerk (Camille Blake)

Berlin Atonal is an institution in the German capital, but an institution of two halves. The festival started all the way back in 1982, but was on hiatus from 1990 until 2013, when it was relaunched in a gigantic former power plant on the cusp of the Mitte and Kreuzberg areas of Berlin. The fifth post-relaunch edition took place in late August, making use of five venues around the plant including Tresor, the basement club that has been a fixture in Berlin in one form of another since 1988, and OHM, the smallest of the rooms, where many of its best (and sweatiest) moments took place.

The yard outside the former power station where Atonal is held (Camille Blake)

By far its most notable space, however (and one of the most notable music venues anywhere, full stop) is the football-pitch-sized Kraftwerk (literally “power plant”). Kraftwerk is only open for Berlin Atonal (“because if it was open the rest if the year it would be seen as direct competition for Berghain,” a local told me pre-festival. “Which would be a fool's errand”). In both its enormousness and its stark, smoky look it is the kind of music venue one might have a fever-dream about Berlin having, without ever thinking that such a ridiculously “Berlin” building could actually exist in real life.

Talking of fever-dreams, I spent the first couple of days of Berlin Atonal in the company of a poorly timed bout of illness, and while no festival would ever be enhanced by ill-health, I found it to be far less of a disaster at Atonal than it would have been at most other festivals. The chief reason for this was the potential for ibuprofen-awash zone-outs to the droney, experimental music programmed up in Kraftwerk. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop's opening-night show was an early highlight there, while on subsequent evenings the ethereal, clanging beauty of Shackleton's show with Anika, Pedro Maia and Strawalde, Roly Porter and Paul Jebanasam's cacophonous stylings, and the Swedish producer Varg's various performances hit the right notes.

Varg performs his 'Nordic Flora' LP (Camille Blake)

Elsewhere, many of my favourite shows at Berlin Atonal were DJ sets. St Petersburg native Inga Mauer, playing for the first time since being caught up in a shocking incident at Helsinki's Flow Festival the previous weekend, turned in a stellar set of febrile techno with ambient flourishes at the upstairs Globus Stage on Friday. At times Mauer appeared still to be composing herself after recent events, and as she played a particularly stirring piece of buzzsaw techno she turned her back on the crowd and danced happily to herself, as if excising or at least coming to terms with the memory in real time. Her live set the following night downstairs at Stage Null was beset by technical problems and I left well before the end of it, but her place was already secure among my festival highlights.

Roll The Dice play in Kraftwerk (Camille Blake)

Moritz von Oswald's thumping Wednesday-night show was the best thing I saw down in Tresor, but over the week I spent far more time in OHM, where Demdike Stare and LoneLady did great things for packed-out audiences on the early nights. Copenhagen's Apeiron Crew and Glasgow's Optimo closed Sunday night and the festival on a high, with the latter's JD Twitch handed a hastily scribbled, hilariously earnest note midway through a triumphant (not to mention techno-heavy) set that read: “THIS IS A TECHNO FESTIVAL, FUCK HOUSE”.

This moment sums up one of the most common criticisms of Berlin Atonal: a perceived pretentiousness among its crowds. It strikes me, though, that if you go to a festival that calls itself Berlin Atonal and are terribly surprised that there are some people there who dress all in black and take life a little too seriously, then that really is on you. If you can go in willing to enjoy Berlin Atonal on its own terms, and pace yourself properly against the sheer length of the thing, then there's a whole lot of fun to be had in the heat and dark of its rooms and antechambers.