Straftanz is dead. It died at Resistanz on Good Friday 2014. Western theology generally supports the notion that what dies on Good Friday will come out of some hole on Easter Sunday for some dramatic intervention. Due to recent events we will need to do this with somewhat reduced personnel, as Kai is very likely tied up for reasons of safety and security. We are confident that our countless members will help us to fill a stage once more. Straftanz will intervene once again in a boundary dissolving, once in a lifetime performance. We do not know either what exactly this means, however what we can say for sure is that something will appear from aforementioned hole and will intervene dramatically
Yeah, we actually did this. We read industrial lyrics without the music, without the movie samples we went down to the semantic core. You can check out this episode of our twitch series on youtube. Or right here:
62 weeks, every damn Saturday. We didn’t feel it anymore. When you don’t feel you don’t do it. – It is time time to pause, to rethink and to reconnect. This is not goodbye. We’ll be back next week.
It’s a year ago. I figured I would be confined to my place for a while and I knew that all my plans are for the bin. You likely know what happened. I booted up IBS (Isolation Broadcast System) for the first time, running on my work computer, my phone and an old nexus4 I found in a drawer. I didn’t have a DJ controller so I rigged some old midi controller with broken knobs and ordered booze from Bezos and informed the world about my shit plan ➡️
This is what happened and it would continue to happen, every single damn Saturday, 2000h, no exception, to this day, almost one year later. While being 100% aware that this would be a long run I didn’t expect how long really. We thought each edition needs a name and a motto but at some point we ran out of energy to come up with this. X joined the DJ crew as my more or less permanent partner in crime and over the little mottos we learned what kind of sound we actually like to play. Sets became longer and more confident over time and X, not having even touched a deck before, became more resourceful than me. We tried running interviews with our audience and had amazing guests, among them a dev and security specialist, a leading systems biologist, an award winning sci-fi author and a madman on a mission to beat cancer. – Digging up the right questions and setting up the dates became an unsustainable effort though and we had to stop it after a couple of iterations. – Isolation Rave was there to stay and working from home, digging up new tracks during the week to play in the weekend, getting a new set ready and playing it became the rhythm of life. Over 57 shows we built a set archive of several thousand tracks, the percentage of new material every week was constantly between 20 and 50%. The tropical summer set for some reason made us members of an international pineapple death cult.
We continued running this. We did specials and joined shows with Karkasaurus and Biomechanimal, we contributed to the Paradise Lounge of the Chaos Communication Congress and we celebrated Halloween together. We had a guest performer, Vince the raving Nerd, and had Krischan from Rotersand over for coffee at an extra early breakfast set at 5am for the Panoptikon people in Dallas, Texas. We created drink recipes and ran the hardest Christmas Rave post war generations remember with The Lord, Faderhead and Dancefloor Gladiators.Meanwhile Sami built the Ghost City Discord and gave our shared community over at Faderhead the com-platform they needed. We cracked 1000 followers on Twitch and made friends in close and in distant places.
Most importantly: we’re still here.
Today, one year after I announced the first edition of Isolation Rave, we know that this is still a long run. Vaccination coming in slowly, club and event scene against the wall without due help from the government, mutant variants emerging in open schools and open floor offices – ready to call the vaccines’ blades blunt, medical staff burned out while deniers are dancing in the streets of Munich to the inaction of the police, this all is not fuelling any optimism. It’s a rain of shit. What do we do when excrement is raining upon us? I will give you the Alchemist’s answer:
Rejoice!
This is Nigredo and as alchemists it is our mission to continue fuelling the fire underneath our furnace. We know what to do! Yeah, you got this right, we will continue cooking crap until it is purified, until we see it crystallise, until we see the colours of the peacock’s tail emerging. For this, more patience is needed and some energy to run the effort. Our furnace is working well and as you can see, even during the past year it produced some gold. – It brought us new skills and experiences, new friends and new connections. I don’t know what the next year is going to bring, but I can reassure you, we will be there, we will keep going and fuel the fires until we get the gold we truly want.
So here is the plan:
We will broadcast on Saturday, 20th of March, the day of the Equinox. We will make some announcement and play whack music and you will get intoxicated with us. Will it be on the drinks? On art? On love? We don’t know, but we will intoxicate ourselves. So get ready. Order the drinks, and go all fancy. Get ready to dress up and dance, even if it you’re doing it at home. Alone. Again.
This time there might be special guests, cake, fancy drinks.
I will still write something about the past twelve months because celebrating new years is so deeply engrained in us and also because we’re in these darkest days of the year when we know for a fact that the days are getting longer and the light is coming back, even though we see little evidence for that in our everyday life.
For me 2020 was a good year. Crazy statement, right? Travels cancelled, shows cancelled, office cancelled, daily commute cancelled, social life cancelled, summer vacation cancelled.
So we cocooned, still hanging in the web of 24h newscasting, and it’s still upon us to decide on whether this is Chrysalis or whether we became somespider’s healthy snack.
I learned: My negative biases towards people are based on observable facts, no matter if it is about their neglect towards the wellbeing of their fellow humans, their misuse of power and position, their unwillingness to make even the slightest contribution to a common good as soon as they feel (not know!) that they are taking some sort of a disadvantage from that or ultimately that they will blame others rather than changing themselves in the slightest. I learned there is nothing that I can do about that.
I learned: My positive biases towards people are based on observable facts, no matter if it’s about people’s general willingness to learn, their strong wish to understand and to trust each other, their ability to accept even when they can’t understand. People are well capable to give their best when just the slightest change in their environment nudges them into growth. I learned that it is in mine and in anyone’s power to makes these changes.
All of the above is true at the same time, yet whenever I focused on the first set of learnings I felt powerless, weak and hurt. Whenever I focused on the second set of learnings I felt I had purpose, strength and happiness within my reach.
Don’t get this wrong. I am far away from selling you some law of attraction bullshit. I know how hard this year was on most of us, how someone without my background, privilege and luck will be impeded in ways unimaginable to most of us reading this. I know the potential weight of demons sitting on our chests when we are just trying to get up and still:
I believe it is this, that will make the better part of the decision of wether the cocoon we live in is made to keep us a fresh snack for the spiders or whether this is Chrysalis. The best possible new years’ resolution is implied.
Tonight I’d like to thank everyone that continuously helped me to focus on the stuff that makes me feel purpose- and powerful.
X. More than anything else. Swami Sami. Krischna Eric Wesenberg. Kai. Hilger. Damien Horst. Weinkeller Meike. Barbz Black. Hannes. Jenthe. Vince. Leya. D. Bob. Holgraaaaa. Neen. Esme. Tim. Luke. Kate. Cathrin. Kevin. Ryan. Veeeeeee. Adrian. Kate. The Lord. Riam. Jannis. Simon. Countess. Ollie. Elena. Mark. Matt. Emma. Danny. Torrie. Irina. Elsa. The ghosts of Ghost City. 920 Twitch followers and You.
Two weeks ago my beloved leader, NRW Ministerpräsident Armin Laschet, called us to take action to deliver:
The HARDEST CHRISTMAS post war generations ever experienced.
Trailer: ISOLATION RAVE XXX-MASS EDITION
Two weeks ago I pledged to pump the bass louder, to christmas harder than anyone ever christmassed. To bury myself under mail order packages, to eat till I puke, to consume till I’m broke, to escalate the season of neighbourly love like never before.
At home. Alone.
Sadly even 2 weeks later Armin Laschet didn’t take much action on his own, his ridiculous statement is still a joke and today he rambled on television about parents needing to decide on weather they wanna send their kids to school on Monday. Since beloved leader Laschet isn’t doing much leadership I guess it’s upon us.
Do what we do and stay the fuck at home and christmas harder. Here is the Agenda:
Christmas home-drinking and witch house session on Friday, 25th of December
What a Night. Never before did we get as many people dancing and being utterly uncool on our Zoom Channel as yesterday. You crazy people made us go for an almost 6h set. – This is a record that won’t be broken in a long time I guess, or I’ll be broken.
So here we are. The days are getting shorter, the weather’s getting colder, and the infection rates are getting higher. More and more restrictions and lockdowns are popping up. Many of us are stuck at home again, but at least we see we are still going strong. One question remains:
What do with Halloween?
We obviously can’t meet up in person at a costume party, the good bars are closed etc. Since we wanna go all festive anyway, we’ll tag along with our friend Sami’sexcellent idea to at least run a big and stylish online event, promoting the streamers on our discord server over at Ghost City. We asked ourselves what we could do to make a meaningful contribution to this enterprise? Obviously we would:
Help people pretend their alcoholism is a real hobby.
With the help of our south german comrade Barbz Black we tested and optimised four cocktail recipes. These drinks seem really sophisticated yet are really easy to make. Start cooking your own syrups and you will soon find that your alcoholism suddenly looks like a real hobby to friends and family.
We offer you four drinks, three orbiting the freshness of apple cider and one that sort of stands alone in screen of smoke.
In all four recipes we are using syrups. You should make them yourself. It’s easy. Making them works like this: mix equal parts sugar and water and let it simmer at low temperatures for at least 20min with a flavour of your choice. Here are the syrups we made last week:
Syrup.
Cinnamon Syrup:
300g Raw Cane Sugar
300g Water
4-5 cinnamon sticks
Apple Syrup:
300g Raw Cane Sugar
300g Water
1 small apple, finely chopped.
Pear Syrup:
300g Raw Cane Sugar
300g Water
1 small pear, finely chopped.
Put ingredients in small pan.
Simmer for at least 20 min.
Rinse through sieve in a bottle.
Adding a sip of vodka might extend shelf life.
You get the idea, right?
Kpt Joylove and Barbz Black discussing the future of intoxication in the park. Photo by X, the Witch.
Come drink with us.
So now that we know what we are talking about, here is the Quarantini Vault with our first four sexy recipes deliciously performed by Barbz Black. Check out these recipes below.
Not from the West.
3cl Dark Rum – We used Pampero Aniversario 3cl Vermut Rojo – We went for for Lustau’s delicious offering 1cl Cinnamon Syrup – you can get some in the store, but we made ours ourselves Cider to top up.
Without further ado, watch Barbz Black perform this:
Not from the East.
3cl Kentucky Bourbon – We went for Maker’s Mark 3cl Vermut Rojo – there is a lot of vermouth around but Lustau is making ours. 1cl Apple Syrup – Scroll up to see how to make it. Cider to top up.
Action speaks louder than words; watch Barbz Black perform this:
From no expected house
3cl Grand Marnier – We could go for a different Cognac or the like and perhaps sweeten with a syrup, but let’s face the rounded sweetness of Grand Marnier – enjoy, it’s brilliant – and refrain from trying to reinvent the wheel. 3cl Vermut Rojo – there is a lot of vermouth around but Lustau is making ours. Cider to top up.
Watch Barbz Black carefully when when she performs this drink:
Enough of because!
3cl Bourbon – Seriously, a Rye will do too. But Bourbon is cheap and abundant. We went for Maker’s Mark. 3cl Vermut Rojo – You know we really like Lustau. 1cl Grade A dark Maple Syrup Cinnamon and Cloves Fire Orange Zest
If you have no idea how to use a blowtorch, ask an adult for help. Again, watch Barbz Black so you may do this as elegantly:
We hope to see you on Saturday at our Halloween Party. More info on that throughout the week.
Hi. Today at 10:55 we played the biggest industrial show in recorded history to millions of unsuspecting listeners, utilising the German national emergency signaling system. With the combined force of hundreds of sirens installed all over Germany, the drop could be heard in the whole of the country.
The dullard will say: “But that ain’t real!” We ask: What is so important about that reality you think you share with others not brighter than yourself? Whom does it help? What wrong does it heal? In this year 2020 we make a national emergency signal test into a rave party because we have no other choice. We heard frightened people ask: “Why do they have to trigger alarms in a year where everyone is on edge already?”
We answer: because 2020 is not exceptional. You remember when these people whined about their favorite actor dying in 2016 and blamed the year, mecury retrograde or whatever other shit they could find. Here is your reality: It’s getting worse. Earth will heat up. Pandemics will become more frequent and likely in your lifetime you will wish for this one back. This was expected.
We may need these sirens in working order because we know what’s coming.
What we need more than the sirens though is the will to make something from nothing and the resilience to go on. As long as we have a choice we must not make the dullard’s reality ours.
Do not cling to your normal. Move forward into the darkness with chaos in your heart so we still have hope for the birth of dancing stars.
X escaped curfew city Antwerp and we’re hanging in here together again. Mikoku helped out with cocktail designs from an undisclosed location in Bavaria, we will pick up the booze to cast our new Pineapple Quarantini into material reality.
Since the recipe requires frozen pineapple we sacrificed a fruit this week. The sexual tension was unbearable. See video above.
We party like it’s 1999, the year before the crisis hit.
Set went pretty well, X played most of it. We uploaded it to mixcloud again so you you can listen once more. Set was so good it triggered our cactus to bloom. True fact.
