By Alexander Cheves
The BCCO x SoundCloud New Faces project is a collaborative initiative between BCCO—a Berlin-based techno brand and record label—and SoundCloud, the global music streaming platform. Its goal is to support emerging artists and find the next generation of talent.
Started just last year, it aims to give rising DJs and producers—typically with less than three years of experience—a platform and wider audience, with a curated mix series and the chance to play at Tresor.
How does a project like this start?
With love—a love of Berlin, and its artists. If you meet Dana Cleavenger, you’ll feel the love.
Dana is the person at SoundCloud spearheading this project. She’s a laid-back, unassuming hero of Berlin nightlife who you’ve never heard of.
Dana was born in the United States but has lived in Berlin for eight years. She has a relaxed, chill, Southern California vibe—she grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles, close to the sea. She has a dimpled smile, bright blue eyes, and a laugh that fills a room.
What’s something weird about you that nobody knows?
Dana collects what she can only describe as “cursed novelty T-shirts”—these may also be called “slogan tees” or “joke tees,” the kind you find in ratty tourist shops.
She loves dub techno. And she loves to rave.
I never thought I would work at a tech company; that was never the dream. But here I am!
At SoundCloud, her official title is “UX Researcher”, which means she researches and analyses how users interact with the product so designers can improve the interface and design.
More recently, she has added a marketing role, partnering with underground collectives in the Berlin music scene. For this job, she interviews artists and SoundCloud creators, meets with local collectives, writes research reports, and, more recently, she started coordinating New Faces as a side-project, partnering the platform where she works with the local music scene she loves.
How does someone get a job at SoundCloud?
“I applied!” she says. (Dana Cleavenger speaks with exclamation points.)
I’m maybe not the smartest person in the room. That’s not my edge. It’s my eagerness and passion.
Dana has amazing, super-friendly energy. She welcomed the Hinterhaus team to SoundCloud’s Berlin headquarters in Mitte (although it’s a global company, SoundCloud was founded in Berlin and continues to be based here) and immediately got us loaded up with snacks and coffee.
The building itself is modern and spacious—a cool, open-format coworking space with a gym, a cafe, and lots of places to chill with a laptop.
The space felt casual and a little too cool, the way I imagine hip companies in Silicon Valley feel. I wondered what it’d be like to actually work there—I’ve always felt suspicious of “too-cool” workplaces, always certain their coolness must be an effort to mask the reality that they are, in fact, still offices, still corporate workplaces that are implicitly exploitative.
But hearing Dana talk about SoundCloud made me wonder if this was the exception—a global business trying to do some real good.
Was it better than Spotify, which underpays and undervalues artists? How did it compare to Apple Music?
Dana couldn’t comment on these questions—the inner workings of SoundCloud were off-limits, and this was an interview with her, she stressed, not the company.
But she has always been a loyal SoundCloud user since before she got the job. She loves where she works and is proud of SoundCloud’s affinity for supporting underground music.
What was life like before Berlin?
She was born and raised in Southern California, in “the most beautiful set of strip malls you’ve ever seen.”
She has an older brother, Dillon; they were born on the same day, three years apart. “I crashed his birthday,” she says.
Dillon now lives in the woods in Northern California, where he built his own house. “My friends here think I’m country-coded. Meanwhile, my brother thinks I’m a city slicker.”
Before Berlin, her home was Los Angeles.
“I went to UCLA, but I didn’t really care about school. I didn’t feel connected to it.”
She cared more about the local music scene. Her first job in nightlife was as an intern for PROTOTYPE, one of the only LA crews throwing legal warehouse parties.
PROTOTYPE were bringing in big European acts like Nina Kraviz, Rødhåd, and Dasha Rush. And I was just the sloppy intern at the party. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I learned a lot.
Why did she move to Berlin?
She came here in 2017 to get her master’s degree in sociology from Freie Universität. But a year into her studies, she realised, “I’m not a political science girly,” she says. “Everyone in my degree was focusing on things like EU integration. Important work, but not my vibe. So I tailored my program to be about music.”
She wrote her final thesis on harm reduction in the club scene. “Kind of ironic,” she says. I ask: Why ironic?
At the time, I was a mess. I was literally going on a bender every weekend. I thought, oh my god—I’m this straight girl in queer club spaces, taking up space. What am I doing?
Her research included interviews with Berlin partygoers, club workers, and people on the Berlin Club Commission.
What she found is that people like to say clubs are safe spaces, but club policies don’t always reflect that.
There’s this pressure for clubs to be safe and inclusive. But then you have an extremely exclusive door policy. Bouncers, usually straight men who are not affiliated with the party, who are subcontracted by the venue, create this tense and inherently discriminatory experience right at the beginning. What about that experience is truly safe?
But then, she pauses.
“I’m not trying to speak with total conviction. I’m no expert. But I’ve got opinions.”
What’s another opinion you have?
Another: “Be softer and sweeter with yourself and others, go out with good intentions and empathise with and support others who may be collapsing or experiencing a bad moment.”
Harm-reduction in clubland requires a degree of community care, she says—ravers taking care of ravers, not just dumping responsibility onto care teams.
Dana got the internship at SoundCloud during her master’s degree.
“My friend Robin, who worked at Soundcloud, texted me and said, ‘Dude. You literally do music research.’ That was the literal job description. I applied immediately!”
She got the position—and never left. Today, she’s on the design team as a UX researcher.
The people I talk to always ask, ‘Who’s the biggest artist you’ve interviewed?’ And I say: none. I want to hear from the one-hundred-follower techno producers. Those are the people who I feel represent the everyday SoundCloud user.
This year, her role expanded to include community partnerships. She’s working with collectives she loves.
“We’re giving people this launchpad into opportunity. It just felt like a perfect match. SoundCloud supports emerging artists—that’s how we can support the scene!”
She’s also helping SoundCloud become more involved in Berlin Pride this year.
“It’s a lot of work,” she says. “I’m stressed. Because I’m doing it alone, low-key, and there’s a lot that needs to happen. But I hope it goes well. Something will come out of it—it’ll be cute.”
One of those jobs was to release a Pride feature on SoundCloud highlighting four local Berlin-based queer and FLINTA* collectives—it just went live and featured SEVEN, Lunchbox Candy, Hoe_mies and Mala Junta.
When I saw it, I texted Dana. “I’m super excited!” she said. “Been putting so much time into this!”
Nine months ago, she stopped partying and got sober. She doesn’t talk about it like a big revelation—it just became necessary.
What is clubbing like for you now that you are sober?
It’s not easy, she says, and it’s involved looking at her former self with a little more love.
I skipped a night of sleep recently to go to Berghain, and I did it sober. The next day, I still felt like I was hungover! It gave me so much compassion for my past self. Maybe it wasn’t the drugs, perhaps it was just sleep deprivation!”
Do you still enjoy clubbing?
Yes, but: “I never really liked dungeon-y club spaces,” she says. “I never felt called to that kind of space. Give me more open-airs. Give me lake parties. Forest takeovers. Let me thrash at 4 p.m., not 4 a.m.”
She doesn’t have a bike—she walks. “That’s how I got through sobriety. I walked the demons out.”
Dana is always reading or watching something. At one point, she says, “I was trying to read The Will to Change and all these dense social justice books. Then I was like—why am I doing this for fun?”
Now, she’d rather read smut. “Some erotic thriller written for a 50-year-old woman? I’m obsessed. Can’t put it down.”
Instead of drugs and booze, she’s found other hobbies to fill her time—like leaving cheeky film reviews on Letterboxd.
“I’m a big MUBI girl. I love long, sad, serious movies. I love when something just hurts. I’m watching Never Look Away right now. It’s a three-hour German movie about postwar trauma. That’s totally my vibe.”
She laughs. “I’m not a serious girl. But I love emotional things.”
Her reviews are deliberately unserious. Of Everest, about the 1996 Mount Everest disaster in which eight climbers died, she wrote: “Can’t wait to go to Nepal!”
On Dune: “I feel so bad for Zendaya. I would kill myself in front of him to traumatise him and get him back.”
Now, instead of partying all night, one of her favourite ways to spend an evening is watching what she calls “YouTube essays.”
What are YouTube essays?
Apparently, YouTube is filled with video essays where people talk at length on virtually every subject—and Dana can’t get enough.
Were you always curious like this?
Yes. She even used to make PowerPoint decks for fun. “I love giving a presentation. I don’t like talking. But I love a deck.”
Finally, I had to ask about the novelty T-shirts.
“I wore one to a recent party in Berlin that said, ‘Help! I’ve lost my boyfriend… for the next few hours.’ So many people came up to me asking about it. I should’ve just made up a fake boyfriend, a famous DJ on tour, something like that.”
We talked about the Berlin club look—the shredded clothes, black denim, and skimpy clothes that Dana says never quite spoke to her. She describes her style now as being “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure”.
“I find a lot of stuff secondhand or what people are giving away on the street in Prenzlauer Berg,” she says.
What food do you love in Berlin?
We ask everyone this, and Dana doesn’t hesitate.
“Shawarma!” she says. “It’s impossible to name just one, because that’s one of the best things about Berlin: there’s good shawarma everywhere.”
She mentions a restaurant called Babel in Prenzlauer Berg, her favorite shawarma spot, and then lists others.
“But my favourite thing to eat is Ornek Lahmacun. It’s Turkish pizza. A wrap with fresh herbs, pickled vegetables, and raw onions. You dip it in lentil soup. It’s like €1.80. So good.”
“When people talk shit on Berlin’s food scene, it’s usually because they’re going to places like natural wine spots, or whatever. And I’m like, okay, go to Paris or New York for that. Here, you eat Turkish food. You eat Palestinian food. You eat Syrian food. Kurdish food. That’s Berlin. Berlin does this food better than anywhere else.”
Will you stay in Berlin?
She says this is an impossible question.
“But I love Berlin,” she says. “I became an adult here. I grew up here. I’m 29 and a half now, and I moved here when I was 22. I became a woman here.”
My womanhood is Berlin.
Has your relationship to clubbing changed since going sober?
“I wondered if my relationship with clubbing would be worse once I stopped partying. But it didn’t—it got better.”
I ask about that journey. Yes, she took a break from partying for a bit, but now she’s working her way back into raves—and doing her best to support it from behind the scenes.
“I didn’t go to a club for fifteen months,” she said. “I needed some sober time. But I’m starting to love it again. I just need some more practice and time—being sober at a party takes practice.”
Dana Cleavenger is on Instagram
New DJ’s can apply to be part of BCCO x SoundCloud New Faces
Words: Alexander Cheves
Pictures: Mara Menzel
