This is the first in an occasional series we’re calling Night Reading, about nightlife books and the cultures and sounds they cover, written by different voices from the scene.
by Luiz Romero
A video work by two artists, Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei, is currently on show at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. It opens on strobing lights, smoke machines, and hard electronic music, and showcases individual dancers: a woman with red lipstick swinging slowly, a guy with glasses going wild, and a man with matted hair ticking like a metronome.
Then, the crowd: hundreds of bodies dancing together in a dark warehouse. There’s a small circle of space around each person, yet they undeniably form a collective.
The piece, titled Repetitions (Dedicated to the Youth of the World II, 2019 and Dedicated to the Youth of the World III, 2023), pairs an original 2019 film with a 2023 remake, both by the Ukrainian duo, now on view as part of Hamburger Bahnhof’s ongoing collection show Tausendmal Berlin (A Thousand Times Berlin).
Malashchuk and Khimei filmed the original at Cxema, Ukraine’s biggest techno rave, staged inside Kyiv’s Dovzhenko Film Studios; the museum describes it as youth reclaiming their post-revolutionary city in a nighttime ritual of near-total freedom.
The artists restaged the same rave in 2023, with an entirely new cast of dancers, after the pandemic and after Russia’s full-scale invasion. Seen together, the two films turn a single night out into something closer to a record of endurance: the same freedom, claimed twice, by two generations of the same city.
What is “stranger-intimacy”?
I’ve danced in similar crowds and haven’t had the vocabulary to express how it feels or name the many tensions at play on a dancefloor. Then I read Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s brilliant book.
It’s called Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dance Floor.
The book is built from years of interviewing, observing, and dancing at minimal and house parties in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin.
Reading it gave me new words and ideas to explain things I’d half-known or half-felt for years.
Garcia-Mispireta is an ethnomusicologist, an associate professor at the University of Birmingham, and, under the name LMGM, a working DJ and member of Berlin’s queer rave collective Room 4 Resistance. Together, Somehow, published by Duke University Press in 2023, draws on fieldwork he conducted in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin between 2006 and 2010.
The book later won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Ruth Stone Prize and the Woody Guthrie Book Award. He has described it, in an interview with Resident Advisor, as “a bit of a time capsule to the moment just before the big EDM boom.” (Garcia-Mispireta also writes about electronic music culture for RA.)
a.k.a. LMGM
First, there’s the idea of “stranger-intimacy,” Garcia-Mispireta’s phrasing for the sense of closeness you feel for people whose names, personalities, and biographies you will never learn.
In theory, intimacy should be rare on dancefloors. Intimacy needs time, stability, and shared history. Yet many people feel it when partying. How? Why?
Garcia-Mispireta explains that dancefloors build intimacy through touch and sound, from the casual crowd-press of moving through a busy room to the more intentional act of physical proximity and contact, dancing near or with someone. And intimacy also builds from music that mirrors sounds made by the human body, like clapping, breath, humming, and the bass that registers as a shared, physical vibration felt by everyone in the room, independent of language.
Then there’s Garcia-Mispireta’s idea of “liquidarity,” a shared sense of belonging and mutual recognition that remains light, vague, and fluid.
For me, this idea is encapsulated in the idea that, at a party, it’s easy to find someone and easy to lose them. This fluidity works both ways: the same vagueness that lets me fall into instant closeness with a stranger (no names, no history, no information exchanged) is also what allows that closeness to dissolve so easily. We meet for a bit, dance, exchange some time, then move on.
Knowing little about those around you helps. The book describes an implicit agreement between club-goers not to “fill in the blanks” about each other.
This lets people project their own ideas and expectations onto strangers without them ever having to be confirmed or denied.
Too much information about outside beliefs and inclinations, political or social, that exist in real life, beyond the club, can end this felt sense of belonging.
Who gets left out?
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there’s Garcia-Mispireta’s idea of “embedded diversity,” which is the feeling of a seemingly diverse crowd that is nevertheless only made possible by acts of exclusion. Door selection is the most obvious example of this, but it is not the only way people get excluded. It also happens through filters like price, secrecy, and dress code.
That hits home to me, and surely to many people in Berlin. Garcia-Mispireta describes how his sources in Paris, Chicago, and Berlin seem to agree that the stricter door selection in Berlin does some things very well; it’s an effective way to create crowds that feel right and natural, and, in theory, to reserve parties for those who truly know what kind of event they want to experience.
Selected crowds, Garcia-Mispireta writes, can be seen as a mirage, an illusion, one that is at times too perfect to be genuine.
For me, these crowds and parties often look diverse on the surface while any true difference, or even a spirit of antagonism, is absent underneath.
Garcia-Mispireta goes through much more in the book, but these are the core concepts that resonated with me most, and still sit with me as I navigate nightlife in Berlin. The author is careful not to project them as universal aspects of nightlife and, just as important, does not try to resolve these tensions or suggest how they might be resolved by others. They are lingering tensions that are part of clubland, crucial to its experience.
Together, Somehow allows dancefloors to be as they are: flawed but aspirational spaces that connect and disconnect, that both create and dissolve community, and that exclude as much as they include. All these elements coexist to make the clubbing experience happen.
After the lights come up.
Reading this book, I kept thinking back to Malashchuk and Khimei’s video piece. In the final part of it, they are captured outside the club; here, some of the tensions in Garcia-Mispireta’s book are rendered meaningfully visible. Once part of a collective, moving together, the dancers are now outside and, for the most part, alone.
They wear ordinary clothes and have piercings, tattoos, and makeup. It’s unclear what they are doing: going home or waiting for friends. It’s also unclear how they feel, if they’re high or sober, anxious or bored. They move in and out of the frame, adjusting their hair for no one, looking around, lighting cigarettes, resting their heads on the wall, stretching, and, in the very last frame, closing their eyes.
Check out the full selection of books on nightlife and club culture at SEVEN Community Record Store (where Hinterhaus lives) and at the SEVEN online shop.
Luiz Romero is a journalist from São Paulo and based in Berlin. See more of his work at luizromero.com.
Edits: Alexander Cheves
