05/05/07
Text: Swax T. McIver
Ten o'clock on a rainy Saturday night in Berlin. The sound of wet tires from cars whizzing up and down Torstrasse is all your ears afford you. The bright, luminescent glow of buses chugging late-night commuters and hobos home is all your eyes register—until you reach number 60 on this particular street, that is. Situated slap-bang in the Mitte district of Germany's still-relatively-new capital city, the throbbing red-lit sign gives little away except the name of your destination: Kaffee Burger.
Upstairs inside the restaurant, you could be almost anywhere: Paris, Moscow, Budapest, even New Orleans, but definitely not London (way too bourgeoisie for that.) In fact, forget all that—you could only be one place and that place happens to be right here, where the old swinging Berlin of the late 1920s and Russian nostalgia meets the new Berlin of now: bright-eyed, forward-thinking and certainly as uncertain as it gets. Low-lighting, quiet conversations and the clinking of glasses set a sleazy, sophisticatedly European tone.
And then, straight out of nowhere, it hits you like a great, fat crimson fist in the ribs. A bulbous, brass-driven bass line pounding through the floorboards from the sound system downstairs, a couple of stray violin notes breezing their way up the stairs, hand in hand with amorous accordion ripples and an uproar of joy, high times and adventure from the heaving masses filling every corner of the main room, the queue snaking back for miles.
Welcome to Russia, Berlin-style. Welcome to Russen Disko.
Almost seventeen years after German re-unification, following the fall of the wall in November 1989 and the subsequent exodus of many Soviet guards who once patrolled the city's wall perimeters and various checkpoints, Russen Disko (literally translated as "Russian Disco") represents the rapidly changing tempo of today's Berlin. So much so, in fact, that a growing influx of curious next-generation Russians and immigrants from all over are flocking back to the Deutsche capital in search of that certain something in this hotbed of cultural diversity that was once known to the outside world as the grey, oppressive Eastern Bloc. Russen Disko is the by-product of two of that region’s more prolific CCCP ex-pats: DJ/musicologist, Yuriy Gurzhy (Ukraine) and journalist/novelist, Wladimir Kaminer (Russia). This bi-weekly melting pot of alternative arts from the ex-Soviet Union has reached boiling point.
"Essentially, it's all about celebrating the music from our homeland," says Gurzhy as he dips out of the chaos around his DJ booth downstairs for a necessary visit to the bar. "No matter what it is or where it's from, it has to be what we both dig."
Now in its eighth year of existence, and established globally through a tight network of likeminded artistic instigators, from Vladivostock and Kiev to Tel Aviv, the Balkans, Brighton Beach and beyond, Russen Disko has made giant musical and cultural steps forward. Metaphorically: East meets West, gets it on, falls in love and the goes on to produce a plethora of beautiful babies together that, ultimately, defy categorization. Russian roots and history form the basic influence—add the rest of the world into the mix and what you end up with is the ethos of Gurzhy and Kaminer’s Russen Disko.
