Romuald Karmakar has shot his fourth documentery about electronic music and uncovers a big topic that goes way beyond personal taste. How can you bring all these individualists, these lone wolfs, together in this day and age? 4-to-the-floor is the answer in DENK ICH AN DEUTSCHLAND IN DER NACHT.

Five famous producers, Sonja Moonear, Ricardo Villalobos, Ata, Roman Flügel, and Move D, describe the music being produced, what it’s made out of, and the effect it can ideally have on others. Karmakar visits them in their sound spaces like their studios and a hill in Heidelberg where they layer the sounds of insects, traffic sounds, and birds chirping. We see the music’s environment, industrial areas, clearings, river banks, and beaches where the clubs and studios are located. Places that are waiting for the bass to kick in. In the end, the camera goes to the clubs and documents the strange connection between the crowds and the individual behind the mixer, the creator of the sound, turning buttons with small finger movements. The shots are long enough to watch the individual club goers until the moment where they raise their arms. We often only hear the DJs control track, the little adjustments of what’s to come, before the transitions, while the bodies are still reacting to the master channel. Sounds are actually free, says Villalobos, the challenge is to control this freedom.

Controlling free sounds doesn’t come across as a deficit in the film. Sonja Moonear connects techno to the tradition of communal religious singing, a social experience that is missing in northern countries. Roman Flügel thinks about the Bataclan attack, with people letting loose and wanting to give up control only to be met with targeted violence. He saw people on the dance floor lose the rhythm for the first time on the evening of the attack because they were looking at their cells to learn more about what happened. Building a community takes hard work sometimes.

Jan Künemund

Translation: Elinor Lewy