CANCELLED Kometenmelodien w/ Powell at Kantine am Berghain / Thursday, 24.11.2016

Unfortunately the POWELL concert has been cancelled due to a scheduling conflict.
Purchased advance tickets can be returned at the respective advance ticket retailers.

Oscar Powell belongs to a very small pool of dance artists whose music is a style in itself. The club music Oscar Powell wanted to hear didn’t exist, so he made it himself. He’s now released six EPs and a compilation of the stuff, and it’s the most inventive and hard-hitting dance music I’ve recently heard. His tracks combine the attitude of post-punk with the physicality of techno and the adventurous spirit of experimental music.

Powell’s drums are a meticulously crafted mess, which makes dancing to his tracks both fun and challenging. “I’m really trying to do something different,” he said. Powell runs a label called Diagonal with his best friend, Jaime Williams, and in the spirit of Powell’s records, they mostly release leftfield electronic music you can dance to. The revered techno artist Regis was an early supporter, advising Powell to start Diagonal and remixing a track on its first release. Russell Haswell, the famously bloody-minded multidisciplinary artist, has released two records on the label and has become something of a mentor to Powell. These friendships have contributed to Powell’s uncompromising views on his music and the scene around him. He sometimes feels disillusioned at the formulaic nature of contemporary club music but, as he told me, he doesn’t think of himself as the antidote so much as an alternative. Nevertheless, his music and views raise questions about what we expect from our dance floor experiences.Much has been made about the lines Powell has drawn between post-punk and no wave and modern club music, but he’s no connoisseur of these sounds. “It’s not like I love all post-punk,” he said. “I think it was more about what post-punk and no wave stood for as ideas that was interesting to me. This kind of determination to rub up against what was happening, and to change things, and to provoke.” I’d met Powell at the house he was staying at with Williams in Selsey, a small coastal town on the south coast of England. He was there to write music and take a break from London. Powell is in his early 30s, is strikingly tall and looks like a model who’s had his features softened by late nights. He speaks with a mixture of spiky honesty and unchecked enthusiasm.