Audiotour Berlin: Berlin Sounds

While brows­ing the shelves of pro qm, a most excel­lent media/architecure/design book­shop in Alte Schönhauser Str., I stum­bled upon Berlin Sounds — an audio­tour of Berlin focused on the beats of the city. Right up my audio alley.

The idea is great: Anja Schnei­der gives you a tour of Berlin’s Mitte while spin­ning records. Artists include Bar­bara Mor­gen­stern, Chris­t­ian Kleine, Jaz­zanova, Max­i­m­il­ian Hecker, Mia and Mod­e­se­lek­tor. The walk­ing pace is given by the beat; 75BPM.

But. The infor­ma­tion pro­vided is some­what triv­ial, and though she intro­duces audi­ol­o­gos, city sounds etc. it never really takes off. The thoughts on the peo­ple of Mitte are pretty naive and the over­all tone a bit too pädagogish

for my lik­ing. If you ever lis­tened to elec­tronic music or thought just a lit­tle about the sounds of the street, you won’t learn any­thing. Which prob­a­bly just means that I wasn’t in the tar­get audi­ence. Just as I found it impos­si­ble to walk that slow… How­ever, I can imag­ine it will be a great way to expe­ri­ence that part of Berlin for the first time if you’re not the typ­i­cal recordbag-carrier and to be fair, you can find a cou­ple of decent sto­ries on the var­i­ous build­ings you pass as well as some info on the club scene of the area.

Tak­ing the tar­get audi­ence into acount, I’m still sorry that the actual music doesn’t take up more space of the tour, though. Too much talk, way too lit­tle beats. Again, the idea rocks.

It’s avail­able as an MP3 down­load at reduced cost, just as Hear We Go has made other audio­tours.

On a related note, I picked up 100% Pure Ham­burg by Pure­Or­bit when I vis­ited Ham­burg in February.

Their approach is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent; it’s not an audio­tour but record­ings from dif­fer­ent places of the city. The sound itself is a lit­tle muse­um­like, as if it got post­processed a bit too much, but over­all it gives a good pic­ture of the “typ­is­che Geräusche aus der Hans­es­tadt”. The­ater of the mind!

One last note. Credit to Berlin Sounds for solv­ing a lit­tle mys­tery. The I hate CBS grafitti doesn’t relate to the net­work, but to a Ger­man grafitti group by the name of CBS (Cow­boys Crew) — and they prob­a­bly put the grafitti up there themselves.