Clubs like this always bring a certain smell. These people haven’t showered since well before they got here twelve hours ago, during the course of which their sweat has drenched them from head to toe. Brick stands where windows ought to be, locking the dancers in an endless night. Pills float around the crowd, turning the people who take them into fixtures of the room every bit as conscious as the lighting fixtures or the speaker rigs. From outside this drug-induced haze, the scene makes little sense; these people seem to be deriving so much pleasure and meaning from music that barely exceeds a typical metronome in complexity. What the fuck are you doing here?
Like many other situations in life, nights spent at a dance club take on a considerable layer of absurdity when examined from an objective lens. Especially in the extremely intense club scenes of Germany, from which Kassem Mosse originates, the simplistic, repetitive music leaves many outsiders confused. The environment eventually draws these bewildered participants in, subsuming their conscious minds into an hours-long synthetic, repetitive pulsation. In response to this techno trope, Mosse presents us with Workshop 32, a self-reflective product of the German techno scene that invites us to laugh at the absurdity of dimly lit 24 hour dance clubs.
With occasional narration from dazed and confused partiers, human breaths that interrupt the otherwise squeaky-clean mechanical nature of the music, and detuned sections that jolt the listener out of the techno daydream state, Workshop 32 flies in the face of techno’s established purpose. As Mosse implies here, perhaps we should examine our surroundings critically when in a dance club, at that precise moment when our rationality is invited to exit the room. For, there are many ways we can unplug the critical parts of our brain and float downstream in a trance, but there’s only one place where we can analyze our current moment in one of Germany’s premier late night destinations.