The Black Dog – Live Berghain Set

Here’s something pretty special to start off the week. The Sheffield-based techno pioneers known as The Black Dog have gone ahead and thrown up a brilliant Berghain live set for download and stream. It’s done in collaboration with Electronic Supper Club, a new online spot that includes a Boiler Room-esque element that will feature an epic live show this week (more on that later). Out of it’s base in Sheffield, Electronic Supper Club (ESC) has stated it’s primary purpose as “to help, support and establish artists and DJs in the SoYo area and within the Northern realm” which explains The Black Dog connection.

The Black Dog don’t need much of an introduction. Over the last 20 years they’ve never been scared of experimenting or pushing the boundaries of what they do, willing to take on any project or production. The influence The Black Dog holds over the UK scene comes just as much from this creative and experimental attitude as the quality of tunes they’ve produced, and even more so from the legendary live shows where they blur the lines of performance and DJing, putting their soul in to every track and knowing exactly where to take the audience.

Our friends at The Quietus also got involved and managed to get a statement of sorts from the guys regarding the 50 minute set, originally recorded in October of 2011. Words from them below, tracklist underneath that and stream or donwload the full set right at the bottom. Proper techno business.

The Black Dog via The Quietus
“We’d been booked to play with Xhin and Surgeon, so we knew it would be a great night of full-on spectrum techno. We actually went to Berghain in the day to fine tune our set and to hear our new tracks on their system, the sound guy helped us tune up certain parts of the tracks so they’d sound better on the system. We just practiced until it was time to open as we knew it would be another six months before we had a chance to spend hours playing on a system like that.

“Berghain is always good for us, we never had a bad reception there and even when we’ve tried new things out the crowd have followed us, which is a beautiful thing. The venue has such a good crew, sound system and knowledgable crowd that you couldn’t ask for more really.

“We love Berghain because of the scale and the brutal design, it’s very Sheffield and feels like home to us but we also love lot of other places as well, we celebrate difference. It does have the same aesthetic as many of the buildings in Sheffield, we played at Park Hill flats recently with Richard H Kirk and Sandwell District, that definitely had the “Berghain” vibe! The reason ours remain empty is it’s too difficult to start something here, Bergahin may be having problems with GEMA but we bet that’s way easier than dealing with our council and police force.

“If there were a Berghain in Sheffield, what building would it be in? It have to be pure meta, it couldn’t exist here and if it did, it would be quickly turned into Gatecrasher 2 for economical reasons. Sheffield works in a very different way, you have to keep things under 300 here or it just goes tits up. You risk pulling the wrong crowd in or being compromised by demands of money. When that happens it messes with the creative vision. It’s really a problem though, it’s something we love about the place, things are difficult here for the right reasons.”

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The Black Dog – Live @ Berghain – Track listing
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01. Silent Escape
02. Bird Siren
03. Eden 353
04. Bass Mantra
05. Greedy Gutter Guru
06. Only Concrete & Steel
07. Black Chamber Order
08. Single Light Focus
09. Beauty In The Fear (The Black Dog’s DOP Mix for Luke Slater)
10. Distant Kick
11. Dissident Bleep