- For as long as anyone can remember, May 1st has been the biggest party of the year at Club Der Visionäre. While street parties and political demonstrations sweep much of the city, a crew of old friends share the decks in the tiny brick shack, some of them now far too famous for such a small dance floor. This year they were Sonja Moonear, Margaret Dygas, Sammy Dee, Zip and Ricardo Villalobos, billed, as usual, as Die Üblichen Verdächtigen ("The Usual Suspects").
An RA writer once described CDV's dance floor as being about as big as a queen-sized bed, which isn't much of an exaggeration. Squished between the DJ booth, the bar and a low wooden ceiling, it barely has space for 20 people. During a big party like this, they cram into every inch and spill onto the deck outside. DJs usually climb through a window to get into the booth.
No one dancing on the deck could see what was going on in there, but it was easy to guess when Zip and Villalobos were on. Fresh from Sunwaves in Romania, they started sometime around 4 PM, at first following Margaret Dygas's lead with crisp minimal and house—the classic sound of CDV. Sometime past sundown, the music exploded into technicolour. Italo, electro, dub techno and latin house poured forth in a soaring medley, stitched together with the lean and punchy fare that's this duo's bread and butter.
Many of these records were unpredictable to begin with and mixed with haphazard flair. Zip played one with a warm and fat disco arrangement that abruptly dissolved, leaving behind just a skeletal beat. Villalobos, dressed in pajama bottoms, sleeveless shirt and a golf visor, was constantly punching in little morsels of whatever he had next, often with a slight crouch, head cocked to the side and faders pinched between thumb and forefinger. Acapellas burst in and quickly disappeared, never to return again. Sometimes he'd tease one record and then play something else first—by the time Schatrax's "Restless Dub" finally dropped, we'd forgotten about the split-second fragments that had introduced it some ten minutes earlier. He really went for it with Josh Wink's "Higher State Of Consciousness," dribbling in tiny drops of that acid line for ages, then finally bringing it all the way back to the beginning and letting it play in full. As the track hit its wailing climax, the tiny crowd surged around like they were at a punk concert.
On the deck outside you could breathe a little easier. People danced or huddled on benches by the water, chatting and smoking in the glow of tiki torches. Onlookers gawked from the bridge nearby, unaware of the video projections flickering below their feet. By 2 AM or so, Sonja Moonear had appeared in the booth and was kissing her hellos. The pianos of Villalobos's "True To Myself" twinkled throughout the club. Through the wooden planks beneath our feet, the canal lapped against the dock.