After the enormous success of One Day / Reckoning Song back in 2012, German DJ and producer Wankelmut decided to keep his newly successful career in pop-house music in his native Berlin….the world capital of techno.
“When I started going out and discovering all these genres, I was into techno for a brief amount of time,” Wankelmut, the alias of Jacob Dilßner, says. “It doesn’t have enough diversity for my taste. I like vocals, I like melodies, some grooves. So I stuck with house music. But Berlin is definitely the techno city! We have Berghain, About Blank, all these famous clubs that play banging techno. But for me, it’s all about grooves and melodies.”
Growing up in the traditionally working-class but now hip and gentrified Friedrichshain area of the German capital, Wankelmut took up piano lessons from a young age, and was studying Philosophy and Political Science when he began DJing around the city. He chose his name after taking a liking to its meaning of ‘fickleness’ in the German language.
After hearing the Asaf Avidan & The Mojos song Reckoning Song while in the United States, his attempt at remixing the song went from his Soundcloud account, around the blogosphere and quickly spreading through the clubs of Europe like wildfire. He’s roared into 2020 with singles Only You and Give & Take.
Wankelmut understands my scepticism about how possible it is to thrive as a house music DJ in the city of Berlin, where the stereotype is deadly-serious techno fans dressed all in black, queuing for hours for Berghain, despite the huge likelihood of being turned away. I ask if he ever feels like the odd one out.
“Sometimes I do, yep,” he says. “There aren’t many of us in Germany, there’s Robin Schulz and people like that who are a bit more radio focussed than club focussed.
“But yes, when you go to Berghain, everything is very serious, which I don’t like that much, with the techno scene in general. I like to have fun, and I like to show it! I actually live very near the club here. Sometimes we are at the coffee shop, and we see people on their way to the club, and they do have the very serious demeanour that you need to get let in, you can tell it’s very important to them. Berghain does feel a bit like a temple, and the people feel like acolytes! So there is definitely some truth in that stereotype.”
I remark that living near the club with the world’s most brutal door policy means Wankelmut must also live near the East Side Gallery, the longest remaining stretch of The Berlin Wall that now features street art from some of the world’s greatest talent.
“I was born two years before the wall fell,” he says. “So I didn’t get an impression of what life in East Germany felt like. But it gives the city itself a lot of inspirational energy. The dividing of the city made all these clubs possible — the ‘90s dance scene here grew because there were all these abandoned buildings that nobody cared about. And that spirit is still here today.”