The Kater Blau on the Spreeufer in Friedrichshain is one of those places, along with the world-famous hedonist temple Berghain, that every well-informed techno tourist should have on their Berlin agenda. Once you have passed the iron-hard door there, a kind of happily cobbled together adventure playground with neo-hippie flair opens up, including two dance floors and a houseboat that is anchored seasonally. If Peter Pan were a raver, he would spend his weekends right here.
Whoever wields the musical scepter in this well-guarded Neverland can certainly be proud of it. All the more so if you belong to the select group of house cats, as the resident DJs at Kater Blau are affectionately called. Of course, one can argue about whether one shouldn’t rather speak of a domestic cat in the case of Franca Rehm – in any case, the fact is that the DJ, who simply operates as Franca, has been one of those Felidae for several years, who regularly swarmed the atmosphere here Bring Bootsbude, and not short of it.
Franca’s path to this status began in Munich in the mid-1990s. Strongly hooked by her school bus driver at the time, who insisted on blasting his young passengers with rock-hard techno every time they drove, Franca Rehm also fell for this highly energetic new music in no time at all. With her double tape deck, she soon records her first mixtapes in the children’s room, which she gives away to friends, and after moving to Cologne in the mid-nineties, she finally begins to DJ.
And so a hobby, which was actually intended more as a living room project out of pure love for the cause, becomes an obsession that culminates in Franca’s first own electronic productions in 2015. There aren’t too many, but enormously filigree tracks that she has released since then. Sometimes they combine the powerful pumping of deep house with densely woven atmospheres, as in their homage to the Indian “Vipassana” meditation of the same name. Sometimes they unfold a formidably ecstatic form of electronic psychedelic, as in the title track of their “Microdosing” EP. At the “Bunten hustle and bustle with Franca” in the Bahnwärter Thiel, the same now stands in front of a whole squad of DJs as the eponymous artist of the evening. It should be a glorious homecoming.
Hustle and bustle with Franca, Saturday, June 24, from 10 p.m. Signalman ThielTumblingerstrasse 45