Ellen Allien – Einsteigen
Ellen Fraatz (aka Ellen Allie), who runs the famous Berlin techno label BPitch Control, has been one of the defining figures of the city's bursting electronic music scene for some time. On this track, taken from her 2008 album Sool, she splendidly combines her abstract minimal sounds with field recordings of a tram ride from Alexanderplatz to Hackescher Markt (line M4 or M5, if you feel like re-enacting). Berlin has the third-largest tram network in the world, but, somewhat ironically, the city would be without its lovely yellow streetcars if it hadn't been for the communists. While the postwar West quickly got rid of the network, hoping to turn Berlin into a "car-friendly city", the Eastern authorities were pragmatic enough to realise their political system of choice would never be able to provide enough Trabants to rationalise such a decision.
Marlene Dietrich – Ich Hab Noch Einen Koffer in Berlin
Marlene Dietrich, icon of Berlin's golden 20s and one of the few true global superstars ever to come from Germany, left the city for Hollywood in 1930. Supporting the fight against Nazi Germany from the States, at home she was subsequently widely despised for being a traitor. Ich Hab noch einen Koffer in Berlin (I still have a suitcase in Berlin), first interpreted by Dietrich in the early 50s, is not only personal melancholia for a lost home, but also an expression of a distinctive nostalgia that yearns for that certain point in time when Berlin could compete with London, New York or Paris – and before everything was so thoroughly and deliberately messed up.
LA Vampires and Matrix Metals – Berlin Baby
In 2003, long-time mayor Klaus Wowereit coined the unspeakable but surprisingly sticky Berlin leitmotif of being "poor but sexy". Visitors may form their own opinion, but in any case, the city has never sounded sexier than in this glam-infused slow disco anthem by Amanda Brown (aka LA Vampires) and Sam Mehran (aka Matrix Metals). A few years back, Mehran had a short residency in Berlin, during which he recorded the Foxy Baby LP under his Outer Limits Recordings moniker. He may thus stand here for the myriad artists from all over the world who arrived in Berlin since the early 2000s to revive the spirit of David Bowie and Iggy Pop.
David Bowie – Neuköln
When David Bowie lived in Berlin during the late 70s to record his seminal Berlin Trilogy, Schöneberg – where he shared a flat with Iggy – was the place to be. The district's bohemian heyday has long gone, so if you're looking for the hippest quarter in town you should head to Neukölln (which is actually spelled with two "l"s). Afflicted with a notoriously high crime rate and suffering from a bad image only a few years ago, nowadays the district (and in particular its northern part) has become the latest battleground in the ongoing gentrification wars, with quickly rising rents and new clubs and bars popping up every week. If you go, the most exciting area right now is the quarter around Weserstrasse.
Jens Lekman – A Postcard to Nina
Scandinavians love Berlin to such a degree that "a Berlin-loving Scandinavian" almost feels like a pleonasm. By now, I guess everyone from up there has bought a flat down here, not least because for them the city is almost ridiculously cheap. Swedish singer Jens Lekman's A Postcard to Nina is one of those picture-perfect pop songs that the Swedes excel at – telling a heart-warming story about him coming to Berlin "to have some fun" (who doesn't) but ending in some traditionalist/modernist generational conflict. This is all very cliched of course, but simply too sweet to deny.
Beirut – Prenzlauerberg
In an interview a couple of years ago, a famous Hollywood actor (their name escapes me) said that filming in Berlin was great because the city looked like any other town east of Berlin, meaning you didn't have to actually travel to Moscow to get stereotypical eastern European scenery – the filming of the Bourne Trilogy in the city is a case in point. In a way, Beirut's Zach Condon does a similar thing here, musically. In this song, the formerly eastern district of Prenzlauer Berg – nowadays both the epicentre of the German neo-bourgeoisie and ground zero of the Scandinavian invasion – sounds like a village in the High Tatras.
Einstürzende Neubauten – Steh auf Berlin
Berlin is a city of extremes: construction and deconstruction are always only a few steps away from each other. The city's permanent state of transition may never entirely recede, which makes it simultaneously so painfully ugly and so staggeringly exciting. Their subversive intentions notwithstanding, no one has ever captured the essential sound of Berlin more perfectly than Einstürzende Neubauten with Steh auf Berlin, taken from their 1981 album Kollaps (Collapse).
Thomas D and Franka Potente – Wish (Komm zu mir)
The soundtrack for the iconic Tom Tykwer movie Run Lola Run (1998); the film that quickly became the symbol for the Berlin hype that had set in towards the end of the last century. Until the mid-90s, no one had really known what to do with the unexpectedly recovered metropolis in the east, and Berlin was far from being considered the world's capital of cool. But all of a sudden, everyone wanted to move here to witness the hip charm of post-socialist decline. Somehow, during these years the Berlin myth was born, and it became essential, in every conversation, to incidentally drop that, of course you had arrived "before the hype".
Marcel Fengler – Shiraz
The Berghain may not be DJ magazine's number one club in the world anymore, but without doubt it remains Berlin's top location for techno and house. For last year's fifth anniversary of the club's affiliated label Ostgut Ton, UK producer Emika made a bunch of field recordings inside the empty Berghain, which she passed on to all resident DJs and other affiliated artists, who then built some very fine, very distinctively Berlin minimal tracks around them. Here's what Marcel Fengler came up with.
Tocotronic – Gott sei Dank, haben wir beide uns gehabt
This song by Germany's best rock group became my secret Berlin hymn years after it was released in 1995. It's not about Berlin – it's about not being there; stuck in some dull town somewhere else in Germany. With that theme the band perfectly nailed the ambivalent feelings of us West German kids towards that rather unknown city during the first decade after reunification, culminating in the laconic and aptly helpless line: "That guy over there is now a DJ in Berlin/in general, quite a few people are moving there now." Despite being one of the defining exponents of the so-called "Hamburger Schule", probably Germany's most influential branch of indie music since the late 80s, Tocotronic took the inevitable step sometime in the early 2000s to record their three most recent albums in the capital, retrospectively naming this their "Berlin Trilogy", an reverential nod to Bowie.
• Henning Lahmann writes for Oslo and Berlin-based blog No Fear Of Pop
