LIARS DOING A PHOTO SHOOT WITH JOE DILWORTH IN PLANET ROC AT THE FUNKHAUS
On the outskirts of East-Berlin there is a cluster of factory-like buildings that make up one of the most unique recording studios ever built; a colossal studio compound called the Funkhaus.
The German ‘funk’ translates as ‘radio’ and beginning in the late 1950’s, in the years just before the Berlin Wall went up, the newly established East-German government the GDR built this massive complex to be the center for broadcast recordings in the east. Comprising recording studios and administrative offices, here, any conceivable demand a broadcasting network would need was located. The architect, a former student of the Bauhaus named Franz Ehrlich, designed each of the recording studios with a specific purpose and with a precise acoustic aim. Every live-room was planned to maximize its space and yield the greatest acoustic response. Perhaps the most striking of the many studios is the recording hall in building B, an enormous curved room meant for orchestras complete with a built-in pipe organ.
From 1956 through to the final days of the GDR, radio stations broadcast directly from the Funkhaus. Every program was administered and produced right there within these buildings on Nalepastrasse. More than three thousand people worked there and at one time, the East-Berlin Funkhaus housed a clinic and a kindergarten to accommodate this considerable work force. The now dusty and empty hallways are lined with cubbyholes where tape reels were once stored and exchanged. Elaborate staircases wind to yet more empty hallways. In winter, the snow quickly covers the pathways. Large wall-sized windows overlook the banks of the quietly flowing Spree. Once a bureaucratic army administered over the thoughts of a nation here. Now there is an odd silence in the halls and the feeling of being surrounded by ghosts and secrets.
The GDR was perhaps the largest secret-police state the world has ever seen. Contrasting it with some other rather infamous police states, Anna Funder points out in her fantastic book Stasiland, the KGB had one informer for nearly every 6,000 Russians under Stalin, under Hitler the Gestapo had roughly one informant for every 2,000 Germans, while, astonishingly, East-Germany’s secret police, the STASI, had one informer for every 6.5 East-Germans.
Most of these informers were just ordinary citizens persuaded to spy on their neighbors and colleagues with the promise of getting access to expensive medical drugs, travel-visas or political favors. To defy the STASI was to risk being refused good jobs or admission to the best universities. The STASI controlled and watched every aspect of people’s lives. Books, music, plays, the STASI viewed these as potentially dangerous elements. Thought and culture had the potential to secretly spread propaganda from the west and in the GDR’s view, this meant that even the most seemingly benign use of culture needed to be controlled. East Germans learned not to speak openly even in their own homes for fear someone might be listening. Even the ostensibly innocent ears of children couldn’t be trusted for, teachers were often recruited to coax children to rat out their parents. So then, in a place in which some 3,000 people were working, and administering and broadcasting and receiving radio signals and disseminating information, news and culture to the entire population of East-Germany, what would one suppose the percentage of STASI to non-STASI was among the workers at the Funkhaus? The likely answer seems to be that it must have been almost entirely STASI. Most assuredly, there is almost no chance that STASI agents weren’t constantly and meticulously supervising every single operation and employee at the Funkhaus.
Erich Mielke (center) the head of the STASI with his inner-circle.
“But I Love… I Love all… all people,” said a tearful Erich Mielke six days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. To which the crowd began to laugh.
Further up the Spree and over the wall in Kruezberg, David Bowie,Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed were recording their seminal works while living out a 1970’s broken down vision of Weimar Berlin. Kruezberg proudly holds a claim to this bit of music history, but it’s on the city’s ripped back side, back in the Funkhaus, in this once overly offciated, orderly, micro-organized and perfectly compartmentalized village, that perhaps the future of Berlin’s storied musical history will unfold. Walking into the place today, it’s impossible not to get the feeling that great and impossible works should be made here. It’s the sort of place where a band should hunker down to deconstruct and re-invent and come away with something that sounds like the kind of future Jules Verne or George Melies imagined.
In the 1990’s, after the collapse of the GDR, the offices at the Funkhaus fell into disuse. There are now, as yet derailed, plans to radically revitalize the remaining facilities at the Funkhaus to accommodate a number of business, housing and public cultural spaces and a few of the studio’s were sold into private ownership and are now in operation.
One of these private studios is Planet Roc which operates out of the rooms where GDR radio once broadcast it’s live theater productions. Within this one building the most elaborate stagings took place. It’s rumored Radiohead had originally wanted to record ‘Kid A‘ here but the studio wasn’t ready. True or not, it’s an anecdote that seems immediately believable when entering the place
Planet Roc’s rather large control room looks out into four separate live rooms. The largest boasts ceilings some thirty feet high. In the middle of this room is a staircase leading to a brick wall. The stairs are divided into sections of wood steps, stone steps and carpeted steps to capture the different sounds footsteps make. When Liars recorded their third album ‘Drum’s Not Dead‘ here, Angus Andrew would sing from the top of the stairs to a microphone below. As one would imagine, there’s a stone barrel-vaulted dungeon beneath the stairs, because, well, why wouldn’t there be. The dungeon is another thing Liars made liberal use of.
The smallest room at Planet Roc is called the ‘dead-room’; a reverb-less room with spiraling gravel paths hidden beneath floorboards. The air immediately sucks inward around one’s eardrum when entering the ‘dead-room’, it’s an extremely uncomfortable feeling but yields a perfect close-mic’d dryness. While actors acted out their scenes in the neighboring rooms, expert foley artists simultaneously supplied the accompanying sound effects from there in the ‘Dead Room’. These days, it’s is mostly used to catch the spit of aspiring German rappers often seen skulking around the hallways dressed hilariously in head to toe Lakers gear.
Recording The Boggs’ ‘Forts’ in Planet Roc with Liars’ Julien Gross
I recorded four tracks for The Boggs’ album Forts at Planet Roc. I couldn’t use the control room because a young German pop idol was mixing so, Holger Muller, in-house producer at Planet Roc, built me a makeshift studio there in the middle of the big room. Mek Obaam, who played drums on Forts used the walls and sound barriers to record the flickering stick patterns. To get the ambiguous heartbeat for the track ‘The Passage’, we had all the lights off in that cavernous room, all of us sitting quietly in the dark, listening to the gentle bomp bomp of the mallet. It’s that kind of place; a place where you want to improvise and re-invent wheels and find new and interesting ways to approach things and rip it up and start again.
A view of one the Funkhause’s now unused buildings ripped up and waiting.
In Part two of this two part series, Walkmen/White Rabbits/Asobi Seksu producer Chris Zane and Rakes‘ guitarist Matthew Swinnerton talk about recording together at Planet Roc.
Read Pt.II Here.
Funkhaus Berlin « Sonicskepsi | 25-Jun-09 at 2:39 am | Permalink
[...] This website I came across has a really good two-part article about the building, including it’s history (which is also well covered by Wikipedia), so I’ve provided links to them both rather than regurgitating all the information here. In a nutshell, The Funkhaus was built in the 1950s by the East German government to cater for all it’s radio broadcasts. Some of those broadcasts included plays, for which there were extensive facilities for foley accompaniment. [...]