Show Them the Reason

fabric put an interview with Marcel Dettmann online in June, ahead of a night at Boston Manor Park where he and DJ Hell were billed to play back to back for the first time. Most of the conversation is about Berlin. The last question is about the set itself, and the answer arrives as a list:

Like imperfection, surprise, creating tension, and you know, like creating something you believe in.

Read the four again and notice what is missing. Nobody promised the room a clean night.

Four words, none of them about skill

Two DJs at that level announcing a first meeting could have offered precision, depth, weight, a shared record collection — the things a poster usually promises. Dettmann leads with imperfection.

That ordering is not modesty. In a back-to-back, imperfection is the evidence that two people are actually deciding something in front of you. A pair who sound seamless for four hours have generally agreed the lane beforehand, or one of them has quietly stopped taking risks. Whatever else is true of that night, it is one person's set with a guest.

Surprise, for it to mean anything, has to include surprising the other person. If both know what is coming, the audience is watching a rehearsal with extra equipment.

Tension is the one most sets are engineered to remove. It means going somewhere the room has not yet agreed to and staying there long enough to be a problem — which is the only reason resolving it later does anything at all.

And then the fourth, which is doing the work of a filter over the first three. Without conviction, imperfection is just sloppiness and tension is just a bad record played too long. With it, both become choices you can defend the next morning.

Which is the same territory Dixon was pointing at when he said the blending is the least of what the job asks, and the same instinct behind playing appropriately for the room rather than playing to be seen.

Playing the piano with the hammer

Earlier in the interview he is asked what Berlin sounds like. His answer is a little bit of distortion — maybe, he says, it is playing the piano with the hammer.

The biography he gives immediately afterwards explains where that comes from. As a child it was normal to play in broken buildings, an old hospital or something. After the wall came down there was massive potential and the city felt unfinished, which was the magic of it: everything was possible. That freedom, he says, is what Berlin delivered to him and to a lot of other people.

The word worth keeping is unfinished. Not ruined, not free of charge, not lawless — unfinished, in the sense that nobody had yet decided what the buildings were for, which meant the people using them decided instead.

Cities do eventually finish. Rooms acquire owners, uses, prices and opening hours, and the Berlin figures we went through recently — from the Clubcommission's Clubkultur Berlin 2026 study — describe an ecosystem under genuine strain rather than a golden age quietly continuing. That study also counted roughly as many openings as closures since 2020. The condition Dettmann describes was never a property of the nineties; it is a property of any space where the use has not been settled yet, and those still get made.

The sentence in the middle

Between the history and the set, he says the thing this piece is really about:

I don't want to be this old grumpy guy who said everything was better in the past. No. But it's important to show the people this is the reason why I do this. If you are interested, you are interested. If not, it's okay.

Three sentences, and each one is doing separate work.

He refuses the comparison first — deliberately, as a stated position rather than as false modesty. The comparison is the trap, because once you have said the past was better, everything you play afterwards is a reproach and everybody in the room younger than you is standing in the wrong decade.

Then he keeps the part that matters, and the verb he chooses is show. Not explain, not correct, not remind. The reason gets demonstrated in the music, which is a considerably harder standard than telling the story at the bar, because it has to survive contact with people who have no idea what you are referring to.

The third sentence is the one that costs something. If you are interested, you are interested — if not, that is fine. He puts no obligation on the listener at all. The grumpy version always does: it wants agreement, it wants the room to concede that something has been lost. Dettmann hands over the thing and lets it find whoever it finds.

What I take from it

I was not in that Berlin. I arrived long after the buildings had owners, and any nostalgia I performed for a room I never stood in would be borrowed from someone else's story.

What transfers is not the decade but the working condition. Leave enough unfinished that decisions still have to be taken live — in a set, that means carrying records I am not certain about and letting a passage stay unresolved longer than is comfortable. In the studio, the day job buys the same thing: tracks that never had to function as products get to keep the parts that make them mine.

And the transmission problem is exactly why this section of the site exists. The positions are written down here, but the argument for them is the music. Nobody is obliged to be interested.

Source: Marcel Dettmann interviewed by fabric ahead of his first back-to-back with DJ Hell at Boston Manor Park on 25 July 2026, posted by fabric on 12 June 2026. Produced by Sean O'D, filmed by Seamus Platt, edited by Jess Vincent. Quotations are transcribed from the clip; the surrounding passages are paraphrased from it.