The boys from Berlin

I knew Modeselektor, the German duo of Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary, were supposed to be a bit whacky, the tricksters of the Berlin techno scene. But I did not expect them to tear a page from Steve Aoki’s book and spray the crowd with champagne, which they did about half way through their set Saturday night at the Red Marquee. From behind the DJ table, they just hoisted a couple bottles of bubbly and waved them around a bit, giving the crowd a chance to ponder what was about to happen. Which was getting the champagne sprayed all over them, like a cheap hooker. It was actually kind of funny.

The music was their own groovy techno, a more girl-friendly version of what Boys Noize plays. The beats are a little softer, and they use vocal parts that are not in the computer-generated machine voice, including some bizarre East European interpretations of hip hop. As a whole, it is not nearly as bombastic. They were playing all their own compositions, so in that it was not much different from what Boys Noize had done a couple hours earlier with his “live” set. Szary kicked off the show by saying hello to everyone in a chipmunk voice — the microphone they used had two different effects on it, one was a high-pitch chipmunk, the other a demonic baritone, both used with maximum comic effect. The first half hour was fun, but a little slow. The song “Pretentious Friends” made me laugh for the accompanying visual of a Facebook counter with 50 billion “likes”. But it wasn’t until a little deeper in, when they notched up the b.p.m.s and got into their core techno stuff, like “Evil Twin” that their unique groove really took hold. By that point, they had the crowd bumping around like it the room was a box in the mechanical arms of a gigantic paint-shaking machine. At that point, we were well on the way to Monkeytown.