Techno-tourism and post-industrial neo-romanticism in Berlin’s electronic dance music scenes

Abstract

This article profiles the ‘techno-tourists’ of Berlin: music fans who return repeatedly to the city in order to participate in the local electronic dance music scenes. Based on interviews, this article sketches a profile of these music-minded voyagers, surveying their motivations, their attitudes, their patterns of travel and their strategies for making this mode of travel possible in terms of work and money. It also situates this recent wave of tourism within a broader history of tourism in Berlin, as well as considering its representation in local popular discourse. Local debates about the impact of tourism are reflected in interviewees’ ambivalence towards tourist identities, as they strive to describe the terms of their socio-cultural belonging within a sub-cultural scene that is spatially distant from house and home.

Keywords

cities electronic dance music ethnography ethnomusicology music scenes post-industrialism

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