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The First Days of Berlin: The Sound of Change. By Ulrich Gutmair. Translated by Simon Pare. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021. 212 pp. ISBN 978-1509547302
As historians of popular music, we have long relied on journalistic publications to substantiate our often theoretical insights into the reality of musical phenomena. In electronic dance music, journalists such as Simon Reynolds (1998) or Matthew Collin (1997) have provided insightful histories of the genre from their perspectives as participant observers. Ulrich Gutmair, a journalist and cultural editor for the German national newspaper taz, could be seen as continuing this tradition of journalistic projects to narrate history through a personal lens. His book, originally published in 2013 in German, is now available in English. It tells the story of Berlin in the 1990s. One would think that this particular story has been told already (see Rapp 2009; Denk and von Thülen 2012; Henkel and Wolff 1996), but this book is different in that the music is not centre stage. Gutmair focuses on communities of creative people exploring, appropriating and creating physical and sonic spaces. The empty houses that characterised East Berlin after the fall of the wall are the starting point of this narrative. For many of the buildings in East Berlin...