“This isn’t a book about what happened at Creamcake’s parties,” writes Chal Ravens in her review of the Berlin club night's new book Chronologies Of Creamcake in The Wire 484. “Many of the writings within, which date back to 2015, reflect ideas orbiting the interlocking scenes of art, music and technology, including Maxi Wallenhorst’s complex deconstruction of the aesthetics of “cool performance”, and Alex Quicho’s cyberfeminist take on the age of the influencer. The music writing focuses not on the artists who appear in the neon-hued photo collages (among them Yung Lean, Lil B, Total Freedom, Dis Fig and Eartheater) but on the state of the culture in general: editor Steph Kretowicz’s critique of the neoliberalising effects of corporate sponsorship, Michelle Lhooq’s gonzo-cutie account of post-pandemic raving, and Selim Bulut’s dispiriting recollections of a decade in online music journalism.”

Publisher Distanz shares the foreword to the book below:

Foreword Chronologies Of Creamcake

It’s hard to know when Creamcake truly began. As the little sister of the similarly sweet sounding queer party, Milkshake, the seed of the mutant Berlin club night may have already been sowed when co-founder Anja Weigl was still co-organising its unambiguous EDM predecessor. But if we’re sticking to the facts, the name and its initial direction came in 2011, when friends Weigl and Daniela Seitz found themselves browsing through an agglomeration of pop and electronica that was equal parts chaotic and smart, experimental and emotional, and which they’d only ever heard on the internet. Still dominated by the house and techno order of the day, the duo felt the German capital’s club scene was in desperate need of a night for this kind of difference – a mostly queer, sometimes quirky sound made by misfits, that would later be known as deconstructed club.

Around the same time, Südblock opened at Kottbusser Tor. The vital LGBTQI* space in the heart of Kreuzberg became the launching pad for Seitz and Weigl’s first Creamcake party, where they indulged their proclivity for cutting-edge music that was born and raised online, before being actualised ‘in real life’. Of course, the 2010s was a time that questioned what was, in fact, reality – the line between virtual space and the physical world would get fuzzier throughout the decade. The troubling of categories and conventions enabled by the unprecedented access afforded by internet expansion and mobile technologies led to the formation of countless compound words and neologisms to match the endless stream of rapid change in art and music making. A long suffering postmodernism met ‘post-internet’ and ‘post-club’ during the turn-of-the-21st-century evolution of Sombart’s late capitalism, and the creative and critical possibilities of this merger were scintillating.

Ignited by the excitement of a new queer friendly gathering place, Seitz and Weigl’s early twenties energy supported the Berlin debuts of early career artists like Kelela, Yves Tumor, Chuquimamani-Condori Crampton, DJ Paypal, coucou chloe, Hannah Diamond, and a sixteen year old Yung Lean. SOPHIE took part in three Creamcake live events, including its overenthusiastic 2nd Anniversary in 2013, and Lil B went thrift shopping with the girls before performing a sold out show that same year. Grimes DJed using her iPod, and was accompanied by a gaggle of back up dancers at Südblock in 2012. For a long time, there was a stage in the venue’s toilet.

Another defining feature of Creamcake and the era in which it emerged was its commitment to interdisciplinarity and diversification. Pop music and academic discourse, digital media and live performance, were all par for the course of a culture built on the multi-hyphenate potential of the World Wide Web. The visual representation of its parties was as important as the music it promoted, with each Creamcake event paired with a poster by a now notable visual artist or designer, like Amalia Ulman, WangNewOne, Pussykrew, Sam Lubicz, Anja Kaiser, Tea Stražičić aka Flufflord, or Sam Rolfes. The original website – built by Easter’s Max Boss – was simply a browser sized video of a kid swimming underwater and a list of the artists who’d already performed. It echoed Nirvana’s Nevermind album cover, and embodied a similar punk spirit in its radical refusal to explain itself.

Like most things worth their salt, Creamcake has evolved since those hedonistic early days of exploration and experimentation, and developed into the reputable platform and events organisation it is today. Its annual 3hd festival – first held in the humble surroundings of artist run performance space Vierte Welt in 2015 – is now in its ninth year of inviting artists from around the world to show their work across media. Its tradition of presenting some of its programme in unusual places around Berlin has led to DJ sets and a live performance in an old, multi-storey post office, an exhibition in an abandoned shopping mall, and a concert headlined by CHRISTEENE (with a cameo from Peaches) in a disused crematorium. In occupying and repurposing empty buildings and lost spaces – perhaps, as a nod to its famous squatting culture and the party scene it fostered – the history of the city and its changing infrastructure doesn’t just feed into the unique narratives constructed around each Creamcake program. It also mirrors the universal changes happening across the globe.

Mostly an excuse for its organisers to meet the artists they’d encountered online and admired, Creamcake has long been its own vortex for creating connection and forgetting oneself in the vital creativity of its niche queer-feminist community. It has always operated at the edge of reason, playfully anticipating the future, and conjuring the fast pace of the digital age in novel ways. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t hard work, and the journey hasn’t been arduous. Along with crucial contributions from other present and past members and associates, like Steph Kretowicz and Tomke Braun, as well as ink Agop, Lena Cramer, Jared Davis, Viola Glock, Susanne Huber, Jon Lucas, Atefa Omar, Lilith Schneider, and Nathan Shah, Creamcake is a labour of love that continues to operate in the face of increasingly hostile public policy and funding cuts. Twelve years ago, the youthful vigour of its organisers more than made up for the risk required to realise a project like Creamcake, but the level of shared responsibility it demands has only grown as it became more established.

Creamcake has always prided itself on its ability to gather local and international peers together in one place, firing up the collective imagination, and uniting audience and artist; sound and lighting; duration and location; along with the production, installation, permits, and financing required to unearth and promote art from the cultural margins of Berlin, and beyond. Chronologies Of Creamcake reflects the heterogeneity and multiplicity of its platform’s ongoing endeavour, emphasising the complexity and contingency of infinitesimal time, and the fluidity and fragmentation of space in the Information Age. Not only a compendium of images and ideas from the past decade or so, the book also features a selection of accompanying texts by some of the most interesting and essential writers, critics, curators, and artists contemplating the contexts and conditions that have made Creamcake and its community what it is today. This is by no means a definitive guide to a single era, but one of many possible snapshots of the prism that is history in hindsight. We hope you enjoy the view as much as we have.

Love, Creamcake.

Read Chal Ravens's review of Chronologies Of Creamcake in full in The Wire 484. Wire subscribers can also access the article online via the digital library of back issues.