In the preface to Lost and Sound, a stocktaking of the Berlin electronic music scene at the end of the noughties, Tobias Rapp suggests that it might be too early for the drafting of a proper historiography of techno and its entanglement with the city. Yet four years later, despite proving its undaunted vitality every single weekend in countless clubs across town, techno nostalgia is in full bloom. In his anthology Berlin Sampler from 2012, French journalist Théo Lessour dedicates a whole quarter of his book to the phenomenon, implicitly defining techno as the pinnacle of the city’s musical development. That it effectively amounts to Berlin’s continuing contribution to world cultural heritage since 1989 has by now become a commonplace perception.

However, while of course there has always been music made in the city aside from techno, only in recent years has a different story begun to unfold in the shadows of the overarching club scene – a story not exclusively, yet largely, told by Berlin’s ever-growing expat community. Distinct from the dance community, which had already started to become more international after the turn of the century, those artists may have chosen Berlin as their temporary or permanent home without having been attracted by the city’s reputation as a techno mecca. More prosaically, what almost everyone mentions are the favourable economic conditions that make the German capital so much more affordable than any other major city in the Western hemisphere.

The work of those newly arrived artists does challenge the dominance of dance music in Berlin. Still, a common denominator is hard to find. What connects the psychedelic soundscapes of Swedish improviser Olle Holmberg, aka Moon Wheel, with the futuristic beats of Houston native Lotic, or in what way does the experimental proto-dance of Australian producer Phoebe Kiddo relate to the fierce noise attacks of Milan’s Shapednoise? If anything, what they create is a broadly understood version of pop, »a multiplicity of artistic practices that derive from and actively participate in certain cultures of the everyday,« as defined on the webpage of Berlin Current, the project initiated by CTM Festival to unearth some of the artists that represent this »new« strand of Berlin’s diversifying musical community – to be witnessed during the festival, when British composer Owen Roberts and his ensemble showcase their »Recycled Hyperprism Plastik for Amplified Chamber Ensemble,« and experimental musician Kathy Alberici sets out to musically explore the GDR’s old Funkhaus, visually accompanied by filmmaker Martha Jurksaitis.

Even more difficult than finding common musical ground between the various artists, however, is assessing their impact on Berlin’s scene. For many contemporary musicians, the emergence of the Internet Age has diminished the significance of an actual locus of creativity. As the existence of a locally fixed community may be disregarded, cultural production can happen anywhere. This not only holds true for the artists themselves, but also for those who publish their music. Two labels that in recent years have turned into characteristic examples of new developments in the city’s musical landscape, PAN and Human Ear Music, are both run by expats who more or less accidentally ended up in Berlin. And although commonly identified as »Berlin-based labels,« neither PAN’s Bill Kouligas nor HEM’s Jason Grier consider their endeavours a real part of the city’s scene. More than that, even if he managed to establish his label as a genuinely local venture, Grier says, »I would imagine HEM would appear to be a scene unto itself. That’s just Berlin’s nature.« Kouligas and Grier are connected through their own networks that are global at least as much as they are local, the changing musical landscape within the city itself remains scattered and fragmented.

For now, discontinuity within the prevalent narrative of Berlin as the city of techno is mainly propelled by and channelled through institutions such as the Senate-affiliated Musicboard and the projects funded by it, for instance Berlin Current. By starting to map the newly emerging »scene,« thus boosting the visibility of musicians that stand apart from the clubs, those organisations attempt to associate the music with a more broadly outlined notion of Berlin as an international cultural centre. Whether this effort has already come to fruition in the eyes of the wider audience is a different question.

Berlin is attractive as a place to live and work for its perceived »otherness.« Thus it appeals more due to what it is not – not as expensive, not as restrictive, not as »settled« or »finished« as other cities – than what it actually stands for. In this sense, it serves as an empty vessel, to be filled with the ideas and expectations of arriving members of the transnational creative class. For most artists, moving here is very much about »this imaginary Berlin I started to build up in my mind«, in the words of Colombian-born musician and current Musicboard scholarship holder Lucrecia Dalt, who releases on HEM.

Whatever shape the Berlin musical landscape may take in the near future, it will most likely remain in a struggle with the image of Berlin as a techno capital, a standing now written in stone. This is already evident in the discourses of today. While the fading cohort of natives and first-wave newcomers mourns the lost utopia of early to mid-1990s Mitte wonderland, those expats who arrived before the turn of the decade long for a bygone paradise that ostensibly still existed only a few years ago. To see the past in ever-brighter colours mirrored against the present’s perceived staleness is certainly not exclusive to Berlin’s musical landscape. But since the fall of the Wall and the subsequent opening of seemingly endless possibilities amidst the city’s ruins and abandoned spaces, feeling stuck in past marvels appears to be a narrative so particular to Berlin that by now it may be considered the artistic community’s only true continuity. For the incoming musician, this situation might even provide comfort, for it spares them the subtle obligation to adapt to any predefined and settled scene. However, it ultimately also means that it will be harder if not impossible to leave any significant and lasting mark on Berlin’s musical heritage. Even for the city’s emerging experimental pop undercurrents, transience remains the city’s only persisting feature.