Where do the tracks come from?

From the weekly Track ID threads on r/Berghain_Community on Reddit. Every track was recognised by someone who was on the floor and posted it, and every night in the archive links back to its own thread.

What gets into the archive?

A track that was actually played, with an artist and a title. Unconfirmed guesses, tracks with no artist and descriptions without identification stay out.

Is this a record of what Berghain plays most?

No. It records what people asked about: strange enough that someone asked, known enough that someone else could answer. Most of the club canon never appears here because it was never a question.

Why do some tracks have no player?

Much of what plays at Berghain is white label, dubplate, an unreleased edit, or a catalogue that never reached streaming, so it is not on Spotify. A wrong match is worse than a missing one, so unconfirmed matches stay quiet.

How do I report a mistake?

Reply in the Track ID thread for that weekend, which is where the entry came from. Every night in the archive links straight to its own thread.

How this is made

Where the tracks come from, what gets in, and why some are missing.

Why this exists

Every time one of my playlists ran dry I ended up doing the same thing. Back into the threads, scrolling for names people had posted, then searching each one, listening, deciding, moving on to the next. An evening could go by and I would come out of it with four or five records.

The information was never the problem. It was all there, written down by people who were actually in the room. It just was not in a form anyone could use: spread across weeks of comments, impossible to search once the thread went quiet, and gone from memory by the next weekend.

So I built the thing I wanted to have.

Now finding out what a night sounded like, or just finding something I have not heard, takes one page instead of a whole evening. If it saves you that time too, that is the entire point.

Thank you

None of the hard part is mine. Every track here was recognised by someone who was on the floor and took the time to come back and write it down, often at four in the afternoon the next day, from memory, for nobody in particular.

The archive is theirs.
This is just the place it is kept.

If you have ever answered a track ID in one of those threads, some of your work is in here.

Credits

The archive is other people's work. This is every source it has been built from, and the list grows as the archive does.

r/Berghain_Community. The weekly Track ID threads, plus one thread asking what the perfect Berghain track is. Almost everything here comes from there, written by people who were on the floor and came back the next day to post what they heard.

An early techno list. 178 tracks of classic and contemporary techno that came in before this project started keeping a record of where things came from. No night is attached to them, which is part of why the archive has an undated section.

Berghain Klubnacht Database. Who played, on which night, and on which floor, from December 2004 onward. It is the exact complement of this archive, which is tracks without DJs — and it is where the line-up above each night comes from, split between Berghain and Panorama Bar. Line-up data: Berghain Klubnacht Database, CC BY 4.0, adapted.

Not the same project. The database records who played. This archive records what was played. Klubnacht ID is independent: not affiliated with Berghain, and not part of the database it credits above.

The credit here is to the community and not to individuals: no usernames appear anywhere on this site. Each entry links back to the comment it came from, and that link is the credit.

Other sources exist, and I am looking at them: a couple of Telegram groups and other subs. Two things have to be solved before anything from them goes in. A closed group has no public link to give. And people who wrote in a private group did not publish to the web, so nothing gets taken from one without asking the people in it first.

What gets in

A track that was actually played, with an artist and a title. That is the whole rule.

It is not a taste filter. If a reliable commenter says it was played, it goes in, even when it is Depeche Mode, Prince or ABBA. The club plays what it plays, and the value of the archive is being faithful to that. The records that sit oddly next to the rest are usually the good discoveries.

What stays out:

Unconfirmed guesses. "Maybe it's X?" answered with "close, but no" does not qualify. Neither does a question nobody answered.
Tracks with no artist. Never deduced, however obvious it looks.
Descriptions. "The one with the sirens" is not a track.

What this is not a record of

This is not a record of what the club plays most. It is a record of what people asked about, and those are different things.

Nobody asks about a record everyone in the room already knows. A track the whole floor recognises on the first bar rarely becomes a question, so it rarely reaches a thread, and what never reaches a thread never reaches this archive. Not because it was not played, but because it was never asked about.

So the archive sits in a particular band: strange enough that someone asked, known enough that someone else could answer. That band is where most of the discovery is. It is still not the programme.

The archive plays straight through

Press play on any track and the one below it follows, then the one below that. The night runs on its own, in the order the table is showing at that moment, so sorting or filtering changes what comes next. To stop, pause the player.

Why some tracks have no player

A line without a player is not a broken link. It is an honest one. Three different things can be behind it, and only the first one says so on the row:

Not on Spotify. Much of what plays at Berghain is white label, dubplate, an unreleased edit, or a catalogue that simply never reached streaming. The archive says not on Spotify and never unreleased, because it has no way of knowing the second thing.
No player at all. Resolving a track costs API requests against a low daily quota, and the archive is still catching up on its own backlog. Those rows are simply quiet: the track is real and identified, it just has no link yet.
Match unconfirmed. Something was found, but it might be a different version of what was played: the original instead of the remix, for instance. Until a human confirms it, the row stays quiet rather than showing a player. A wrong match is worse than a missing one.

Found a mistake?

Wrong artist, wrong version, a track credited to the wrong night: corrections are welcome and they are how this gets better. For now the way to send one is to reply in the Track ID thread for that weekend, which is where the entry came from in the first place. Every night in the archive links straight to its own thread, and so does the found an error? link above the table.

Keep it going

This archive has exactly one source, and it is not me. If the threads go quiet, it stops growing. There is no other feed, no scraping some official tracklist, no API that knows what a gig actually sounded like.

So if you were on the floor and you recognised something, post it.

Late is fine. Partial is fine. "The stomping one about an hour into the second set" is fine, because someone else will know it. And if you can answer someone else's ID, answer it: that single reply is often the only reason a record from that gig survives at all.