Möwe Club, 2005, Frank Richter
From MemoryArchive
Who: Frank Richter What: Möwe When: December 02, 2005 Where: Jena
Möwe, Jena, is a location that is perhaps closest described as "underground club".
The last opening, celebrated with an 8 hour set of the local DJ that also happened to run the place, was on December 02, 2005, after two years of operation.
Although I only knew and visited the club for about 4 months, it was in my opinion the best location in town. The public relations for this somewhat semi-legal place were actually rather public unrelations - posters for upcoming events were usually singularly placed at some selected locations; the "web site" was basically a photo of the handwritten schedule spanning a few months. Again, it was not obvious to find. Either way, the location was only given as "Möwe" - no street address or anything. Unless you already knew where it was, you had a hard time visiting one of the announced events. Consequently, it's probably safe to assume that most visitors came there due word-of-mouth. To my opinion contributed both people and music there.
Music: I usually did not know any of the artists performing there beforehand, and I was always pleasantly surprised. There was usually either a night of DJed music, Electronica, or a live act (or sometimes two), again with DJing before and after. The bands came from across all fields - an extreme example is the night when [www.malmzeit.com/ Malmzeit] (heavy metal), Preslisa (girl with ukulele sings Elvis songs) and Pornophonique(guitar+gameboy) played interleaved. You don't find such an unusual program anywhere else in Jena. But even with more "normal" events, the artists were generally rather off the mainstream.
People: as mentioned above, knowledge was spread word-of-mouth. The audience was thus relatively homogenous - mostly students with likely similar taste and views. The kind of people I find sympathetic and interesting. They were motivated - numbers were, I guesstimate, perhaps in the middle two digits when it was relatively full - and the artists were usually received loud and cheerfully. The audience was not one that was locked into a narrow set of genres rejecting anything else.
Furthermore, due the small and selected pool of visitors, the atmosphere was somewhat personal.
Although I only knew and visited the club for about 4 months, I must say I miss it now.
