“With Every Inconceivable Finesse, Excess, and Good Music”:

Abstract

This chapter explores the intersection of music, sex, travel, and affect in Berlin’s electronic music scene. In particular, it focuses on a semi-annual music event, ‘Snax Club’ (hereafter: ‘Snax’), where the intimate—and at times messy—entanglement of these phenomena is especially conspicuous. Snax is described by its organisers as a ‘pervy-party’, an electronic dance music event held twice a year at the Berliner nightclub, Berghain, in which the club harkens back to the queer sexual subcultures out of which it initially emerged. Admission is restricted to men dressed in ‘fetish gear’ (e.g., leather, rubber, latex, sports kit, etc.). The event has become one of the largest of its kind in Europe, attracting an international audience of fetish enthusiasts. Drawing from ethnographic interviews, observation, and media-analysis, this chapter develops an account of encounters between travellers and locals of various affinities and affiliations, tracking the shifting tropes of queer sexual and musical conviviality. Of special interest for this chapter is the central role music plays in both facilitating corporeal encounters and mediating identity, fetish and gay male sexuality. This chapter is also distinctly affective in its approach, focusing on how feelings are mobilized by various actors to articulate and negotiate complex constellations of musical affinity, sexual subjectivity, and local/national/cosmopolitan belongings.