“It was fucking insane!” When I speak to Darwin, she’s at home in Berlin, still riffing from the night before. She went to the closing of Berlin Atonal’s three-day festival, OPENLESS, where she witnessed a one-off collaboration between the Kenyan rapper Lord Spikeheart, Swiss performance artist Lara Dâmaso and the multidisciplinary duo Canzonieri. This wasn’t the only act on show that night, but it sent waves far beyond the walls of the Kraftwerk complex where Atonal takes place–by the morning a number of my group chats were ablaze with similar exclamatory comments. For Darwin, the performance was one of two things that made a lasting impression, “It was interesting to see the space. No one was dancing. Everybody was just absorbing the experience.” She continues, “The mood of that festival is very calm and respectful. You don't have this chaotic party energy.”

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Darwin’s life generally veers towards the ‘chaotic party energy’ she was glad to be free from at Atonal. She’s away DJing most weekends and at home in Berlin she runs the party REEF and the label SPE:C. REEF started as a 24-hour party at the former Griessmuehle and quickly became the go-to place for bass and techno-hybrid music in Berlin. It’s now a 12-hour stint with an after-party that goes until 6pm, so 20 hours in total. When she’s running her party there’s no sleep involved. “I'm usually awake from 8 a.m. Friday (since pre-party nerves keep me from sleeping in) until around 7 p.m. on Saturday, as I also run the after-party.” And it was even more hardcore in the Griessmuehle days, “I was completely DIY. I’d be there hours before setting up security, managing the door, hanging timetables, handling artist liaison, paying everyone, doing cash outs...I’d also close the parties, sometimes playing 5-7 hour sets.”

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When she started REEF back in 2016, “it was always about bass music in Berlin” and doing something for the community. At the time, the bass scene was disjointed and Berlin was more widely saturated by techno, deep house and disco. REEF brought something new to the table, amalgamating Darwin’s love of dubstep and UK bass with her background in tech-house and minimal where “parties would go on forever”. She’s now eight years in running her party and she’s about to start something new, Abyss, “a soundsystem party…on a Sunday evening” which sees her return to organising an event completely alone and D.I.Y., but at least the run time is shorter (six hours from 20.00 until 02.00)“I want people to sleep” she laughs. At Abyss, Darwin wants to go deeper–after all “the abyss is deeper than the REEF”–powered by the unique low-end frequencies of a dub soundsystem.   

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“I’m reading this book at the moment called Low End Theory” Darwin says of the inspirations behind Abyss, “it talks about how, at certain levels, low end frequencies actually shock your body so much that your ego disappears.” She also had a dancefloor epiphany in December last year, whilst playing at Dubtopia in Switzerland, that set her wheels in motion. “My immediate feeling when I walked in was, ‘OK, this is a proper session. Everyone is dancing towards the sound system, and there's a deep love and respect for what's happening in the room.’" The rigs at Dubtopia were provided by the Digital Steppaz Soundsystem, “I did not plan to stay as I was very tired that night…but I stayed almost to the end dancing by myself!” she remembers, “it’s been several years, because of COVID, since I had been in the presence of a proper rig like that…The best way I could describe the feeling is that you are submerged in a womb of sound, which makes you feel held and safe.”

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Pre-pandemic, Darwin would attend the now-defunct Wax Treatment parties in Berlin, run by Mark Ernestus, Fiedel and DJ Pete. It was always on a Sunday, the line-up was unannounced and the music was always played through a killer dub soundsystem, the Killisan. “It felt like a meet-up of the heads…a beautiful place to go listen to music and be in a chill setting,” she recalls, fondly, “the party was never raging, it always felt like it was swaying.” Her experience at Dubtopia reminded her how much she missed having this type of music experience in her life. She knew she had to bring it back to Berlin. And what better occasion than for her birthday? 

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The first edition of Abyss takes place at a secret venue on Sunday 22nd September, where Darwin will not only celebrate her birthday, but also her 14th year anniversary living in Berlin (how’s that for serendipitous timing?) Azu Tiwaline will play live followed by DJ sets from Darwin, dubstep legend V.I.V.E.K and Phrex, the founder of Dubtopia, so the flow of the night will slowly move into a dancing vibe–“I’m going to have a bean bag corner, in case you want to lay down and zone out to bass, but I also want people to dance and have a good time.” 

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Darwin isn’t kidding when she says Abyss is a soundsystem party. The Digital Steppaz Soundsystem, whom she met at Dubtopia, are driving their full handmade system (all 8 scoops and 1 giant stack) 9-hours from Freiburg, a city in the Black Forest area of Southwest Germany, especially for the party. Like Wax Treatment, the soundsystem is the headliner at Abyss, “it really strips away the sentiment of ego,” Darwin explains, “I also prefer to be in the dark while I play and everyone faces the system. We are only there to facilitate the music. The magic is what's happening through the speakers and the energy that is exchanged on the dancefloor.”  

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Next to the sound experience, there’s a holistic aspect to Abyss–another first for hedonistic Berlin–which goes hand-in-hand with the shorter run time, “end your weekend on a chill, even if you went raging Friday and Saturday, you can come to get bathed in bass. You go home, you feel nice because you saw your friends. Then you wake up and don’t feel like shit.” It’s something Darwin also loved about going to Wax Treatment, “when we left we felt really happy and good.” In collaboration with the DJ and movement practitioner FYI Robyn, there will be a 1-hour private meditation and breathwork workshop before the party. It’s limited to only 30 participants “so people can get into their thing” and the session for the first edition is already fully booked “which is promising.” 

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Transcendental Meditation–an extended style of meditation which is practised for 15-20 minutes and allows the mind to slowly settle into deeper, quieter thought–changed Darwin’s life “in terms of being able to manage stress and feel more connected to myself and everything around me". She’s been practising this style of meditation since 2014 as a much-needed counterbalance to her hectic DJ life, but she recently discovered she needed to usher in further measures. Earlier this year she ended up in hospital with a heart scare caused by stress and excessive travel, so she doesn’t “drink much these days–a tequila or two–but I try to drink lots of water and non-alcoholic drinks. I’ve also made a conscious effort to turn down more shows and slow down” she explains, “I also mostly stick to microdosing psychedelics on a night out which helps me connect to the music more.”

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Connection to the music is the core to Abyss and the meditation workshop is set-up as a transition into the club space “People don't realise that most of us are not even breathing properly on a day to day basis,” Darwin laughs. But no, seriously, “literally feeling how your body and mind feels when you’re breathing properly is completely transformative. You feel so alive and calm. How cool would it be to enter a party space feeling like that.” With REEF, Darwin always wanted it to be a Berlin-based party and community, so she purposefully swerved collabs and takeovers in other places, “if you take the same lineups and put it somewhere else with a different crowd, it’s not REEF”. But as she moves into a new, more restorative phase of her life, there’s big plans on the horizon for Abyss that go beyond her home city, “because of the healing aspect of it, that would make me feel good to take it to other places, to be able to give that.” She says, “my biggest inspiration is community and world building. Being able to create spaces for people to come together is one of my biggest motivations for what I’m doing in my life.”

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