BLITZ with Decoder, Reduks, The Lady Machine, VSSL

Set times for the weekends are published every Friday noon at www.blitz. club.

PLEASE RESPECT OUR NO PHOTO POLICY!
NO PHONES ON THE DANCE FLOORS!
BE WHO YOU ARE!
LOVE IS THE MESSAGE!

"You gotta look at it like, techno is technological. It's an attitude to making music that sounds futuristic: something that hasn't been done before." Juan Atkins once said, and Derrick May added: "We can do nothing but look forward." But forty years after Detroit techno paved the way, what's left of that promise? A question that runs through the upcoming Klubnacht.

Dallas-based Decoder started producing at the age of 10, long before he could legally enter a club, and by 17 had released his debut album on Jeff Mills' Axis Records. Working in what he describes as "retrofuturistic soundscapes," his sci-fi deep techno fuses Detroit mythology with a strong rhythmic focus. He has earned support from Richie Hawtin and Ben Sims, while mixes recall the Perlon era's minimalism and microtonal accents reminiscent of Finland's Aleksi Perälä and remains indebted to the DIY spirit of his native Dallas warehouse scene.

The Lady Machine has spent decades asking a different question. The Brazilian-born, Berlin-based DJ built her practice on Token, Mote Evolver and KEY Vinyl: labels perhaps less interested in where techno is heading than in its current, and timeless, musical quality. "Quality sound with attitude […] is what I strive for in my sets," she says, with a vinyl-only, classicist approach considered "a techno purist's dream," keeping a traditionalist's fire burning in the present tense, embodying a spirit of 21st century Techno.

Between them, Munich's Reduks and VSSL occupy another stance: not revivalist, not futurist, but explicitly rooted in the scene and community immediately around them. Munich, a former royal residence city with limited industrialisation and thus little post-industrial decline, could hardly be compared to Detroit foundation landscape. Yet the two are co-founders of roots.audio. Their debut Ground Floor EP arrived in May 2025 with an expression focussed "no polish, no pretence," as its own description puts it.