Review: Femminielli Noir + Jaako Eino Kalevi + Touchy Mob (5 Years Shameless/Limitless)

The 5th anniversary of Shameless/Limitless, which was also their last event before the winter hiatus, attracted a considerable amount of people at Urban Spree the weekend before.

The celebrations began with the performance of Femminielli Noir, a collaborative project of Jesse Osborne-Lanthier and Bernardino Femminielli. As the name could suggest, the whole thing is pretty dark, indeed. Heavy techno beats, some ambient sounds, distortions, on top of which resonate Femminielli's demonic screams/whispers and melo-recitations in Italian. He looks kind of Lucifer-ish too, so along with the beat-synchronised strobelights it was quite a show. A disco inferno, if you will.

Jaakko Eino Kalevi played the second gig of the evening and what an excellent gig that was. Somehow I haven't listened to this really talented and prolific Finnish guy before, so I was happy to discover his music from a fresh perspective. I even moved really close to the stage where it seemed that the fun was in full mode for everyone, the 'randoms' included: there was a group of people in the first row who clearly got there by accident (or maybe not, who knows these days) and one of the guys was using the music as a background he could rap to (really loud and in German), which sounded kind of interesting in an absurd, what-the-hell is happening way. However, that was just a temporary distraction, Kalevi's dreamy, chilled out sounds from another dimension as well as John Maus-resembling vocals quickly guided me back into the blissful mood.

Touchy Mob played last and it was quite late in the night, so I was probably already too tired to appreciate it. But people seemed to love it, the crowd was even denser than before and everyone was moving along to the beats.

Between the gigs you could go downstairs and dance to some tunes dj'ed by Molly Nilsson, among others. The room where it was happening was smaller than most of the living rooms you can find in Berlin and the songs that they were playing were a peculiar mixture of classic, cheesy and weird. All in all, super-fun houseparty vibes for everyone to enjoy and dance that Friday night away.