- Boiler Room, Berghain and CTM: we talk shop with one of Berlin's busiest industry figures.
- Every music scene has a few members who seem to have their fingers in everything. Michail Stangl is one of those people. If you've scratched the surface of electronic music in Berlin, you'll undoubtedly have come across him. Arriving in Berlin from small-town Germany, Stangl found a home for his oversized interest in adventurous electronic music. It wasn't long before he got his hands dirty behind the scenes—first at a string of underground venues before joining the team behind the quarterly Leisure System night at Berghain. His work on that party, along with his own Berghain showcase Not Equal, remains a big part of what he does, though he's also a major player in Boiler Room's Berlin operation and a curator for the city's top-flight CTM Festival. Given Stangl's centrality to one of the world's premier music scenes, and with Leisure System's fifth anniversary party on the horizon, we were keen to check in with him about the state of electronic music—both experimental and otherwise—in Berlin. What we got was a candid chat about the city's surprisingly adventurous taste, the most famous room in techno and how he brought his music fandom into the professional realm.