Located in the Kunsthalle and still functioning as a visitors’ café, for said Kunsthalle, the Salon des Amateurs, which opened ten years ago, has long since evolved into a club of national and even international renown and importance. Lena Willikens, now a resident DJ here, can still remember how it all began, and how her life behind the decks began. “Ultimately, for me the salon was the reason that I began taking DJing more seriously. I mean, before that, I’d been lugging my vinyl to art college parties and everything, but I’d never really had any interest in learning to mix beats. I just jumped in at the deep end, even though I didn’t have the intention of becoming a DJ, like some others maybe did.”
TWO YEARS LATER (THINGS ARE MOVING FORWARD)
Back then, everyone was jumping in at the deep end. However, when the salon opened, Lena was still in Berlin. She had moved from the art college at the Rhine metropolis of Düsseldorf to the Berlin’s art university UDK, and after two years there, she moved back. The American sculptor and installation artist Rita McBride had just taken up her professorship in Düsseldorf, and given her admiration of McBride’s work, Lena decided to return to the art college there.
McBride wasn’t only incredibly engaging, but she also “wanted to teach us something about strategy, she wanted to get us in shape for the art market. She always said, ‘you just have to know what you’re doing, you must go and check out everything for yourselves, go and visit all the art fairs, you simply have to know completely what you’re getting yourselves into.’ So that’s what I did for two years. I went everywhere: Venice, Kassel, Basel. It was a real full-time job.” However, even during her studies, she had the feeling that the art business wasn’t her real goal, and this feeling gradually crystalized into certainty. Despite moving back to Düsseldorf because of Rita McBride and despite being grateful for the opportunity to learn from her, Lena decided to follow a different path following her graduation. “The question that I asked myself was, if I could do anything at all, anything that I really wanted, what would I do? Well, I wanted to be the owner of the coolest club in the world. So I designed it, as my final graduation show,” Lena explains. “I designed it all myself, thought up the name myself – it was called Replik -designed the logo and built a section of the bar in the college. Everything was dark, foggy and smelly. And techno music was playing, really muffled techno. It sounded like when you go to the toilet in a club and you can hear the music coming through the wall.” The professors who graded her work were split, Lena confesses. “Two were totally blown away, one walked out saying, ‘That’s just not on; that’ll make people infertile.’ And I was like, ‘yeah, that’s just what I want’.” The graduation project represented a break for Lena. “With the exam, I also dealt with this – that it isn’t a fixed concept, to want to be a club owner and not to have anything to do with art after graduation.”
6.76667/E 6° 46’ 0“ / 51.2167/N 51° 13’ 0“
— SALON DES AMATEURS
Back then the Salon des Amateurs was already in existence; it opened during Lena’s time in Berlin. When she returned to the art college, “the basics were already in place.” People were queuing up at the door of the salon and there was some serious hype surrounding the place. Nobody understood what was going on there.” Housed in the 1950’s Brutalist Kunsthalle, the salon was actually only meant to be a visitors’ café – at least, that was what the staff of the Kunsthalle had expected when they let Detlef Weinrich [from Kreidler and Tolouse Low Trax, amongst others] and Aron Mehzion take over the unused exhibition space. The pair had previously run a different space in Düsseldorf which, according to Lena, the guys at the Kunsthalle had liked so much that they wanted to have something similar set up as part of their center. “When I started working there, the main thing that fascinated me was how Detlef and Vladimir Ivkovic [resident at Salon des Amateurs] DJed. I started off doing one evening every week, which at some point became a regular gig on Fridays. To start with I didn’t play any dance music at all, just totally crude stuff.” To this day, Lena Willikens defies being “fixed to one specific genre. I never thought about any particular style, I just played what I liked.” At that time, electronic music was virgin territory for Lena. “I completely missed out on techno. When I was young I really only listened to punk, hardcore and Jamaican music. Not so much reggae, but loads of dub. And really old stuff like Rocksteady – that was just really great.”
Lena’s fascination for electronic music evolved in Düsseldorf. During her studies, she came into contact with people in the scene. Although the evolution of the salon into its current, diverse mixture of café, lecture hall, cinema and club was not exactly what the guys at the Kunsthalle intended, it just wasn’t to be stopped. “The salon must continue to function as a café for the visitors to the museum; that is, as it were, the only condition. Apart from that the guys who run it have completely free reign.” The space’s success can be traced to the state of the Düsseldorf club scene back then. There was simply no longer anywhere where art and music – two disciplines that have been closely related to each other for decades in the Rhine metropolis – could come together. Many independent spaces had had to shut and the days of the legendary Ratinger Hof were long gone, even back then.
Lena talks about an illegal club called Ego, “…a pretty legendary place, but one that barely anyone knew about.” Timing, the right people, a certain something, but also luck –
these are the factors that allowed the salon to evolve and that kept it sustainable, they’re the factors that freed up and brought together new impulses in the city. Marc Matter and projects such as The Durian Brohers, Stabil Elite, Bar and Wolf Müller as well as the aforementioned Weinrich and Ivkovic, are just a few examples of the acts that came out of the scene around the salon. “Because by now the word is out that you can enjoy legendary nights in the salon, many musician- and DJ-friends approach us – that’s great for us, because it means that money is no longer a factor.” The promise of a good night in keeping with the golden rule – “no bullshit music!” – is much more important. From time to time, Lena also works on film projects – “maybe one film a year, if that.” However, although she is credited as graphic artist, contrary to what people often think, she doesn’t do the designs for the DVD covers, but rather is responsible for making sure that “…in the film you see the things that actually aren’t there.” For example, for Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch’s most recent film, she had to make the filming locations in North Rhine/Westphalia look as if they were actually in Detroit, where the film is set. “Using the appropriate signposting and all sorts of details achieved using graphic techniques, we converted an empty factory building into a Detroit hospital.” At another moment in the film, record covers that Lena created are visible in the background, “because it would have been too expensive to obtain the rights to use the originals.”
WHAT IS MUSIC
These days, almost everything in Lena’s life has to do with music. Earlier, she explains, whilst it wasn’t the case that the opposite was true, she was nevertheless only a consumer of music and not a maker of it. “The art world absorbed me for a good ten years. I only started making music myself relatively late, in my mid-twenties or so. Before that I just collected records.” Cómeme has become a second home for her – her second family, as she calls it, alongside the one in Düsseldorf. Whilst the first is focused on the salon and its scene – thus also entailing a certain spatial element – the Cómeme family is not only more international, but also dispersed across the world; it is not only centered on Berlin, where the label has its office.
“Becoming a part of Cómeme just happened very naturally. At the beginning, I organized parties with Christian S and Korkut Elbay on a regular basis. Through them I then got to know Matías and we began playing together at Cómeme parties, in places like Santiago de Chile, Paris and of course often in Cologne and Düsseldorf. Cómeme is a collective of people who aren’t necessarily all musicians. Sarah Szesny, for example, who does the artwork, is an artist and just as important a part of the whole as any one of us. Once Radio Cómeme started, where I had my radio show Sentimental Flashback right from the start, it was obvious that Cómeme would gradually take on more and more of my bookings. So yeah, that’s how it happened.” Matías Aguayo, Alejandro Pax, Christian S, Sano and others – in total a dozen artists who release music through the label or are connected with it in some way – all host their own shows. However, although Lena Willikens has been at the heart of Cómeme for many years now, there have as yet been no releases from her. Alongside her DJing work and producing, Lena also plays in the noise band Titanoboa, has a solo project and works in the Cologne record shop a-musik. But her catalogue is still relatively modest. She can point to a sampler contribution with Titanoboa [“Ante Sapina” on Noise of Cologne 2] and a DJ mix, but not much more. The latter is already a couple of years old. Called “Bubberrand,” the mix appeared as a split-album cassette in 2011. It was recorded at a demonstration against the closure of the AZ Köln [Autonomes Zentrum – ‘Autonomous Centre’]. “You might have heard about the demo, it was pretty legendary. I’ve never seen people go so crazy to such weird noise-drone music.” Lena’s first mix ever was then released straight away, as the first release from the label ALARM. “The guy who runs the label was also at the demo back then and wanted to start a cassette label. He had heard two mixes on the demo [the second was Jessica Loers’ “Sandale des Amateurs”] and said, ‘Right, that’s gonna be my first release.’” The two pieces were released under the catalogue number 001. The label is still running and has also started releasing vinyl. Lena’s first EP as a producer will be released by Cómeme at the beginning of next year, with work in the studio more or less complete.
Whoever knows Lena’s mixes knows not to expect a simple dance album from her. She describes her working style as intuitive; the end product is often something unplanned, but not undesired. “Although I have an idea of how the track should sound when I start out, whilst I’m working on it, it always becomes clear to me that it’s going to turn out differently to how I had planned it.” But Lena can’t be said to be someone who’s constantly making corrections. “I just have to let it take its course. In this way things appear that have a completely new quality, things that I also really like. When I buy a record, I always like it when there’s a real mixture of stuff on it, i.e. not only stuff for the club but also more chilled out tunes. That’s what my EP is going to be like too.”