Last month, on a Saturday at midnight, a crowd of twentysomethings gathered at the Knockdown Center, in Queens. They wore bandannas and boxy, oversize sunglasses as they waited for Adam Port, a member of the Berlin-based electronic trio Keinemusik, to take the stage. But when the D.J. stepped behind the decks and started to play, something unusual happened: instead of dancing, the crowd pushed and shoved their way toward the D.J. booth, as if the musician in front of them were not a dorky-looking German but rather a Beatle in 1964.
Or a member of the Grateful Dead, as one New York–based editor says. “Going to their gigs, all you see is a sea of people taking videos.... People will literally kill each other for the best visual. It’s like groupies for the Deadheads.”
Except the crowd bears little resemblance to a typical music-obsessed audience. “Everyone at the party will be dressed like a raver,” says Lilly Schoenbaum, 26, who lives in New York. “But in reality it’s just bankers and influencers in raver outfits.”
The Keinemusik hashtag surfaces over 80,000 TikTok videos, many of them featuring fans planning their outfits for the next gig—tying neck scarves around their heads babushka-style, a trend the D.J. collective popularized at Burning Man for protection against the hot desert sun. In one video, a man in his mid-30s explains the best way to tie a headscarf. The video is captioned: “@Keinemusik would have been proud of this one 🫡”
The social-media clout translates to real sales. The group plays up to five shows a week, and they tend to sell out quickly—last year, tickets for the group’s July 4 Brooklyn Mirage show sold out in under a minute, and this past February their London Finsbury Park show sold out in less than an hour.
In 2022 the group collaborated with the rapper Drake on tracks such as “Falling Back” and “A Keeper.” This past September, the Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet hired Keinemusik to play at its launch event on the shores of Lake Lucerne; mid-act, a fleet of drones illuminated the sky with the Audemars Piguet logo, followed by Keinemusik’s signature peace sign. And one of Keinemusik’s members delivered a lecture at Harvard Business School earlier this month.
The Berlin-to-St.-Tropez Pipeline
The group—made up of D.J.’s Adam Port (Adam Polaszek), &Me (André Boadu), and Rampa (Gregor Sütterlin), all in their early 40s—founded Keinemusik, which means “no music” in German, in 2009, after Rampa and &Me met as interns at the same production studio. Port joined later, introduced through mutual friends. “In the beginning, we played at clubs in Berlin,” Rampa told Forbes last year, “and it felt like just a small community knew who we were for a long time.”
The group also produced and recorded tracks, selling them to musicians such as the well-known D.J. Black Coffee, which earned them recognition among a niche group of electronic-music enthusiasts. (Port, &Me, and Rampa didn’t respond to AIR MAIL’s request for comment.)
Around 2017, Keinemusik began trading dingy Berlin club basements for upscale destinations such as beach clubs in St. Tropez and five-star hotels in Tulum as their popularity began to skyrocket. By the end of last year, admission to Keinemusik’s New Year’s Eve party at the ritzy Fasano Hotel in Punta del Este reportedly cost $2,000—not including drinks.
“I have no money left, and I blew it for Keinemusik in Madrid,” one fan complained in a recent TikTok video.
Despite the steep prices, getting hold of in-demand tickets can be challenging. One TikToker who wasn’t able to buy tickets to a “secret” charity party in Spain’s Balearic Islands filmed herself and her friends swimming over to the Ibiza beach club where the trio was performing to avoid the bouncers, with a water cooler possibly packed with her clothes.
But attributing Keinemusik’s meteoric rise to their musical talent may be overestimating people’s depth.
Dance music—which is mixed to sound like one continuous song—traces its roots to 1980s New York, when the D.J. David Mancuso would throw loft parties that inspired Larry Levan’s famed nightclub Paradise Garage. Around the same time, the D.J. and record producer Frankie Knuckles pioneered “house” music at Chicago’s Warehouse club. Where classic house is defined by a steady, commanding beat—oontz, oontz, oontz—Keinemusik’s variation, Afro house, uses melodic flares over a more restrained beat.
“Afro house acts as an entry point for underground music,” says Schoenbaum. “Many new listeners see it as the full extent of the underground scene. But these aren’t really music people.”
An Endless Photo Op
The Keinemusik venues seem designed for taking videos. Concerts often start either at sunrise or sunset. A large, white cloud—known to fans as “the kloud”—is a permanent fixture above the D.J. booth, with statues of Port, &Me, and Rampa often erected in the background. In April, fans gathered for a show at the pyramids of Giza. Two months later, the group performed at the Yard Festival, near the White Sand mountains outside Lisbon; their name, emblazoned on one of the the summits, looked like the Hollywood sign.
“Everyone wants to go because they play in these fancy locations,” says the sound engineer Michael Petricone, 24. “By going, people signal: ‘Hey, I can afford to go to these places and, on top of it, afford this concert.’”
Many groupies go to multiple Keinemusik gigs in one summer. One person I spoke to saw them in Mykonos, Istanbul, and Ibiza within a span of three months. “The identity of being a raver,” a 25-year-old writer says, “wearing a scarf, posting the sunglasses outfit … it aligned perfectly with Brat summer.”
Mid-set, the trio is known to orchestrate stunts they know will go viral on social media, such as ordering pizza and eating slices decadently over the decks. Fans either document the moment or join in, ordering their own pies and filming themselves.
The group’s rise may well signal a lasting trend in electronic music. A recent Vox study found that of 125 emerging artists who signed major-label deals last year, more than 45 percent went viral on TikTok first. For D.J.’s—who have historically not been attractive clients for record labels, given that their revenue depends on live performances rather than royalties from music sales—social-media streams present the perfect path to securing a deal. And that deal may be the ticket out of a lifetime of playing gigs in cavernous clubs until ungodly hours—a grueling reality that likely contributed to the suicide of the renowned D.J. Avicii in 2018.
This leaves the true-raver crowd, who attend parties for the music rather than the status, in the dust, as D.J.’s begin to cater to a different audience. “It’s a bunch of fake ravers,” says the creative director Jade Alexandre, 27. “People want to be ‘cool’ and show they have a lot of money, but wouldn’t actually go to a rave. And what’s easier than wearing a bandanna and listening to pop songs at a concert?”
“The speculation, the videos, the decadent sets … people think they’ve really tapped into something both ‘naughty’ and little-known but glamorous,” says a member of the D.L.R. D.J. trio.
“But all it is is corny pop.”
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at Air Mail
