One of the best and most established squats in Berlin, Kopi celebrates its 20 year aniversary with a massive weekend long festival of music, love, leather jackets and Sternburg beer. 
If you’ve been around Berlin for any period of time and you’re a bit of a music fan as well, you’re probably finding yourself a bit disillusioned by the locally produced music. The bands here are relatively unambitious and generally aren’t busy lining up steady streams of gigs, organising publicity or even, oftentimes, getting their music to a standard where it could have any international relevance at all. That would be true for almost all genres here except two: techno and punk.
After you’d come to the conclusion that Berlin’s best live bands come out of the Punk scene, you would have done the rounds amongst the circle of squats that most often play host to them. Kopi might be one of your weekend haunts, that easily being so, since the quality of the bands that they have there is basically second to none. Very often featuring groups who’ve traveled from all over Europe, you can easily hear some of the best rock music that you might encounter through your entire lifespan any night of the weekend at Kopi.
The short of it is that you have to love Kopi, not only for the great live music they feature, but also the general vibe of the place, krust and voku and Sternburg and graffiti and leather jackets easily become synonymous to live music after you’ve checked out even just a couple of gigs there. And they’ve been kicking on for twenty years now, with Koma F, their live music basement venue, being active for the last ten of those years. Time to party.
The weekend housefest stretches from the Friday night to the Sunday and features not only live bands, but also techno, hip hop and britpop DJs as well as live performances and even punk rock karaoke. Fun. This is really something not to be missed, so slide into your stinkiest leather jacket and jeans and head down there. Only a few bucks on the door with cheap beers, even us kids with nur ein wenig geld can make it.
Here’s a clip from one of the bands who’ll be playing on the Friday night, SJU SVAeRA AeR with their (equally unpronounceably titled) track Storma Varje Hjrta:
They’ve got a new album out soon, check their myspazz for details.
