A Short History of Tresor Club
„Everything here is vacant! There simply must be a good location for a club somewhere around here!“ It is January 1991 and two men are driving along Leipziger Straße by car on the lookout for a successor to the Acid House Club UFO. They simply get out at some point, cross the road and discover the old vault of the former Wertheim department store. More by chance than anything else, they meet the caretaker who carries the key to the place and together they proceed to a first encounter. The lock has the shape of two concentric circles with a horizontal bar underneath them. The logo of Tresor is born.
The club opens its doors three months later and the first party is already packed. Young people from both parts of the town dance to extremely hard and industrial music in the midst of hundreds of old lockers and surrounded by dust, fog, mud and strobe light. Down here there are no retentions, no east, no west. The kind of hard music is played here which had been said to be impossible in Berlin but the scene now has the perfect place for it.
This is how the story of one of the world’s best-known clubs to date begins. Many German artists are intrinsically tied to the beginnings of Tresor: Sven Väth, Tanith, Maruscha, Paul van Dyk, Ellen Allien and Pacou are just a few of them But it is especially the musical link to Detroit’s artists such as Mike Banks, Jeff Mills (the founders of Underground Resistance), Juan Atkins, Kenny Larkin and Blake Baxter who enduringly shape what has hitherto been known as the typical Tresor Sound. Other international acts did the rest.
Rumours about a possible closure of the club repeatedly surfaced, from the end of the 90?s on. In 2005 the time had indeed come. The last party of Tresor in Leipziger Straße was held on April the 16th after a fortnight-long party marathon to which all the old artists came one last time to bow in reverence.
Those who want to become real legends, however, keep going. Two years later, Dimitri Hegemann found a new location for the club in the old heating plant in Berlin Mitte. Tresor has been residing in Köpenicker Straße since May 2007. Only a third of the over 22000m2 is used for the actual club. On three floors the Guests can find experimental music in +4 Bar, House in Globus and „loud and filthy“ music in the vault, the heart of Tresor where one can find some of the ancient lockers that could be salvaged from the building in Leipziger Straße. Tresor is open on four days every week: on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Every week up to 3000 ravers from all over the world gather at Tresor to celebrate together.
