The Jan Diaries — First Day at the Academy

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 20 September 2018

Ten days after announcing the trip, Jan Kinčl filed his first report from Berlin — written, he admits, at the rooftop bar of Hotel Amano, where he sat with his colleague Monika trying to put a first day at the Red Bull Music Academy into some kind of order. The entry leaves the conversations for later instalments and concentrates on the place, the rhythm and the atmosphere.

What the piece covers

The twentieth edition of the Academy — back in Berlin, where it all began — occupies Block B of the Funkhaus, the broadcast complex on the Spree built in the mid-1950s with input from the leading architects and acousticians of the day. The compound in the industrial part of former East Berlin once employed over three thousand people, and its main recording hall is twice the size of Abbey Road. The opening lecture belonged to British mastering engineer Mandy Parnell, who has worked on more than a thousand albums for the likes of The XX, Feist, Sigur Rós, Björk and Brian Eno. Kinčl had watched her on video before; sitting in a full room while she played Aphex Twin material she had mastered was, he writes, a different thing entirely.

The column then lays out the daily rhythm: breakfast at half past ten in the canteen, which doubles as the social heart of the Academy and houses a Red Bull Radio broadcast booth; the first lecture at noon in the orchestral hall, an hour or two plus twenty minutes of questions; lunch at two, a second lecture at three, then studio sessions with the guests, dinner at seven and events from ten in the evening onwards.

The part that stayed

The honest confession is the best part. Kinčl skipped Parnell’s studio session because he ran into musicians in a hallway whose records he had followed his whole life, and spent two hours in the café listening to stories from the history of techno. If anything describes a day at the Academy, he writes, it is moments like that — and the Academy’s greatest value is the simple concept of putting a carefully selected mix of creative people in one place and letting things happen by themselves. The entry closes with a plan: think up questions nobody has asked Kevin Saunderson before.

Read the full piece

The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Five minutes.

The Jan Diaries | Prvi dan na Akademiji → redbull.com