After years of working as a journalist, Adriano Sack turned to fiction with his first novel, Noto. His latest book, In die Sonne fliegen, enters the world of fashion through Felix Kellergeist, a young man whose appearance quickly becomes his greatest asset. We spoke to Sack about glamour, ambition, friendship and the realities beneath the surface of the fashion world.

Maybe it’s the guitars. Maybe it’s the return of indie sleaze, blurry flash photography and nights that feel a little less calculated. Or maybe it’s simply a longing for music that doesn’t sound like it was made with an algorithm in mind.

Somewhere within that feeling, Neuswanstein is taking shape. The new duo brings together two quite different musical worlds: Julian van Zico comes from indie rock, Fabian Prekrat from hip-hop and electronic music. What started casually — through mutual friends, jam sessions and no particular master plan — has turned into a sound that combines guitars and electronic production, pop-punk nostalgia and a distinctly contemporary edge.

And this is only the beginning. With their first tracks out and a collaboration with Dschungel and the mastermind behind it, Götz Offergeld, coming soon, Neuswanstein is a name to keep an eye on. But before things start moving faster, we wanted to catch Julian and Fabian at the beginning — to talk about where they come from, why indie suddenly feels exciting again, the value of imperfection in an increasingly AI-driven world, and why sometimes the best things are the ones you never planned.

Ann-Kathrin Riedl: First of all, tell me a little about your musical backgrounds.

Julian: I’m actually part of the indie-rock scene. I play in various bands and have been involved in all kinds of projects since my teenage years. My main instrument is the guitar. As long as a project leans towards rock or indie, I’m really into it.

AKR: How did the two of you meet?

Fabian: About two years ago, I started jamming with Stefan, a mutual friend from Peru. We were just playing guitar, trying things out, messing around. Then Julian and I happened to meet at a Christmas dinner Stefan had organized, and he brought me over to Julian’s studio. The three of us jammed together, and it immediately felt right.

Julian: Stefan is actually the hardest rocker among us, which makes it funny that he brought us together. Fabi comes more from hip-hop and electronic music, while I’m somewhere in between. You can hear that in Moving to LA: his instinct for contemporary sounds meets my endless nostalgia for Sum 41, Blink-182, post-punk and pop-punk. It comes together really nicely.

AKR: I think there’s also a longing for something authentic and wild. Everything has become so calculated and cautious. People want to break out again, to let something loose.

Julian: Totally. Nights just felt different then. Even the aesthetic takes me back to the Flickr days — that time right before everything became driven by algorithms. Maybe that was the last truly authentic phase of the internet. I’m sure there are a million reasons why it’s coming back. But for me, it’s also just about the look. It simply looks cool.

Fabian: For me, it’s also about the physicality of it. I started playing guitar as a teenager, then moved into electronic music and eventually hip-hop, sampling and all of that. At some point I realized I missed actually holding an instrument and recording it. Maybe not everything goes perfectly during the recording, but that’s exactly what gives it character. That’s my approach.

Julian: And that’s the last thing we still have over AI: the unpredictability of a live performance. You already hear AI-generated music that’s almost indistinguishable from other music. But if there’s a tiny mistake somewhere in a guitar take, something that isn’t perfectly quantized, that suddenly feels valuable. In a strange way, imperfection is becoming precious again.

AKR: Because with AI, live performance is basically the one thing that can remain real.

Julian: Exactly. And a lot of people in music are already saying that everything is becoming more expensive while budgets are shrinking. AI videos will probably become normal soon. But the live moment is much harder to replace. I think that will become increasingly important.

AKR: When did this turn from having fun together into an actual band?

Fabian: It came out of this very specific project. We started seriously planning to record something and put it out. The whole thing was confusing and crazy at first, but at some point we thought: okay, we’re actually going to make this. We never really sat down and said, “Now we’re a band.” It just happened.

Julian: It started with jamming and having fun. It was very idealistic: “Hey, we’re friends, let’s make something cool together.”

AKR: That’s actually what I find interesting about Bavaria in general. It has this very traditional image, but there’s also another side — eccentric, rebellious, sometimes almost punk.

Fabian: Definitely. None of us completely fits the Bavarian cliché. I moved to Berlin, and when I tell people I’m from Bavaria, they sometimes have a very specific image in mind. Then they meet you and realize it’s not quite that simple.

Julian: Bavaria is strange because the inventive spirit is there, but it often comes through industrial channels: cars, engineering, huge companies. At the same time, there are these eccentric characters who completely contradict the stereotype. King Ludwig is probably the ultimate example. There’s something rebellious in that too.

AKR: Fabian, your own path into music wasn’t necessarily straightforward either. You studied business administration in Munich.

Fabian: I studied sports, event and media management. For me, music was never a planned career path — just a hobby and a feeling. I’m still not the best guitar player or musician, but whenever I hear something, I try to figure it out. I’ve always enjoyed recording little ideas and putting them together. Eventually I thought: why not see what happens if I actually give this some time?

Julian: And now Fabi has an extremely good taste level. I’m always impressed by what he finds. I had no idea about artists like Mk.gee until he showed me. I was like: where do you find this stuff?

Julian: I basically had the song completely done except for the bridge. The first demo already had that line, “I’m moving to LA without you,” and the first verse. I immediately thought it was a strong idea. At first, I was worried people might misunderstand the title because it can sound a bit cliché — moving to LA, chasing something bigger. But then I realized that misunderstanding was interesting in itself.

Fabian: When Götz first heard the demo, it immediately resonated with him. At the time, both he and Julian were going through heartbreak and were in a similar emotional state: you have a certain idea of your life and where it’s going, and then suddenly things don’t turn out the way you imagined. Götz continued writing the lyrics, and together we finalized the song. So Moving to LA is essentially a snapshot of how we were feeling at that particular moment in time.

Julian: My initial idea was actually to write it from the perspective of someone leaving LA and moving back to Berlin — because that was becoming a reality for some people around us. But eventually the song found its own meaning. It wasn’t planned. That’s often the best way things happen.

Fifteen years ago, Silencio opened its doors in Paris and quickly became a landmark for the city’s creative community. Its founder is French entrepreneur Arnaud Frisch. To mark its 15th anniversary, Silencio is bringing its concept to Berlin with a temporary pop-up in the former Watergate space. Opening on 30 October 2026, Silencio Berlin will bring together music, art, cinema and design while connecting with the city’s creative scene. Following the opening party, our Deputy Editor in Chief Antonia Maria Schmidt sat down with Frisch to talk about Berlin nightlife, the idea behind the new space, his long-standing friendship with Mumi Haiati and the evolution of Silencio over the past 15 years.

AS: I’m curious, how do you see Berlin nightlife?

AF: What Berlin has is unique, and it’s now official: the city’s Technokultur has been recognised as intangible cultural heritage. And it comes with things no other city can offer, spaces you simply don’t find elsewhere and a freedom that has no equivalent anywhere in the world. That’s also why we’ve spent years bringing Berlin to Paris rather than the other way around. At our Parisian club FVTVR we regularly host Berlin collectives and clubs: BCCO, Pornceptual, Primal Instinct, Multisex, RSO…

AS: You’ve spent so much time in Paris and now you’ll be spending more time in Berlin. What feels different between the two cities?

AF: Berlin is much bigger than Paris, with parks and green space everywhere, and you feel it immediately. Paris is a finished city, in the sense that it was built long ago and nothing is left over. You work inside what already exists.

AS: You collaborated with Studio Karhard for the club.

AF: Studio Karhard made this project possible. Thomas Karsten knows this city and everything that opening a club here involves. Marc Leschelier’s work is fascinating: brutalist, sometimes uncomfortable and very poetic. Then Studio Raito did the lighting.

Four years after it began as a queer party series at Tbilisi’s Bassiani club, housed in a former swimming pool beneath the city’s Dinamo Arena football stadium, Eau De Cologne has evolved into a wider platform for music, nightlife, performance and visual art. Since then, its parties have travelled beyond Georgia to international spaces including Basement in New York and the queer festival WHOLE. Founded by Giga Gulverdashvili, Natuta Bagrationi, Dato Koridze and artist Uta Bekaia, the project has become an important part of Georgia’s underground queer culture, creating space for artistic expression and community at a time of growing political pressure on queer life. Now bringing its multidisciplinary programme to Berlin’s KREUZWERK on 2nd October, Eau de Cologne is presenting work by Georgian artists across performance, sculpture, photography, film, sound and installation, drawing on Georgian rituals, mythology and collective memory to explore queer identity within a culture where it is increasingly presented as something foreign.

We spoke to Uta Bekaia about the evolution of Eau de Cologne, the role of the underground, taking Georgian queer culture beyond its borders, reclaiming heritage, and the importance of documenting queer life in Georgia.

Billy Burrell: Cohere’s ‘Convergence’ event at Berlin’s Kraftwerk brought AI into one of the city’s most iconic cultural spaces, with live performances from Actress and Sega Bodega. Why was it important for you to introduce Cohere through music and creative culture, rather than a conventional tech setting?

Joel Evey: I grew up with the early internet, when technology and creativity were the same scene. That’s the version I still believe in. Kraftwerk felt like the perfect place to bring that spirit to life. Cohere is deeply pro-human, and Convergence reflected our belief that when AI takes care of the tedious work, people have more freedom to focus on what they love. We think AI is only useful if it empowers people, that’s why we are focused on building models that automate boring work, and allow people to be more creative, not less

BB: Berlin is a hedonistic city where subcultures collide and new ideas emerge. What does it represent to Cohere, and what did you want ‘Convergence’ to say about the company?

JE: We are growing in Germany and we really respect the culture and art scene here. At Cohere, we believe there’s enormous value in bringing people with different perspectives together. It creates conversations that challenge assumptions and open up new ideas. Berlin felt like a natural place for that. It has always embraced experimentation, different cultures and subcultures which is exactly the kind of environment where new ideas can emerge.

BB: Nick, what’s different about today’s AI conversation from what you imagined when you joined Geoffrey Hinton as his first hire at Google Brain? Has the reality of where AI has ended up surprised you?

Nick Frosst: When I started with Geoffrey, AI was still a small research field. The big question was simply whether these techniques would work at all. What’s changed is that AI has moved from a research challenge to critical infrastructure. The conversation is now much bigger, about trust, security, economic impact and, importantly, who controls the technology. That shift has made the role of places like Europe much more important. Europe has world-class talent, industries and institutions, and should have a meaningful role in shaping how AI is built and deployed rather than simply relying on technology developed elsewhere.

BB: You’ve spoken about a future where AI becomes “boring” infrastructure, something that simply works in the background. Does a culturally charged event like ‘Convergence’ sit in tension with that idea, or are the two actually connected?

NF:  They’re actually connected. When I talk about AI becoming “boring” infrastructure, I mean it should simply work, for example taking care of repetitive, time-consuming tasks so people can focus on doing what they enjoy. That applies to culture too. AI should be another tool for artists and creators to use, challenge and reinterpret and definitely not something that replaces human creativity and talent.

BB: Cohere has positioned itself differently from some of the dominant Silicon Valley AI companies. What do you think Cohere sees differently?

NF: We started from a different premise. Rather than simply making bigger models, we’ve focused on making AI useful, open, and relevant to organisations and the people they serve. That means giving organisations choice and control over how AI is deployed and where their data goes. We don’t think such an important technology should be controlled by a handful of companies or a single geography.

BB: Joel, Cohere’s visual identity feels quite different from the way we usually see AI represented. How important was it to create a brand that feels human and connected to culture, rather than futuristic or overly technical?

JE: Very. We’re operating at the frontier of technology, but we also want to engage with the frontier of creativity and culture, where many new ideas emerge. We never wanted Cohere to look like a stereotypical AI company. The technology we build is ultimately about people and organisations solving real problems in the real world.

BB: AI is already changing the way we work, create and communicate. What do you think we’re still getting wrong about its impact on culture, and what are you most curious to see humans do with it?

JE: I think we often see AI as subtractive, rather than additive. We’ve seen this before with tools like Adobe. Lowering the barrier to creation didn’t kill creativity; it gave more people the ability to create. I’m excited to see AI become another tool in the creative toolbox, helping people explore ideas, experiment faster and bring things to life.