Berlin Summer Rains II
The Sorry Entertainer
To call yourself The Sorry Entertainer is to sabotage your own publicity department before it has even been hired.
The Sorry Entertainer aka TSE is exactly what he says he is – or perhaps his exact opposite. This, naturally, is for the few remaining people on earth who have never heard of the man to decide. They must blind-guess whether the nom de plume is a precise and comprehensive description of his talent, promising little in the way of joy; or whether it is a piece of self-mockery, a stoic refusal to take the whole business of being an artist terribly seriously. The clever ones will get it at once. After all, the cleverest man in the room is often the one prepared to call himself a fool.
We, however, have known The Sorry Entertainer rather too well for that sort of innocence. Through various collaborations, from the low-intensity to the frankly hazardous, and through innumerable parallel engagements around the world over the past decade and more; but above all through his long residency and off-duty omnipresence at Berlin's notorious Kater Club, successor to Bar25 and KaterHolzig, we have watched the portrait become steadily less portrait-like. The closer one gets to TSE, the blurrier the outline becomes.
We, however, have known The Sorry Entertainer rather too well for that sort of innocence. Through various collaborations, from the low-intensity to the frankly hazardous, and through innumerable parallel engagements around the world over the past decade and more; but above all through his long residency and off-duty omnipresence at Berlin's notorious Kater Club, successor to Bar25 and KaterHolzig, we have watched the portrait become steadily less portrait-like. The closer one gets to TSE, the blurrier the outline becomes.
This may be because, musically, he has never shown much interest in the notion of a border. The Sorry Entertainer absorbs and exhales an entire galaxy of grooves, beats, textures, moods and flavours, with one conspicuous constant: his fascination with whatever unites them. House, dub, disco, funk, techno, psychedelia, pop, folk – the categories are less containers than things to be punctured. His early work with The Sorry Entertainers (a trio before the combo fell apart with TSE repurposing the orphaned title) was already devoted to loosening the grip of Berlin's techno orthodoxy, slowing the machinery down and letting other kinds of pleasure into the room. Sets below 100 BPM were not a joke but a kind of cultural insurrection: the dance floor liberated from the tyranny of the metronome.
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He absorbs and exhales an entire galaxy of grooves, beats, textures, moods and flavours, with one conspicuous constant: his fascination with whatever unites all that.
And then there is Basics of Paradox, the experimental series whose chapters seem determined to make the word “genre” feel faintly embarrassing. Music and noise, literature and film, psychology and philosophy, seriousness and nonsense: everything gets thrown into the same cosmic blender, with no guarantee that what emerges will still be legally classifiable as entertainment. The effect is paradoxical in the proper sense. The music becomes hazier, more diffuse, less immediately legible – and this very lack of legibility forces the listener to concentrate. You squint, acoustically speaking. You adjust the focus. Ambiguity becomes an instrument of attention.
This is The Sorry Entertainer’s trick in miniature. The more elusive the object, the more fiercely it demands your attention.
On the personal level, too, he is a bottomless chasm: a vagabond on the sinuous, occasionally circular road of perpetual self-discovery and reinvention, each discovery already dreaming up the identity that will replace it. He seems less interested in arriving than in becoming the sort of person who might plausibly leave again.
Also known simply as Lotti, he dwells, almost literally, among record shelves – the kind that never acquire dust because the records are always being removed, examined, played, reconsidered and put back somewhere slightly wrong. He has been credited as one of the figures in Berlin's electronic underground who helped shift the city's older techno paradigm away from its harder, more robotic orthodoxy and toward something slower, warmer, stranger and more mischievous. His music became part of a larger change in the city's sonic metabolism: from concrete bunker to riverside lawn; from industrial severity to psychedelic horticulture. Contemporary accounts of his work describe precisely this impulse toward deceleration and eclecticism, while his releases on Shitkatapult helped formalise it.
This is The Sorry Entertainer’s trick in miniature. The more elusive the object, the more fiercely it demands your attention.
On the personal level, too, he is a bottomless chasm: a vagabond on the sinuous, occasionally circular road of perpetual self-discovery and reinvention, each discovery already dreaming up the identity that will replace it. He seems less interested in arriving than in becoming the sort of person who might plausibly leave again.
Also known simply as Lotti, he dwells, almost literally, among record shelves – the kind that never acquire dust because the records are always being removed, examined, played, reconsidered and put back somewhere slightly wrong. He has been credited as one of the figures in Berlin's electronic underground who helped shift the city's older techno paradigm away from its harder, more robotic orthodoxy and toward something slower, warmer, stranger and more mischievous. His music became part of a larger change in the city's sonic metabolism: from concrete bunker to riverside lawn; from industrial severity to psychedelic horticulture. Contemporary accounts of his work describe precisely this impulse toward deceleration and eclecticism, while his releases on Shitkatapult helped formalise it.
“
This is his trick in miniature. The more elusive the object, the more fiercely it demands your attention.
There is a delicious coincidence behind the name. Daniel Johnston, the eccentric American singer-songwriter and artist, recorded “Sorry Entertainer” years before Lotti adopted the phrase: a song about drifting wherever the wind blows, about loneliness, demons, escape and the strange business of standing on a stage while simultaneously wanting to disappear from it. Johnston died in 2019, but the song remains an oddly perfect piece of mythology for Lotti – not because the two artists are alike in any simple sense, but because both understand the comic dignity of the reluctant performer.
The name, then, is clever. More than clever: it is almost offensively appropriate to Berlin.
Berlin's underground culture has always had an uneasy relationship with the grandiose apparatus of cultural success: the hype machine, the cult of personality, the glitz, the posturing, the endless manufacture of importance. The underground says no to all this, and one of its more effective weapons is self-deprecation. To call yourself The Sorry Entertainer is to sabotage your own publicity department before it has even been hired. It is an act of pre-emptive humility – and, paradoxically, of enormous confidence.
Because self-deprecation, properly executed, is not weakness. It is strength with a sense of humour. You deliberately place an obstacle in front of your own legend and then proceed anyway. You make yourself smaller so that the work can become larger. The real achievement is not overcoming the crowd. It is overcoming the self that wants to impress the crowd.
The name, then, is clever. More than clever: it is almost offensively appropriate to Berlin.
Berlin's underground culture has always had an uneasy relationship with the grandiose apparatus of cultural success: the hype machine, the cult of personality, the glitz, the posturing, the endless manufacture of importance. The underground says no to all this, and one of its more effective weapons is self-deprecation. To call yourself The Sorry Entertainer is to sabotage your own publicity department before it has even been hired. It is an act of pre-emptive humility – and, paradoxically, of enormous confidence.
Because self-deprecation, properly executed, is not weakness. It is strength with a sense of humour. You deliberately place an obstacle in front of your own legend and then proceed anyway. You make yourself smaller so that the work can become larger. The real achievement is not overcoming the crowd. It is overcoming the self that wants to impress the crowd.
“
You don't exactly maximise your commercial luminosity by calling yourself The Sorry Entertainer and putting your work out on labels with names as gloriously uncommercial as Shitkatapult.
This is why Lotti is better understood as a hero than as a celebrity. The distinction matters. A celebrity emits starlight; a hero leaves a trail. A celebrity requires a spotlight; a hero can usually be found somewhere behind the speakers, rummaging through records.
And you don't exactly maximise your commercial luminosity by calling yourself The Sorry Entertainer and putting your work out on labels with names as gloriously uncommercial as Shitkatapult. You would sell better as MC Magic, perhaps, playing back-to-back with DJ Fabulous beneath a laser-generated logo of your own face. There would be a press photograph. There would be a booking agent. There might even be a VIP area.
But playing tennis with the net down is not Lotti's game.
His game is stranger and more difficult: to remain in motion without becoming fashionable; to entertain without becoming an entertainer; to make the dance floor slower, wider and more bewildering; to keep the shelves moving and the categories unstable; to remain, despite everything, a Sorry Entertainer.
And perhaps that is the final paradox. The man who calls himself sorry has spent the better part of two decades giving people very little to apologise for. Ok, some.
► SoundCloud: The Sorry Entertainer
And you don't exactly maximise your commercial luminosity by calling yourself The Sorry Entertainer and putting your work out on labels with names as gloriously uncommercial as Shitkatapult. You would sell better as MC Magic, perhaps, playing back-to-back with DJ Fabulous beneath a laser-generated logo of your own face. There would be a press photograph. There would be a booking agent. There might even be a VIP area.
But playing tennis with the net down is not Lotti's game.
His game is stranger and more difficult: to remain in motion without becoming fashionable; to entertain without becoming an entertainer; to make the dance floor slower, wider and more bewildering; to keep the shelves moving and the categories unstable; to remain, despite everything, a Sorry Entertainer.
And perhaps that is the final paradox. The man who calls himself sorry has spent the better part of two decades giving people very little to apologise for. Ok, some.
► SoundCloud: The Sorry Entertainer