As one half of the new international resident duo, Ben Klock will be exclusively at Fuse in Belgium for one full year. Over the upcoming season, he returns in three formats:
⁍ 1 Back-to-back: a rare pairing with an artist of their choosing, crossing sounds with unpredictability as the core principle.
⁍ 1 All night long: a solo journey from opening to closing, revealing their range and record knowledge while disappearing into the tunnel.
⁍ 1 Curated night: a handpicked program of their favorite selectors, giving us a closer look into their musical roots, taste, and vision.
He's no newcomer to the club: his name has featured on Fuse's line-ups for years, and he's now tied to it through a long-term exchange. To picture what that exchange might sound like, it's worth looking at where he comes from:
Ben Klock started DJing in 1994 and became a resident at Berghain in 2005, the year the club's in-house label, Ostgut Ton, was founded, and was among its earliest contributors. It all jump-started from that point onwards, through his track with fellow resident Marcel Dettmann, "Dawning," as it was effectively the label's opening release and is still cited as a blueprint for what's shorthanded as "the Berghain sound": heavy without being blunt, industrial in texture but attentive to dub space. That partnership has run for two decades now, largely through extended back-to-back sets; in 2019, marking Ostgut Ton's hundredth release, the two returned to the studio together for "Phantom Studies."
His own catalogue as a producer has been unhurried. The debut album "One" (2009) was received as an industry-wide event; Resident Advisor called it that year's first great techno record, moving between "crushed-metal techno" and "flash-frozen dub-tech," with Elif Biçer's voice used as texture instead of conventional vocals. It was the first full album a Berghain resident released on the club's own label, and became a reference point against which much of what followed has been measured.
In 2006 he founded Klockworks, initially an outlet for work outside his Ostgut Ton output. It grew into a platform for other producers' ideas on top of his own: DVS1 and Etapp Kyle released early, formative work there, and more recently it has backed Fadi Mohem, with whom Klock recorded 2022's "Klockworks 34", reviewed as two generations of the club's roster meeting in the middle. His instinct to build a label to support emerging talent in addition to showcasing his own sound says as much about his standing in today's scene as his DJing does.
His long Berghain sets, historically running well past ten hours, pushed him to think in terms of dynamics across a night, avoiding isolated peaks. It's this kind of dedication that earned him BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix to be voted as Essential Mix of the Year in 2015. Fast forward to 2024, Klock and Mohem launched a further label, LAYER, opening it with "LAYER ONE," featuring grime MC Flowdan and South London artist Coby Sey, a deliberate step away from the techno grid into ambient- and IDM-adjacent territory.
What makes him unique as opposed to common thought? Ben is "not really such a techno purist" when asked on the topic, and what matters to him is music and feeling first, with techno simply the tool he uses to move both. In practice, that shows up as house and dub sensibilities worked into the harder architecture of a Berghain set, an ear for texture and repetition over obvious impact, and, on record, a growing willingness to sit outside 4/4 techno altogether.
