Here is Italian guitar player Dario Chillemi and his 12 string guitar using the acoustics and atmosphere at Beelitz Heilstätten to great effect:
For a little more information on the abandoned sanatorium Beelitz you can visit this earlier post.
For more information on Dario you can visit his website.
Dizzy Moon beautifully performing her song Dizzy Moon Around at Beelitz Heilstätten, an old, abandoned German sanatorium and war hospital.
Hidden romantically in the deutsche Wälder (woods) not far Potsdam, Beelitz Heilstätten
conjures up a uniquely German image, a Zauberberg (Magic Mountain*) without the Berg (mountain). But beneath the decaying beauty, the history of Beelitz has been far from romantic.
In the late 19th Century tuberculosis was rife and in order to stop the spread of the disease, those inflected were encouraged to enter sanatoria. Beelitz was one of many sanatoriums built to deal with the numbers and the 140 hector wooded site was chosen for it’s clean air – considered essential for the treatment of tuberculosis. Construction began in 1898 and the doors were opened to the first patients in 1902.
After the outbreak of World War I, the site was transformed into a military hospital, treating casualties from the trenches. It was during this time that the hospital received it’s most famous patient, one Adolf Hitler, after a grenade exploded a little too far away from him during the Battle of the Somme. Whether Hitler’s left testicle remains buried somewhere around the grounds will remain forever a mystery.
In the interwar period Beelitz became a Sanatorium again before being transformed back into a military hospital during the next World War and then being taken over by the Soviets, who carried on using Beelitz as a military hospital until 1995 when they abandoned it. A couple of the buildings remain still in use today, but the vast majority of the site lies in ruins, frequented by many photographers, film makers (including those that made the Pianist and Valkyrie) , urban explorers and Ramstein.
The Beelitz area is also famous for it’s asparagus and a serial killer.
We recorded this video in the large hall in the Männersanatorium (sanatorium for men).
If you can read German and want to learn more about Beelitz Heilstätten, this site is well worth visiting. Even if you can’t, it has some nice pictures. If not wikipedea or these nice blogs should suffice.
Dizzy Moon is a Berlin based artist who is originally from France. Her dynamic, linear songwriting style is often sparse, but this sparseness only serves to give space to the expressive beauty of her songs. She often plays with loop pedals and what not, but here we catch her with only the acoustics of the room at her aid, and how nicely they do that.
There will be more videos from Beelitz coming soon so subscribe or Facebook it so that you find out about them.
*Zauberberg is a rather big novel written by Thomas Mann about a young German man who visits a sanatorium and, after a 1000 pages, leaves. ….but not before having been extensively lectured to by some weighty intellectuals.
The Dictator’s Waltz – a concept waltz by Douglas MacGregor
This recording was made at the abandoned Krampnitz military base near Potsdam in Germany. Krampnitz is a huge abandoned military complex. It was originally used by the Nazis to train cavalry officers and after the war was taken over and used as a military base by the Soviets. The camp was abandoned in 1992 after the collapse of the USSR
This recording was made in what appears to be the ballroom of the officers ‘club’. The room is in remarkably good condition and sounds amazing.
The Dictator’s Waltz is a piece of music directed at dictators and other such people, hence the ballroom of a Nazi military camp seemed like the perfect location for a field recording. You can even see two crumbling stone eagles in the background.
For more info/photos about/of Krampnitz and other interesting places around Berlin here is a great wee blog: Abandoned Berlin
For more info/music about/by me go here: www.soundcloud.com/dougmacgregor or www.douglasmacgregormusic.com
Urban Exploration Field Recording 