Tresor doesn't send its residents on the road to make a point lightly. The Berlin institution that has anchored techno's post-Wall lineage for over three decades is putting three of its current resident DJs, Kerrie, Chloe Lula and Ireen Amnes, on a single London bill this Thursday, alongside V.40, founder of the Soma People collective, as guest. The night is called REVERSE. It runs 11pm to 5am at Ormside Projects in Peckham, tickets £10 to £25 via Resident Advisor.
What makes REVERSE worth flagging isn't the venue or the hours, it's who built the lineup and why. According to the Peckham.Live newsletter, the party's own promo copy describes it as "techno with a point of view: visibility, pressure and no decorative nonsense," and calls the sound a "hard, hypnotic, industrial-leaning night." The premise is stated, not implied: this is a bill organized around women, trans and non-binary artists in underground techno, and that's the point of the exercise, not a footnote to it.
Why does it matter that it's Tresor's own residents saying this?
Booth politics around gender and representation aren't new in techno, promoters have been building all-women or gender-inclusive lineups on the club circuit for years. What's different here is the source. Kerrie and Ireen Amnes hold resident status at one of the genre's most historically loaded rooms, the club that helped define what post-industrial Berlin techno sounds like after 1991. When residents of that specific institution take a statement lineup to another city, on their own steam, it reads less like a themed party and more like Tresor's current DJ roster deciding what the room stands for going into its next chapter. An outside promoter making this argument is one thing. The people who play the actual Tresor floor most weeks making it is another.
"Techno with a point of view: visibility, pressure and no decorative nonsense."
V.40's presence sharpens that further. Soma People is its own collective, separate from Tresor, brought in as a guest rather than folded into the residency. That's a lineup built by invitation around a shared premise, not a house showcase padded out with a guest slot.
Does a statement lineup change how the night actually sounds?
Nobody involved is pretending the politics are the whole show, the promo language itself leans on "hard, hypnotic, industrial-leaning" as the sonic promise, which tracks with what Kerrie, Chloe Lula and Ireen Amnes are known for on record and on Tresor's own bills. REVERSE isn't billed as a panel with a soundtrack. It's billed as a techno night that happens to refuse to be neutral about who's in the booth, and lets the music carry the rest.
