Dr. Motte: Forty Years of Techno, Tolerance and Transformation
When Dr. Motte steps into a booth, there is more than vinyl, USBs or a carefully curated playlist at stake. There is history. There is a city\\\’s pulse. There is the persistent idea that techno can be more than entertainment. In 2025, Motte marked forty years behind the decks, a milestone that speaks not only to a career in music but to the cultural DNA of a whole generation.
Few figures embody the contradictions and possibilities of Berlin as clearly as Matthias Roeingh, the man who chose the moniker Dr. Motte. Before the decks came punk, jazz and experimental percussion. Before the reunification parties and the global headlines came the intimate sweat of West Berlin clubs like Turbine Rosenheim or UFO, where basslines travelled through concrete and sparks of a new culture began to catch. In 1985, when he first started mixing records, \\\”techno\\\” was not yet a German word. It was an intuition, a sound for those who refused easy categories, raw and political in equal measure.
The world knows him best as the founder of the Love Parade. That first unauthorised march along the Kurfürstendamm in 1989, gathering roughly 150 dancers and dreamers, turned out to be one of the great cultural pivots of modern Europe. Within a decade, it was the largest peace demonstration in the world carried by sound. In 1999, more than 1.5 million people flooded Berlin\\\’s streets with whistles, basslines and banners, insisting that the right to dance together could be a form of politics. For Motte, it was never spectacle for its own sake. It was proof that rhythm can write manifestos more effectively than speeches.
This summer, his vision returned to the centre stage. The Rave The Planet Parade on 12 July 2025 filled Berlin once more, this time under the motto \\\”Our Future Is Now\\\”. The crowds were vast, the energy undeniable, and the message of solidarity and peace felt as urgent as ever. Just a month earlier, the hymn of the same name, created together with Marc van Linden, had already set the tone, uniting a new generation of ravers with the spirit of those who had marched decades before. Far from a nostalgic exercise, it was a declaration that techno\\\’s social force still has a role to play in shaping futures.
That longevity rests not only on ideals but on sound. Dr. Motte remains one of the most consistent diggers in the scene. He refuses to lean only on his history. Instead, he seeks new textures on Bandcamp, champions unknown producers, and builds sets that stretch beyond hype and algorithm. His approach makes him unusual among veterans. Where many have fallen into safe retrospection, Motte\\\’s selections breathe with the risk of the present. They are emotional without cliché, political without slogan. He never lets the booth become a museum.
His stages this year have included both major festivals and intimate floors. From Fusion and Mayday to Nature One, where he performed again in 2025, the thread remains clear: techno as a space of self-empowerment and collective transformation. His style is marked not by pyrotechnics but by persistence, by the steady conviction that the dancefloor is rehearsal for another kind of society.
There is a temptation to freeze him as monument, to let \\\”founder of the Love Parade\\\” serve as final label. Yet Dr. Motte resists the statue. He keeps working. He keeps insisting that techno is not history but a living practice. He keeps asking the same question that has carried him from the eighties into today. How do we want to live, and with whom.
Forty years is not just a mark of time. It is evidence of continuity, of a man who turned underground experiments into global celebrations, who treats each set as an opportunity to craft solidarity, and who refuses to separate bass from belief. Berlin gave Dr. Motte the raw material. He gave it back a culture. And the beat, still, goes on.