Hasenheide from DRUMS UNDEFINED by HIJI

Volkspark Hasenheide sits between Neukölln and Kreuzberg, a quiet park shaped by the rubble of postwar Berlin. Its gentle hills and depressions are the remnants of bombed buildings and collapsed flak towers—traces of destruction absorbed into the landscape. When I lived beside the park, running its counterclockwise loop became a way of sensing this buried history through my own breath and pulse.

Berlin was once a center of heavy industry, and its ground still holds the “rhythms of machines”: the rotations of engines, the strikes of presses, the mechanical pulse that powered modernization. From these remnants—factories, Cold War residues, silent ruins—Berlin techno emerged. Even in its futuristic sound, it carries the memory of machines translated into rhythm the body can feel.

As I ran across Hasenheide’s uneven terrain, my heartbeat seemed to synchronize with these phantom mechanical rhythms rising from below. The landscape became a vessel of deep time, revealing itself not through sight alone but through movement—through inhabiting it.

In 2024, Berlin techno was recognized as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. That a music built from mechanical beats grows out of this city, and that those same beats still echo through its ground, ties the past and future together. In Hasenheide, I felt my body and the city’s long memory fold into a single rhythm.

HIJI / Masaya Hijikata (Moussa KalamUllah)

Drummer and artist based in Warsaw.

Drummer of klās’tĭk and sehno. He works across genres while pursuing a personal practice centered on “pre-linguistic rhythm.” Integrating somatic awareness, breath, and Eastern thought, he develops a unique drumming approach that treats rhythm as a living interface between body and world.