Hansa Studios, Berlin — Bowie's Berlin trilogy

Hansa Tonstudio at Köthener Strasse 38 in Kreuzberg stood, when David Bowie arrived to record there in 1976, within a few hundred metres of the Berlin Wall. The studio's Meistersaal recording room — a former ballroom — was large enough that musicians working in it could hear, through the windows, the sounds from East Berlin: guard movements, the particular quiet of a surveilled city, the Wall's presence as an atmospheric condition rather than just a physical structure. Tony Visconti, who co-produced the records made there with Brian Eno, has described the sensation of recording in a city physically divided between two political systems. Bowie put it in the music.

Low and Heroes — recorded at Hansa in 1976 and 1977 respectively, with Lodger following in 1978 — are the three albums known as the Berlin Trilogy, though Lodger was actually recorded mostly in Montreux. They represent one of the most radical creative pivots in the history of popular music: Bowie arriving in Berlin depleted by cocaine and Los Angeles, and emerging with a body of work that incorporated Krautrock, electronic minimalism, and the dissonance of a divided city into something that sounded like nothing else. "Heroes," recorded with Bowie and guitarist Robert Fripp facing each other through microphone stacks in the Meistersaal, remains one of the most emotionally overwhelming recordings in rock music.

Hansa Studios still operates as a commercial recording facility at the same Kreuzberg address. The Meistersaal has been restored and is used for both recording and events. A plaque acknowledges the Bowie and Iggy Pop sessions — Pop also recorded The Idiot and Lust for Life at Hansa during this period. The Berlin Wall is gone, and the neighbourhood has been transformed by reunification and gentrification. The particular atmospheric condition that Bowie arrived to record in no longer exists. The recordings it produced still do.