Pan-Pot: From an Empty Park Party to Techno's Big Rooms

Sometime around 2004, two audio-engineering students set up a small outdoor party in a Berlin park. They had booked one guest they did not know personally: Anja Schneider, a DJ with a Berlin radio show and a name from the Love Parade years. She came along with Ralf Kollmann. Almost nobody else did. "Nobody came to the party," Tassilo Ippenberger later told DJ Mag, "so we had a lot of time to talk to Anja and Ralf." Schneider and Kollmann were just starting a label. Send us something when it's finished, they said.

That empty park is where Pan-Pot begins. Twenty years later the duo play the closing hours of the biggest techno stages in the world, and on 13 November 2026 "Move Your Body", a new release credited to Pan-Pot and ONYVAA that came out a week earlier, sat at No. 16 in Beatport's Techno (Peak Time / Driving) chart. The story in between is about more than two producers who did well. It shows how a whole corner of German electronic music moved from the clicks of minimal to the weight of the big room, and what it takes to move with it instead of being left behind.

Two techno kids in an audio-engineering class

Thomas Benedix and Tassilo Ippenberger met in 2003 at the SAE Institute in Berlin, where both were studying audio engineering. What brought them together was simple: they noticed they were the only two people on the course who were into techno. Benedix, originally from Templin in Brandenburg, brought Richie Hawtin's Plastikman records to the friendship. Ippenberger, who grew up in Bavaria, had picked up a taste for DJ Hell's International Deejay Gigolo label at home.

Being into techno in Berlin in 2003 was not rare. Getting booked was. "Nobody would book us obviously," Benedix said dryly in the same interview, which is why the two decided to throw a party of their own. The engineering background mattered too. Pan-Pot were never a duo with one DJ and one producer; both came from the studio, and their early records sound like it, full of sound design and what Benedix called "found sound".

The minimal years on Mobilee

Within about two months of that party they had a three-track demo, made together with Marco Resmann, who was part of the project at the very beginning and left soon after. Mobilee, the label Schneider and Kollmann were building, put it out as only its second release. "Popy & Caste" arrived in 2005, right as minimal techno was taking over Berlin. Skittering hi-hats, ricocheting drums and a frazzled bassline: it fit the moment, but it was stranger than most of what surrounded it.

Mobilee had no fixed signature sound at the time, and Pan-Pot helped define one. Their debut album "Pan-O-Rama" followed on the label in 2007, carrying "Charly", one of the tracks that made their name. Over the next years came "Confronted", "Captain My Captain", remixes for Booka Shade and Slam, a mix in Mobilee's "Back to Back" series and a compilation for Watergate, the Spree-side club where they later held a residency and whose site has since become a pop-up for a Paris club. By their own account they were, in those years, primarily a tech house act with a minimal touch.

"We don't want to be judged any more"

The turn came slowly and then all at once. "We were together with Mobilee for 10 years, and after eight years we felt that musically it was going in a different direction," Ippenberger told DJ Mag. The label was leaning into tech house and deep house; the duo were drifting towards techno. There was also a creative itch that had nothing to do with genre. "One thing we didn't want to have was this feeling where you finish a track in the studio and then you show it to somebody who then decides if it's released or not," he said. "We said we don't want to be judged any more."

The answer was a label of their own. The idea had been around for years, but Second State only launched in March 2014, later than the two had hoped, with their own "Cells" EP as the first release. In interviews from that time they described it as a label for themselves and their friends. Anyone who has started a record label knows how much work hides behind a sentence like that.

The music changed with the logo. "It's more techno, more mature, more adult," Ippenberger said about their second album, "The Other", which came out on Second State in September 2015, with a remix album featuring Carl Cox, Nicole Moudaber and Joseph Capriati. The vocals that had once been a reflex were gone. "The direction is definitely more Berghain; a more strong, big-room sound." It was a striking choice of words, because those two worlds had long been seen as opposites. Pan-Pot's bet was that a dark, driving record could do both.

The label that found Amelie Lens

A label lives or dies by what it signs, and Second State's most famous signing came early. In 2016, a young DJ from Antwerp named Amelie Lens released her "Let It Go" EP there, the first of three EPs she put out on the label in 2016 and 2017. "Contradiction" and "Stay With Me" followed in 2017, and she returned in 2019 with "Hypnotized". Within a few years she had become one of the most booked names in techno, with her own Lenske label and EXHALE parties. Second State did not make her career on its own, but it gave her early records a home with a name that techno DJs already watched.

That is the quiet achievement here. Plenty of DJs start labels to release their own records. Fewer build one that becomes a launch pad for others. Second State went on to release artists such as Michael Klein and Luigi Madonna, and in 2022 it reached its 100th release. The label they had started so as not to be judged had become a place where others were judged, and sometimes found.

From the Opera Stage to HUMAN

By the mid-2010s, Pan-Pot were regular headliners at Awakenings and Time Warp, playing the biggest outdoor stages in Europe. At Zurich's Street Parade on 11 August 2018, the timetable put them on the main Opera Stage at Bellevue from 22:30 to midnight, the final slot of the day in front of the city's opera house. Seven years later they returned with something more personal: "OPERA", the official anthem of the 2025 Street Parade.

That same summer they announced HUMAN, a new label and event series, which made its debut as the official Street Parade afterparty at Halle 622 in Zurich on 9 August 2025. The concept reads like a reaction to how big everything had become. In an interview with Magnetic Magazine in February 2026, Ippenberger described HUMAN as a way back to "the dance floor as a shared space", while Benedix put it more bluntly: "growth, in our eyes, means going deeper rather than wider." HUMAN has since run nights in Berlin and in the United States, part of a US techno scene that has grown far beyond what it was when they first toured there. In January 2026 they also launched Pan-Pot TV, a round-the-clock stream on their YouTube channel.

What the empty park party explains

Seen from 2026, Pan-Pot's career looks like a map of the last two decades of techno. They arrived with minimal, rode the tech house years on a label that defined them, broke away just as techno was getting heavier and bigger, and built their own home in time to catch the next generation. Now, with HUMAN, they are arguing for something smaller again.

None of that was planned in a park in 2004. What was there from the start was a habit: when nobody would book them, they threw their own party; when they no longer wanted someone else to decide on their music, they built their own label. "Move Your Body" climbing the chart this November is only the latest sign that the habit still works. Most acts from the minimal boom faded with it. Pan-Pot kept building the next room before the old one emptied out.