Disko-Diskurs

Name: Disko-Diskurs
Start: 2026-04-07
End: 2026-04-07
Location: Eaton DC

Listening Session|Featuring Thomas Meinecke and Michael Bowie

Eaton DC, Washington, DC
Language English
Price Free and open to the public
Part of series: Transatlantic Feedback: Thomas Meinecke in the U.S.

Free registration

Deep turquoise background with lines "Disko Diskurs" and announcement of the vinyl listening session in pink © Goethe-Institut/Canva

Join the us on Tuesday, April 7 to kick off Disko-Diskurs with a vinyl listening session about jazz and its transatlantic echoes, featuring Thomas Meinecke — renowned DJ, author, and founder of Berlin’s iconic Plattenspieler sessions. “One of the most influential figures in the German music scene,” Meinecke’s influence spans from the dancefloors of Berghain to the airwaves of German radio.

Disko-Diskurs is a series of listening sessions that invites artists to play a song off a vinyl and then deconstruct it—looking past the tracks to the cultural significance they inhabit, and the unique stories born from engaging with them.

These sessions bring together global artists to show how music and personal stories unite us in a complicated understanding of freedom and expression today.

Presented by the Goethe-Institut Washington and Eaton DC.

This is listening session is part of The Art of Freedom: Voices of Expression from Europe to America, a project by the EUNIC DC, where art, voices, and ideas meet to explore freedom of expression across Europe and America. The April 7th session will feature Michael Bowie, bassist, composer, producer, educator and CCO of Distrik Kollective.

This event is also part of the series “Transatlantic Feedback,” a month-long musical and literary journey by Thomas Meinecke through the U.S., organized together with other Goethe-Institut USA locations.

About the venue

Eaton DC is a purpose-led hotel, cultural center, and community gathering place located in the heart of Washington, DC. Blending hospitality with social impact, Eaton offers a dynamic ecosystem that includes artist studios, a cinema, a wellness center, a radio station, and a robust lineup of public programming. The property is committed to fostering creativity, dialogue, and collective care, serving as a home for artists, activists, and travelers seeking a more conscious and connected experience.

Participants

Thomas Meinecke

Thomas Meinecke was born in Hamburg in 1955 and now lives near Munich and in Marseille. He has authored numerous novels and short stories published by Suhrkamp Verlag since 1986, most recently “Odenwald,” 2024. He is also a musician, with his band F.S.K. (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle) founded in 1980, whose albums have been released on Daniel Richter’s Buback Label since 2008 (most recently “Topsy Turvy,” 2023). Meinecke has also collaborated on many electronic projects with Move D since 1998, worked as a radio DJ hosting his own show on Bayerischer Rundfunk from 1985 to 2021), and DJed at urban nightclubs (Berghain, Robert Johnson, Pudel Club, Rote Sonne, etc.). At Berlin’s Theater Hebbel am Ufer, he ran the dialogic event series “Plattenspieler” from 2007 until the first lockdown in 2020; since fall 2022, the series has continued at Berlin’s Volksbühne. In the winter semester of 2011/12, he held the poetry lectureship at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main (“Ich als Text,” edition suhrkamp, 2012). He has held residencies at universities in Europe and the U.S., most recently: Writer in Residence at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and poetry lectureship on gender at the Technical University of Braunschweig. He has been awarded numerous awards, including the 2020 Berlin Literature Prize (with a visiting professorship at the Free University of Berlin in the summer semester of 2022). A “Text + Kritik” volume on Thomas Meinecke was published in 2021, and the poetological reader “Oceanic Writing” (Verbrecher Verlag) in 2022.