Marie Montexier: Day & Night
Photography: Sam Müller / Mathilda Noelia
It’s the start of December and Marie Montexier has just finished a day of classes at Leipzig University, 63 hours after playing at Berghain’s ‘Last Dance’.
Marie brings me inside Spizz, a dark bar located on the corner of one of the narrow alleys that juts out of Leipzig’s Marktplatz. She orders a hot chocolate for herself and a non-alcoholic beer for me and gathers the tools needed to roll a cigarette from her neighbour, who is working behind the bar.
It’s 7:30pm on a bitterly cold eve at the start of December and Marie and I have taken the decision to sit on the terrace of the bar, with a shimmering Christmas tree hanging high in the orange-lit square.
“I know it's Tuesday night,” I say, “but the town is quiet, no?”
“Everything is closed at 8,” Marie says, putting her messenger bag down beside the table. “Every bar, every supermarket, everything.”
The few around us are draped in red blankets provided by the bar. Marie is wearing a large coat and an even larger scarf that covers the back of her head and her ears and is tucked into the collar of her coat.
We had intended to meet in Berlin on the Monday as she was in the city for her Berghain gig over the weekend, dubbed ‘The Last Dance’ due to imminently imposed Covid rules forbidding dancing. The night unraveled in an unexpected manner, however, and she found herself essentially rolling over onto a train back to Leipzig on the Sunday afternoon. She proceeded to spend the Monday convalescing in her bath before a week of sociology classes in the nearby university.
A full recovery has been made, she insists. It’s her jovial sensibility, I assume. I’ve met many who use their buoyancy to fight off the remnants of a heavy weekend. A blessing and a curse.
“I was thinking back to our first conversation,” I say. The first time Marie and I met earlier in the year felt like the last day of summer in Berlin. It was the end of September and the sun was shining down on a bustling Mauerpark on a Sunday afternoon. “That was literally a week before everything was opening up. Well, at least Berghain was opening up fully again.”
“Yeah, true,” Marie says. She begins smoking a cigarette she’s rolled.
“So it's funny to have that contrasting conversation now.”
“For now, I don't have the feeling that it's shutting down because I still have one gig, so it's not really —”
“Hit you yet?” I suggest.
“Yeah.”
“How did you feel with everything opening again?” I ask. “Having two, three gigs a week, on top of university and the label and the radio shows.”
“Yeah, it was still hard,” Marie says. “Definitely. A friend of mine just asked recently, how do I feel about my development? If I realise it emotionally? Because it was really fast, everything.”
One of the bar staff comes over asking us to pay for our drinks.
“Invalid,” Marie jokes as she taps her card, paying for both of us.
I laugh. “Thank you.”
“It’s fine. But, yeah, it feels nice to have a bit of a life out of the scene as well,” she continues, with her uncanny ability to remember where she left off. “I love the electronic music scene and working as a DJ, but it's nice also to be in a university. I was in university just before coming here. It's nice to have people that are my age studying and doing normal things.”
“Disconnected from the scene, I suppose.”
“Yeah, it keeps me grounded in a way.”
“You were saying there that you're learning more about yourself emotionally,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
Marie pauses. “It's a bit like I have two characters.”
“Ok.”
“Like, going to university and being a bit normal and having this normal life with the other students and then also this DJ life. It's also exhausting because emotionally it's two different worlds.”
“I can imagine.”
“So I feel a bit disconnected from the weekend when I go to university but I still don't feel really connected to the university when I'm doing my job as well. How do I explain it? Because I can't focus 100% on one of them. So it's a bit like playing ping pong with my feelings.”
“Yeah, I get you, I get you. What does take precedence?” I ask.
“The priority is definitely music,” Marie says. “I'm studying a bit slower now as well because I still want to push my career.”
“Ok, ok. I see.”
“But yeah, it feels weird because no one at the university knows who I am actually. I never tell anyone, because it feels a bit weird if I tell other twentysomethings that I'm a touring DJ outside of Europe. That's fucking weird.”
“Has it happened on campus where someone has recognised you as Marie Montexier, the DJ?”
“Yeah, it's happened,” Marie says, putting out her cigarette, “but no one that I'm studying with, so that's actually chill. I don't want to be seen as the star DJ. I just want to do my normal study thing as well.”
Her neighbour comes over to our table to remind us that they will be closing in five minutes and that we have to leave. She hands back the rollies to him and we finish our drinks before walking across the desolate square towards a stone seat wall. Marie unfolds the flap of her messenger bag and sits on it to avoid sitting directly on the freezing surface.
“We talked about Paryìa the last time,” Marie says. “It's nice to be curating this label as a platform. The first record was from my best friend and now I'm more focused on female producers because there's still not many female producers on labels and non-binary producers on labels. That's fun actually, to really dig into Soundcloud and look into people who don't have any releases right now or who are just putting tracks online. That's actually nice, because it's like going into the bibliotheque?” Marie looks for a translation.
“Yeah, the library,” I say.
“— Into a library, and searching for interesting books, but in another way.”
“You're 24, aren't you?” I ask.
“Yeah, now 24.”
“It is amazing to think that you have this, even self-imposed, sense of responsibility to be championing these artists — these female, non-binary artists.”
“Yeah, I feel like it's my responsibility,” Marie asserts. “For the generation after me as well.”
“How so?”
“Because I still think that female DJs are still sexualised in our scene and discriminated against and of course it's changing, but there's still not many non-binary artists, or it's still very white.”
“Yeah, of course.”
“This is also a thing I need to focus more on on my label, definitely. But yeah, I feel responsible because — I don't know — I don't know actually. I just want to do it because I want the artists that come after me to have a better experience than I had.”
“When you say that — when did you start DJing again?”
“At like 19 or 20. Not so long ago.”
“When you were living in Cologne?”
“Yeah, because that environment was full of men. When they saw that I was getting more recognition - not even big recognition, just playing my first radio show and then having my first gig — they were not nice to me. They weren't respecting what I was doing and not really empowering — empowering?”
“Empowering, yeah.”
“— Empowering what I'm doing. So, for a long time I thought I wasn't good at this, because men were saying: 'You're just getting booked because you have a pussy.'”
I wince at the thought.
“When you were saying that you were figuring yourself out emotionally, is it that sense of self-acceptance that you do belong here?” I ask. “For so long you weren't getting the leg up from others around you so you had to start giving it to yourself. Self-empowerment, as opposed to getting it from other people.”
“I think it's still hard to have a good mindset, especially as an artist, to think that what you're doing is good. It's hard to get there because you're always comparing yourself to others.”
“Of course.”
“That's the hardest part actually about it. I'm still not there to be honest. It's still a process.”
“Self-doubt?”
“Yeah, but I'm getting better,” Marie says, slightly despondent. “I don't think that I don't belong here anymore.”
“Where did you find was the most accepting of what you were doing thus far?” I ask. “You've obviously had experience with Cologne, Leipzig, and Berlin. Maybe the easy answer is Berlin, but has Cologne or Leipzig been more advantageous for you in doing what you want to do?”
“I think I could focus more on my work since being here,” Marie says, “because I hadn't this past experience here with people, so I had more empowerment for myself and I'm more self-confident with what I'm doing.”
“I see.”
“Cologne was still holding me a bit back, I think.”
“Yeah?”
“For myself, with my own feelings,” Marie says. “So, it was good to move and to leave that behind me. I still have a connection to Cologne. I have my female collective now in Cologne, which I just started like two months ago, because I just thought that there was nothing changing in Cologne. It's easy to go into a city that is super active and political and diverse and do your thing there, but it's more difficult to go into a city and change something there where there's actually nothing or not so much change. So I started this female collective, Précey, with Philo and Aino DJ.”
“Do you have an ill-feeling towards Cologne?” I ask.
“Yeah, definitely, but because I took some distance from Cologne, now I have the power to go again into it and to do something for the scene there. Before, I wouldn't have done it because of the people around me or this emotional bonding and I was a bit scared as well, definitely. Now I have this distance, I'm seeing myself as an artist and I'm more confident in going back and doing something there.”
“I see.”
“So that was good for me and what I'm doing, I think. And also to not just run away from the scene in Cologne and disconnect from it.”
I found myself on a train to Leipzig two hours ago and only have another hour before I have to hop on a train back to Berlin. With it being my first time in the city, Marie is keen to give me a rapid tour before I go. She folds the flap of her messenger bag over the front and puts it on her shoulder.
As we are leaving, Marie looks beyond me and is momentarily distracted by a thick-coated, medium-sized dog being trained by their owner at the corner of the square.
“Oh, it’s a standoff,” I say.
The dog is sat perfectly still 20 feet away from its owner, waiting for his permission to move. After being obedient for a time, the dog begins to walk towards him.
“Is she allowed?” Marie asks herself. “I don’t know.”