The most important part of the tour was the concert, which worked as a vehicle for every aspect of Giegling that wouldn't work at their usual gigs. From the audience's perspective, it went something like this: a crowd would enter a small venue, sometimes a nightclub or concert hall but in the best cases something more interesting, like the old theatre in Leipzig or the bank vault in Basel. Inside, they would find a hearth of candles and flowers, backlit and wreathed in a milky fog, cut through with Dirk's red lasers. Dustin would be there somewhere manning a merchandise booth, which included a selection of their old records, including Prince Of Denmark's coveted, plus an EP made specially for the tour with artwork unique to each city.The performance had three or four parts, depending on the night. To start, Christian would sit on the floor and play a set using two tube lights, intermittently feeding power into them and piping the buzzing sound through the PA. For most people in the audience, this meant the concert began with the sound of a raw electrical current and a pulsing glow, all performed by someone invisible to most of them and unfamiliar to those who could see him. After a few minutes of that, Moritz would slink onto center stage and sit between a cassette deck, a DJ mixer and a few other bits of gear. For the next ten minutes, he'd rock back and forth on his knees and summon billowing sheets of dubby noise, eventually getting just a bit too loud, then suddenly ending with an abrasiveThe next part was the most artistically daring. Otto, a Cuban artist and longtime friend of the crew, would appear stage-right in a kind of shapeless wedding dress. Haltingly, he'd make his way toward the audience, unfurling his dress and singing, un-mic'd, in Spanish. He'd crouch at the front of the room and paint his face with a teal-colored cream, pausing every now and then to throw out another tortured lament.This all had the effect, intentionally or not, of directly defying the audience's expectations. En route to a Giegling concert, one confidently envisions a group of guys on laptops playing somber electronic music. What you get, at least to start, are two experimental performances and some melancholic voguing.The main bit would, in fact, involve several guys on laptops, though beyond that it bore little resemblance to the standard electronic live performance. Sitting silhouetted along a table, surrounded by candles and bouquets of flowers, were Edward, Leafar Legov, Konstantin, Ateq and Vril, usually in that order. Each of them would play one of his own songs live, and the next would dovetail out of it with one of his own. Konstantin, sitting in the center, was in charge of the mix. Musically, the set was ambient and hip-hop-inspired in a way familiar to fans of Giegling's records. In the tradition of kosmische, the music was groovy and musical in some moments, totally avant-garde in others, and progressed in a fluid, non-linear way.The set mixed classics from the Giegling catalog with unreleased material and sketches made specifically for the tour. Once the group landed on a sequence that made sense, the tracklist was more or less the same every time, though the delivery and reception varied greatly from night to night. In LA, when Konstantin played Traumprinz's "It Takes Two Wings" (Konstantin being the de facto surrogate for the reclusive artist), the seated crowd couldn't help but get up and dance. But at Funkhaus in Berlin, the song was mysteriously flat—for reasons no one understood, the low-end, thick and warm on the other tracks, never came through the way it should have.At most shows, the climax came just before that. Out of the murk would emerge a dubby edit of Rebekah Del Rio's "Llorando"— another Lynchian moment —bringing the concert to its emotional peak. With the crowd fished in, Leafar Legov dropped "Haller," a hip-hop instrumental from Kettenkarussell's 2014 album. With the vocal soaring over the chunky, syncopated beat, the moment recalled Portishead at their most dramatic.For 90 minutes or so, the set would expand and contract, congeal and dissolve, then get progressively quieter until it finally ended. Sometimes the concerts and parties happened at the same venue on the same night; sometimes they were on different nights at separate locations. Either way, there was never much time to waste when it was over. The venue had to be cleaned up and the crew needed to get ready for the party, whether it was that night or the next.Like the concert, the parties followed a carefully considered sequence of events, and aimed to deliver the sound of Giegling in its most unadulterated form. There were two rooms: one for the techno side of the label's sound, the other for house and downtempo. Ateq would get things started in the techno room, slowly building from lush ambience to sleek and pulsing beats. Next was Konstantin, usually for three or four hours, and finally Vril, who'd end the night with a bang—or, perhaps more accurately, aOpening the house room, Leafar Legov would intentionally delay the kick drum for as long as possible, ideally until about halfway through his three-hour slot. Often it worked, sometimes it didn't. "Playing that kind of thing in a club, you're always a little worried," he said. "One time, I was maybe an hour or so in, I thought it was going well, and then someone came up to me and said, 'Hi, when is the music starting?' I worked on the set for two weeks before the tour began, so that hurt a little." By and large, though, the audiences knew what they were getting into, which gave the crew the chance to push things.Who followed Leafar Legov changed from night to night. If the room needed a boost of energy, Edward would come next—unlike his records, his live set is full of thudding kick drums. If the floaty vibe seemed to be working, Dustin would come on and draw it out a bit, the liminal space between peak-time and chill-out being his forte. The final act was Kettenkarussell, that is, Konstantin and Leafar Legov, whose punchy kicks and frothy hi-hats would be an exhilarating departure from the subtler sounds that had come before. If the party still had some life left at that point, Dustin, Konstantin and Edward would DJ until it was over.Barring the spontaneous back-to-backs, Dustin and Konstantin were the only DJs. Everyone else played live, usually for three hours or more, mixing new material with staples of their catalogs. This meant that, over the course of parties that sometimes stretched well past 12 hours, nearly all of the music played was written and performed by a Giegling artist. Even the DJ sets were a conscious expression of the label's sound: in their selections, Dustin and Konstantin intentionally homed in on records in some way essential to the story of the label. This also went beyond the records that influenced them. In LA, for instance, as a throwback to their early days playing student parties, Konstantin dropped Whigfield's Eurodance staple, "Saturday Night."For Dustin, the only member of the group for whom DJing is his sole mode of performance, this wasn't really a change of pace—his sets often embody the label's aesthetic without any conscious effort. He might have played more seminal tracks than he would have otherwise, from Aphex Twin's "We Are The Music Makers" to longtime Giegling favorites like C.B. Funk's "Deep Sea." But even with the guidelines of the tour in place, he rarely played the same track twice.All of this was done in pursuit of that elusive Giegling spirit, the sound, atmosphere and feeling that inspired them originally. Each night achieved this to varying degrees. One time it worked particularly well was during Dustin's set at Closer in Kiev. Coming on at 5 AM, after Edward and Leafar Legov, he coursed through a fluid sequence of thumping and ethereal grooves, from recent favorites like S. Moreira's "My Reality" to seasoned cuts like Och's "Love Unconditional" and Ricardo Villalobos's "True To Myself." Rafa and Konstantin were ready to go on but couldn't bring themselves to stop him. Konstantin would later say that Dustin's set that morning was as close as you can get to the sound of Giegling in its most honest form. Dustin, for his part, said Closer, with its cozy atmosphere and labyrinthine interior, reminded him of Giegling, the short-lived club where it all began.At Closer, you got the sense of Planet Giegling as an actual place, a temporary reality, simpler and more colorful than the usual one. This began early in the night, before the concert started. As the doors opened and people wandered in, Edward and Konstantin bickered about whether the entrance music was loud enough. "You can't hear it!" Edward hissed. "It's better if you can't hear it," Konstantin replied, absurdly but, as often happens with him, perceptively. When people entered they immediately stopped talking, thanks in part, it would seem, to the low volume of the music.Then again, the moment of crossing that threshold was fairly awe-inducing. The night outside was dark and wet. In here, the atmosphere was dazzling, a dreamlike mirage of candles, lasers and flowers silhouetted in the smoke. There was the same feeling of hushed awe you get walking into a church, brought on not just by the beauty of the place, but also by the feeling of having crossed into a different realm, one more spiritual and poetic than the one outside.The party went until 7 PM the next day, ending with what was for a few of the artists the best moment of the tour: Konstantin, having achieved a chill-out room atmosphere with everyone sitting on the floor, played "Close To You" by The Carpenters. Someone starting taking flowers out of their bouquets and throwing them around the room, and that was how it ended, nearly 24 hours since it began."There's something special that happens when you get very, very late in the night," Edward said. "I've never liked drugs, but I've always liked afterparties, precisely for this reason. When you get to the point that it's just ridiculous for you to still be doing this, when you can't possibly justify to yourself why you're still here, that's when things start to get interesting." As the only father in the group, he figured he had a particularly keen appreciation for this strange headspace, where time loses its linearity and nothing seems to exist beyond this room and the people in it.