Artist Profile: Local Suicide

The contest, like most things in Berlin in 2008, happened somewhere half-legal and barely lit. Dina Pascal, a Greek transplant who had been spinning records since her teenage years, arrived to defend a DJ title she'd won the year before. Among the challengers were friends of a Munich-born crate-digger named Max Brudi. In the end, she kept her crown. Within the year, however, she had married the man whose friends she had beaten. The pair became Local Suicide, and Berlin's underground acquired a couple who would spend the next years turning their shared obsession into a sound they call "technodisco".

Brax Moody, as Max is known behind the decks, once described the mood as "uplifting gloominess" and "cobra wave," with melancholy synth lines riding late-shift grooves. Across more than two hundred tracks, Local Suicide have absorbed new wave, EBM, Italo, post-punk, dark disco, acid, indie dance and theatrical techno, drawing on the Greek electronic pioneer Lena Platonos as readily as cult floor-fillers.

They surfaced around 2014, releasing on the Dutch imprint Bordello A Parigi. Over the following years, their records found homes on Multi Culti, My Favorite Robot, Ombra International, Eskimo, Darkroom Dubs, Lumière Noire, and other labels attuned to the darker sides of club music. In fact, when Beatport set out in early 2020 to describe dark disco as a new, "official" genre, it turned to Moody for the definition. From 2015, they ran a Berlin party called We Are TOFU, short for Too Old For Understatement, hosting visiting selectors at venues such as Bohnengold. Their bookings carried them far past the city, onto festival bills from Lollapalooza and Melt! to ADE, and even a warm-up slot for New Order. 

Their Disco Suicide channel on SoundCloud grew into a sizeable archive of guest mixes and premieres, feeding the dark-disco faithful with connective tissue for the scene. This sits on top of an earlier localsuicide.com webzine, described as "one of the top 10 independent music & lifestyle blogs in Germany with 30+ international editors" (the domain now redirects to their artist site). 

The debut album, Eros Anikate, dropped in 2022. Its title, lifted from a choral ode in Sophocles' Antigone, translates loosely as love invincible, and Platonos herself appears on the title track, reciting ancient lines over the couple's machines. The record gathered figures they had met along the way: Curses, Theus Mago, Hard Ton and Joel Gibb of The Hidden Cameras.

The album appeared on Iptamenos Discos, the label they had founded the year before with the EP, This is Iptamenos Discos. The name is Greek for "flying disc," and the launch single featured friends chanting the phrase in 23 languages. Before its launch, Brax Moody had been candid about the need for a house of their own. His professional life had already passed through the industry from the inside, including work on reissues at Mute, and later at Domino, and his current role steering Ninja Tune's German-speaking territories. Dina, for her part, runs the Berlin promotion agency Eclectica, which handles the label's press. Iptamenos became a family enterprise in the literal sense, with a publishing arm, Iptamenos Notes, added in 2023, a distribution wing, and Iptamenos Discotek, which turned the catalog into a touring series.

In 2022, the couple opened another front. Dina Summer, their band with Kalipo, brought the sensibility to the stage, with live drums and Dina positioned as a synth-pop frontwoman. Two albums in, including 2025's Girls Gang, whose remix package featured DJ Hell and Joyce Muniz, Dina Summer has sold out headline shows and climbed festival bills across Europe. German public broadcaster ZDF even cast Dina and Max as themselves in the series Fett & Fett, weaving their music through the episodes.

Their recent work as Local Suicide has grown darker and more physical. Houdini, released by Iptamenos Discos in November 2025, is their most recent Local Suicide EP. Built from late-night Berlin studio sessions with Skelesys, it pushes their technodisco toward industrial, with remixes from French electroclash veteran David Carretta and Greek EBM force Alpha Sect. In March 2026, Iptamenos reissued Leopard Gum, originally released in 2019 on Lumière Noire, returning one of their more narcotic slow-burn records.

This year, Iptamenos Discos turns five, and Local Suicide are marking the anniversary with label showcases across Europe and a vinyl compilation. On June 6, they bring that system to Control Club, sharing the night with Borusiade and Jijian.

Eighteen years after a DJ contest in a darkened Berlin room, Local Suicide remain behind the decks and in charge of the lights, having built the kind of world artists usually imagine while waiting for someone else's permission.