CTM connects multi-perspective experiences, critical reflection, hedonism, and collaborative learning via a yearly festival and continuous collaborative projects, publications, commissions, concerts, club nights, and more.
Since 25 years, CTM has been highlighting new strains of pop and fringe cultures that venture through the weird, the challenging, the cathartic, the esoteric, the contagious, and the ecstatic – simultaneously exploring sonic histories, contexts, and political and technological entanglements. Though international in its approach, CTM remains deeply rooted in and committed to Berlin’s DIY and club scenes, from which it emerged in 1999.
Listening and dancing within the gaps between musics, communities, and scenes, CTM defies easy categorisation and tests the current possibilities and limits of sound and music. Programming supports a multitude of voices, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives – CTM is for all forms of music as long as they dare to experiment, question, and demonstrate conviction. Our work reaches out to all corners of the globe to explore and explode wildly different, experimental, mutating global scenes.
CTM is an independent, non-profit initiative built, from the very start, on constant collaboration. We work closely with artists, guest curators, and researchers to support them in realising new projects and to produce and transmit new knowledge across performances, exhibitions, talks and artistic labs, writing, and more. Through a multi-perspective approach, we aim to respond to the diversity of an increasingly polycentric, polychromatic, and hybrid (music) world, always with empathy, openness, and a desire to counter global asymmetries.
Because of CTM’s mutually collaborative nature, activities highlight a large and ever-expanding range of practices in and around sound. Through yearly themes, the festival experiments with formats, locations, technologies, and ways of listening, creating multiple entry points from which to engage with sound and their contexts.
Music is not a parallel world, but rather a seismograph of our current societies, a powerful force with which to cope with uncertainty and change, and a medium through which to imagine different futures.
- Â 25 000 visitors
- Â Over 240 particpants from 36 countries
- Â 41% female-identifying, 34% male-identifying, 9% non-binary, 16% mixed projects
- Â 150 concerts, performances, installations, lectures, talks, exhibitions, and workshops
- Â 16 venues across Berlin.
»CTM is more than a festival—it’s a frothing petri dish of musical ideas, in equal measure entertaining and enlightening, for the artists as well as the audience.«
Resident Advisor
»Adventurous in its quest for ideas that no one else would consider, let alone have the gall to execute.«
Gabriel Szatan, Crack Magazine
»Considering the ugly political climate outside the festival, it’s a beautiful thing that CTM’s programme avoids any inward looking eurocentrism with a lineup that sprawls over continents.«
Claire Sawers, The Quietus
»CTM excels above other festivals: not because it sidelines traditional festival hedonism in favour of discourse but because it has found the empathetic balance between the two«
Karl Smith, The Quietus
»CTM is filled with moments where exposure to new sounds and viewpoints encourages both openness and a more analytical outlook – not just through discourse, but via relentlessly fun club nights.«
Patrick Hinton, Mixmag
»Neben großartiger Musik fernab des Mainstreams bietet das CTM Festival somit auch einen Raum dafür, das, was wir als Realität annehmen, zu hinterfragen und neu zu verhandeln.«
Laura Aha, Musikexpress
»CTM est peut-être le festival le plus résolu à montrer l’importance socio-politique de la musique, passée comme contemporaine.«
Lucien Rail, Trax
»Véritable porte sur le futur de la scène électronique«
Estelle Morfin, Tsugi
A history of CTM is, in many ways, a recent history of Berlin. Entangled with the last 25 years of change that dancefloors, the internet, and in(ter)dependent music communities have seen, CTM’s two decade tenure has seen it expand, shapeshift, and proliferate continuously.
Berlin in the 90s was not the cosmopolitan city it is today; much of the music scene did not look far beyond its own connections and experiences. CTM’s founders were then active in Berlin’s club and art scenes, and struck by the novel role of clubs as extended art spaces, relatively free from convention and fundamentally based on the interplay of various artistic and social practices. Many artists active in this context weren’t musicians first and foremost, and saw their work and its settings as continuously shifting and necessarily hybrid. Despite this supposedly porous social and cultural character, exchanges between nightlife and other communities were yet to be developed, as was its wider recognition as a serious form of art.
This setting, in part, catalysed CTM (then »club transmediale«). The first festival edition took place in 1999 at the now long demolished club Maria am Ostbahnhof, when organisers Jan Rohlf, Marc Weiser, Lillevan Pobjoy, Remco Schuurbiers, and Timm Ringewaldt saw a gap adjacent to transmediale, the festival for digital art and culture, and sought to fill it with a series of experimental club nights that intertwined sonic experiments and underground dance culture with contemporary media art. Titled 10 Tage an der Schnittstelle von Bild und Ton (10 days at the intersection of image and sound), this first edition was organised with the help of Oliver Baurhenn, who, as of the following year’s 2000 edition, has been at the heart of the festival ever since, along with Jan Rohlf, Marc Weiser, and Remco Schuurbiers. Marc Weiser left the festival in 2005.
Brewing in Berlin near the turn of the century, primordial CTM was the outcome of a cultural climate full of possibilities, outside of the confines of established cultural institutions. What its founders shared was a recognition of clubs as spaces of convergence; of transformative experience; and of appropriation, recontextualisation, and regurgitation. Artefacts of culture and electronic media mingled with collective social ritual, the atmospheres of specific spaces, and the physical bodies of dancers. In clubs there was feedback; there was open-ended, wide-ranging communication between codes, cultures, bodies, stimuli, and technology. Rephrasing well known tropes of media theory, early CTM recognised club culture’s potential to experiment with egalitarian and democratic forms of participation that, in its best moments, allowed everyone to co-create the club experience. Over time, these thoughts and exchanges simmered with the forward-facing ethos of transmediale, bubbling into a partnership that has become internationally renowned for its critical reflection on the interplay of art, digital culture, and society. Recognising the unprecedented scope of the electronic and the digital – their pervasive presence in all forms of contemporary music cultures – CTM reimagined its tagline in 2006, from »Festival of Electronic Music and Related Visual Arts« to »Festival of Adventurous Music and Art.«
Bedroom producers, musical pioneers, gabber-heads, ardent minimalists, the avant-garde, music makers, conceptual artists, academics, technologists, activists, and everyone (and everything) in between have converged over the years, taking part in and contributing to CTM in its many forms. Dialogue, contradiction, experimentation, and rigorous self-reflection are just a few of the outcomes of bringing diverse ideas and interests into one space, and these processes have continuously reimagined and redefined CTM. The initiative has been moulded and re-moulded through critical input and feedback from peers, collaborators, friends, and audiences; and through responding to the forces that so radically continue to transform our world: namely globalisation, digitisation, neoliberal capitalism, political ideologies, and the many movements that keep fighting for a more just and more sustainable future.
Essentially held together by love and solidarity, CTM has become intensively internationally networked and an evermore shared effort. In 2009, CTM co-founded independent music initiative networks International Cities of Advanced Sound (ICAS), and its European derivative, ECAS, to build a forum for mutual support, capacity building, and for discussing best practices. Many more network projects have continued and expanded this work since.
Dancefloor et critique sociale font bon ménage.
Marie Lechner, Libération, 2004
At the same time, as experimental music became professionalized and networked, various new sounds and scenes began to spring up, and making space for different ways of accessing, approaching, and experiencing music felt increasingly important. CTM began spreading throughout Berlin. Instead of using one central venue, the festival started partnering over the years with varied venues such as Berghain, Festsaal Kreuzberg, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, and SchwuZ, among others. The new multiplicity of venues was also mirrored by increasingly open programme contributions through an expanded core curatorial team, guest curators, wide-ranging crews and collectives, and, of course, crucial input from CTM’s global collaborations and partners.
The desire to be in close contact with artists, cultural producers, and everyone else in these music communities has always been constant. Consequently, as of 2010 CTM started to complement its international activities through promoting select concerts in Berlin year round. These include local collaborative series such as Polymorphism with Berghain (2012-present), Technosphärenklänge with HKW (2015-2018), and Untraining the Ear with SAVVY Contemporary (2017-2019), and continue to engage with different artistic approaches and communities, and offer audiences unpredictable experiences, from moments of euphoria and togetherness in the club, to focused listening sessions, intimate artistic presentations, and thought-provoking, interdisciplinary socio-technological inquiries through sound.
Exercises in Plurality
Since the early noughties, CTM has been stepping outside of its Berlin bubble in search of international exchange, wanting to engage with the many radically contemporary forms of sound being cooked-up everywhere across the globe. In its first international partnership, CTM teamed up with Canadian festival MUTEK for a club night that introduced Berlin to Montréal’s emerging electronic scene. 2003’s focus programme, Go East!, substantiated this new angle through establishing lasting exchange with Eastern European music scenes.
In the years following, international exchanges have intensified, for example through CTM Siberia; joint projects with Rio de Janeiro’s Novas Frequências festival or Soco festival in Montevideo; dialogue with Tehran in the form of SET x CTM; the Nusasonic initiative charting and connecting scenes within Southeast Asia; an initiative titled Chronotopia, which explored (new) sonic traditions in Greece and the Balkans; and an ongoing collaboration with Uganda’s Nyege Nyege.
Wer Ohren hat zu hören, der lasse sie bluten …
Kisten Riesselmann, Berliner Zeitung 2005
The transcultural processes that underlie such exchanges, and that shape our increasingly interconnected (music) world, were most explicitly detailed by the 2016 edition, New Geographies. Including curatorial contributions from Rabih Beaini, the 2016 festival edition was a crucial step to articulate the foundations of the festival’s commitment to broadening the programme’s geographic scope beyond established Western music circuits, and to embrace the hybrid topographies and the diversity of cultural modulations emerging globally.
Concurrently, impulses from the global music community in the early 2010s – most notably from the female:pressure network – led CTM to increasingly pursue increasing diversity, inclusion, and multiplicity. Efforts were made in further diversifying both the collaborators behind and programming at the festival.
As the festival grew, so did the shape and form of the organisation behind it. After a few early years of completely DIY production, the small team behind CTM received its first public funding in 2003. In 2005 DISK – Initiative Bild & Ton e.V. was created, in order to strengthen the festival’s efforts in supporting and engaging with independent music and art. DISK e.V. founded an artists’ studio building in Berlin neighbourhood Prenzlauer Berg, as well as the adjunct collaborative project space General Public, which existed until 2014. The 2015 launch of CTM’s sister organisation, DISK Agency, further extended the team’s know-how and connection to artists and the professional music landscape. In 2019, after two decades of precarious project-based funding, the city of Berlin finally made a greater commitment to supporting the initiative with multi-year structural funding by the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe.
Halbe Sachen kennt man in diesem Club nicht!
Spex, 2007
CTM and DISK’s long struggle for stability and support has never been merely out of self-interest, however. It was born out of the need for a better understanding of the importance of self-organised cultural spaces, club culture, and hybrid art practises and a wider recognition of their impact on the cultural and social life of a city. To this day, both the festival and DISK continue to work towards increased support and recognition for Berlin’s independent art and music scenes along with other local initiatives, and as members of associations such as Initiative Neue Musik, Berlin Club Commission, or the Rat für die Künste (Berlin Council for the Arts).
Music is More than Fun (Though it’s Definitely That)
CTM has never celebrated just one facet of music, choosing to engage every year in a precarious balancing act. Various contexts, sounds, experiences, and socio-political realities converge. While unusual (at the time) for a music festival, CTM decided early on that such sprawling interactions and intersections could best be engaged with through the focal lens of a yearly theme. Over time, these perspectives came to form a growing and interlocking glossary of entry points to music and sound, and their aesthetic modes and roles in society. From 2003 on, the idea of contextualising music performances through lectures and talks became increasingly more important. The festival first attempted to establish a daytime discourse and artistic lab programme in 2008, which has since expanded to include yearly contributions from diverse practitioners, activists, and scholars. The 10th anniversary edition, Structures, focused on the organisations and forms needed to support culture, and also staged CTM’s first exhibition, which has continued as an integral festival component ever since. Hands-on formats such as workshops and artistic labs have steadily increased, with notable recurring initiatives such as the MusicMakers Hacklab (since 2013), the series »Rethinking Music Ecosystems« (since 2019) which considers and explores more equitable platforms and models in hopes of re-imagining today’s music landscape and our places within it, and the A2A Transmission workshops initiated in 2021 in order to enhance artistic knowledge through workshops for artists by artists.
CTM Festival is a triumph for weird music.
Themes such as 2010’s Overlap, 2011’s #Live!?, 2012’s Spectral, and 2013’s The Golden Age all sought varying perspectives on sonic cultures. In 2014, Dis Continuity offered another angle from which to explore the exploded kaleidoscope of new sounds, focusing on alternative histories, hidden connections between past and present musical experimentation, and on the archeology of forgotten media and artistic practices, fostering dialogue between musical pioneers and a rising young generation of artists. Also in 2014, formats that broaden the festival’s scope, such as the now yearly CTM Radio Lab and the CTM Magazine, were created in order to continue relaying the stories and sounds connected to the festival. Links between past traditions and newer practices continue to be explored within each edition, notably through highlighting fringe pioneers and scenes.
The 2017 edition, Fear Anger Love, was CTM’s response to the upsurge of rightwing populist movements and their strategic weaponisation of affect and emotion. Since, the festival has continued exploring music and art’s multiplicitous functions amidst our increasingly complex world. Culture provides us with seismographs of our societies; coping mechanisms amidst instability; specters of new futures; and tools with which to convert moments of distress, worry, and hostility into protest, empathy and resilience. 2018’s Turmoil and 2019’s Persistence continued scrutinising music’s place amidst ongoing political, social, and environmental crises, amidst late capitalism and reactionary backlash. 2020’s Liminal grappled with music’s potential to help us embrace the ambiguous and unknowable, which echoed into 2021’s fully-online Transformation pandemic edition, and 2022’s two-part hybrid on/offline Contact edition. The 2023 edition, titled Portals, took an aesthetic turn to make contact with specific modes of experience, histories, communities, and speculative futures – and to reflect on the preconditions, thresholds, regulation, and fundamental function of sound and music as gateways to other realities.
A project dedicated not just to forward-thinking music and experimentation but also to a sense of unification in a time when it is sorely needed.
Karl Smith, The Quietus, 2017
Throughout the years, CTM has been insatiable and tireless in its efforts to push away from rigid dichotomies, preconceived notions, and both new and established conventions. Why not listen more closely? Why not stay out dancing till daylight? Why not debate on the dancefloor? Why not sound out new horizons? Why not show up wasted at the conference?
It’s so beautiful, we need to have it all.
English