Ringing in CTM’s 15th birthday with a sonorous, multi-coloured palette of resonances, the CTM 2014 Opening Concert brings together two powerful musical collaborations between musicians that are renowned for their visionary navigations on some of electronic music’s choppy, uncharted waters.

Charlemagne Palestine is a highly influential experimental American musician, composer, performer and visual artist who creates intense, ritualistic music which he refers to as "resonant music", in contrast to the "minimal music" of his peers such as Phillip Glass. Palestine will accompany his ringing chants with grand piano and electric organ when he performs together with Mika Vainio, himself a tireless researcher of resonances in electronic music through both his solo work and as one half of Pan Sonic. Palestine and Vainio have previously collaborated together in other configurations, most recently with Belgian genre-crossing percussionist Eric Thielemans, who works from a classically trained ear via jazz drumming, free improve and contemporary music. While Vainio and Palestine plan to continue collaborating as a trio with Thielemans, CTM Opening Concert marks a special world premiere and unique appearance of Vainio and Palestine together in duo.

LAST-MINUTE CHANGE: We regretfully inform you that, due to illness, Mika Vainio is unable to participate in the CTM 2014 Opening Concert. Rhys Chatham, a contemporary of Palestine’s who first became widely known as one of the key figures of New York's No Wave scene in the late 1970's, will join Palestine in duo, adding glistening layers of trumpet, flute, and electric guitar to Palestine’s rumbling piano and electric organ drones.

Directly preceding Vainio and Palestine are Thomas Köner and Asmus Tietchens, who will perform Makrophonie, the first studio album of their Kontakt der Jünglinge project. As with the project name itself, Makrophonie is an obvious nod to Germany’s most emblematic figure in electronic music, Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose 1964 piece "Mikrophonie I" predated the sound aesthetics of industrial music.

The project’s blend of generations, from Stockhausen to Tietchens, who was among the first in Germany to connect to the new industrial music evolving in the UK from the late 1970s on through artists like Throbbing Gristle or Nurse With Wound, and from Tietchens to Köner’s pioneering work in industrial techno as one-half of Porter Ricks, reflects aspects of the CTM 2014 Dis Continuity theme, which focuses on hidden connections between past and present musical experimentation by fostering dialogue between musical pioneers and a younger generation of artists.