Concert Series / Club Nights

Polymorphism

Initiated in 2012, the Polymorphism concert series at Berghain takes shape as a crossbreed of club night, concert, and experimental laboratory, and intends to capture the current exponential explosion of electronic sound mutation. The series has featured  artists such as Oneohtrix Point Never, LA Vampires, Heatsick, The Haxan Cloak, Hype Williams, James Ferraro, Nguzunguzu, Evian Christ and others.

Publication

CTM Magazine

Since 2014, CTM Festival has supplemented its 10-day presentation of concerts, club nights, exhibitions, and lectures with a carefully curated print magazine relating to and expanding on the specific edition's thematic and aesthetic focus. Each CTM magazine edition brings together contributions by curators, music journalists, researchers, theorists, musicians, and artists. It includes interviews, dialogues, academic essays, poetic reflections, excerpts from festival-related texts, and reproductions of visual art either from the exhibition or by artists whose work engages with the festival theme in compelling ways.

Overview of Projects Supported by CTM

Commissioned Works

CTM aims to support original works within each festival edition, as well as through collaborations and special concerts year-round. 2019 saw the realisation of a new live AI/AV set from Actress and Young Paint, a presentation of Quellgeister #3: Bussd by Stefan Fraunberger, and Pedro Oliveira's investigation into sonic biometrics with A Series of Gaps Rather Than a Presence. In 2018, CTM together with Chronus Art Center in Shanghai supported Marco Donnarumma in the creation of Alia: Zu Tai, a performance project for human dancers, and AI prostheses. 

Platform for Emerging Artists

SHAPE — Sound Heterogeneous Art and Performance in Europe

A multi-year initiative co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, the SHAPE project reunites 16 European non-profit organisations active within the ICAS – International Cities of Advanced Sound network to create a platform that aims to support, promote, and exchange innovative and aspiring emergent musicians and interdisciplinary artists with an interest in sound.

Supported by the ICAS Network and the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Adventurous Sound

Berlin Current

The new sound of the city – Berlin Current presents young, unconventional, and experimental pop music from Berlin. 

Established in 2013, Berlin Current is an ongoing CTM-led project that identifies and supports emerging Berlin-based musicians by producing live concerts at Berghain, Boiler Room Berlin and during the CTM Festival. Creative commissions and international showcases, as well as radio and magazine features by partners BLN.FM, No Fear of Pop, and previously De:Bug, also make up significant part of the initiative.

Sponsored by the Musicboard Berlin.

Ongoing Collaboration

Technosphärenklänge

The Technosphärenklänge (Sounds of the Technosphere) concert series aims to explore current practices in sound and music as an element and expression of the technosphere. Developed in close collaboration between HKW and CTM Festival, the series is scheduled to take place at irregular intervals into 2018.

Commissioned Works

CTM Radio Lab

Since 2014, the CTM Radio Lab has been dedicated to exploration and experimentation within the medium of radio. Each year, the ongoing project supports two works commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur - Hörspiel/Klangkunst and CTM Festival, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Ö1 Kunstradio, and ICAS – International Cities for Advanced Sound.

Festival Network

ICAS – International Cities of Advanced Sound

ICAS – International Cities of Advanced Sound – is a global network of independent non-profit organizations dedicated to advancing sound cultures, music, and related arts.

Multi-Annual Project

BeBeethoven

On the occasion of the 250th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), the #bebeethoven project invites twelve young artists to explore such questions by developing, testing and presenting artistic experiments and projects. Together with project lead PODIUM Esslingen and six renowned partners – CTM Festival, Ensemble Resonance, Rotterdam Opera, Radialsystem V, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, and ZKM Karlsruhe – these six fellows will experiment with new technologies and develop aesthetic innovations.

Ongoing Collaboration

Untraining the Ear

Untraining the Ear, a project created in collaboration with SAVVY Contemporary and Deutschlandfunk, aims to un- and re-learn the ways in which we listen. These listening sessions work to strip sound of its common contextual affiliations, such as with geographical location, genre, identity, and so on.

Network Project

Nusasonic – Crossing Aural Geographies

Nusasonic is a new, multi-year project establishing dialogue between sound cultures in Southeast Asia and Europe. The initiative will incorporate formats such as artistic labs, commissioned works, concerts, festivals, lectures, and more.

Network Project

SET X CTM

Since 2017, CTM and SET festivals have engaged in a vital, enriching partnership. Together they have realised a series of special commissions, supported by the Goethe Institute, as well as an entire festival edition dedicated to artistic dialogue between Tehran and Berlin.

Ongoing Collaboration

CTM x Ableton

On the occasion of Loop - A Summit for Music Makers, an Ableton-led conference which took place autumn 2015 and 2016 in Berlin, CTM produced concurrently running CTM x Ableton concert series at venues Kino Babylon, Prince Charles, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg Platz. The events celebrate Ableton and CTM Festival’s long-standing partnership.

In Support of Chelsea Manning

Infiltrate with Love

In June 2015, Holly Herndon appeared at Beghain, as part of CTM's Polymorphism series, to present her newest album, Platform. To accompany the event, a limited edition long-sleeve shirt was designed by Holly Herndon x Metahaven x Jacob Appelbaum and offered for sale. Thus far, 2000 USD have been donated to the Chelsea Manning Support Network from the resulting proceeds.

Network Project

SoCCos – Sound of Culture, Culture of Sound

SoCCoS – Sound of Culture, Culture of Sound – is a residency and research network engaging with exploratory music, sound art, and culture. It provides residency opportunities via exchange of artists, cultural workers and theorists.

Network Project

ENCAC - European Network for Contemporary Audiovisual Creation

ENCAC – European Network for Contemporary Audiovisual Creation, is a transnational research project aimed at fostering the cooperation between artists and scientists under the principles of interdisciplinarity, European intercultural exchange and the development of new audiences.

Network Project

ECAS – European Cities of Advanced Sound

ECAS – European Cities of Advanced Sound was founded in 2007. The network rapidly grew into an international format: ICAS – International Cities of Advanced Sound, which was officially inaugurated in 2009. Today ECAS remains a designation used specifically for certain projects centred in the EU.

Collaborative Festival of Festivals

The ICAS Suite

CTM festival co-founded the ICAS – International Cities of Advanced Sound network, a group of 38 organizations and festivals on 4 continents that joined forces to promoting artistic development and knowledge production at the interface of music, art, technology, and society. Shortly thereafter, the ICAS SUITE was developed by CTM as an open and collaborative festival format for the whole network. The concept implies the invitation of the network’s members and of other music initiatives to participate in the curatorial process and shape a unique, collaborative music event.

Conference

Denkfabrik

Denkfabrik was developed for the 2nd edition of the Berlin Music Week as a day-long lecture series on music, culture, and the economy, aiming to address the antagonism between creative activity and the commercial sphere, particularly in light of the ferocity of ongoing debates surrounding copyright law, GEMA tariff reforms, and the wealth of creative minds and artists in Berlin. Organized by CTM in collaboration with ICAS, the event made a critical contribution to the Music Week’s conference programme.

Festival Series

Wasted

Wasted was staged as a series of mini-festivals celebrating loud, fast, radical, and mostly electronic new musics. Generally summed up under the loose terms of hardcore, breakcore, mashup, or raggacore, Wasted propagated a spirit of disrespectful dissent, unruly enthusiasm, and mountains of positive energy.

Exhibition

In That Weird Part

The exhibition project In That Weird Part was concerned with the interpretation and editing of pop music in internet user culture. Through the appropriation of music – mostly in the form of music video remakes – a new musical vernacular with far-reaching implications is currently appearing beyond professional networks of composers, musicians and music promoters.

Exhibition

In That Weird Age

The exhibition In That Weird Age, realized for the CTM.13 Festival, highlighted a music culture in transition, showcasing the odd splendour of plenitude that currently arises from now defunct physical storage media and the end of fixed recordings, as well as from the new musical vernacular of internet user cultures, the exponential potency and open-ended processability of digital sound files, the amassment of immaterial artefacts in online archives, and the promiscuous connectivity of a general state of plenty, where everything exchanges with everything.

Radio Projects

CTM On Air

Since September 2011 CTM hosts its own radio show at Berlin community radio reboot.fm. More than 20 editions to date support CTM Festival's ongoing aim to find and present adventurous sound and to explore new perspectives in musical discourse. ICAS Radio is a collaborative project with the Zeit-Ton series of the Austrian Broadcasting Service, ORF Ö1. Taking place within the framework of the festival network ICAS – International Cities of Advanced Sound, the ICAS Radio roundtable gives festival organizers and their contemporaries the opportunity to discuss innovation and critical developments in current music and culture.

Book

Gendertronics

Edited by CTM and Meike Jansen and published by Edition Suhrkamp, Gendertronics is an in-depth study of questions raised by the theme of the 2004 edition of CTM Festival, "Performing Sound". With contributions from Olaf Arndt, Claudia Basrawi, Jochen Bonz & Thomas Meinecke, Mariola Brillowska, Kurt Dahlke, Diedrich Diederichsen, Harald Fricke, Tom Holert, Miss Kittin, Pinky Rose, Birgit Richard, Terre Thaemlitz, Marc Weiser and 17 black and white drawings by Jan Rohlf.