CTM 2005 – Basics!

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With the festival theme Basics!, CTM 2005 navigated between poles of musical and artistic practice that at first glance seemed to have little in common – and traced their connecting lines. 

What unites the orchestral search for the sublime with digital death metal? Is it perhaps the reclusion of producers that live far away from big city lights? How can nerve-wracking thunderous Breakcore merge with the unpretentious-spontaneous headphone concerts of a Le Placard Festival? Are they not, paradoxical as it might seem, both based on the possibilities of global networking and immediate physical presence? And are they not both decidedly practical approaches to creating structures and situations that might facilitate experiment and participation? Is it therefore not manifest to put them on a level with a project such as Supersilent, whose music derives exclusively from spontaneous improvisation? Or with the Ambiunix sound system, whose spatial-sound research implicates the listener’s physical presence in the here and now whilst simultaneously creating fictive sonic spaces? What do the minimal sounds of Biosphere have in common with DJ Marlboro’s Baile Funk, the voice of the Brasilian favelas? Are they not both artistic reactions to the demands and stimulation of a specific environment?
 
All the forms of expression cited above pose fundamental questions: questions regarding the musical, visual and organisational structures that facilitate artistic work, open up spaces, broaden participation and debate, give artists and the audience a range of choice, and allow works to circulate as concepts; questions, too, that tend to remain invisible in the daily round of the music business, in territorial claims on defining style, in peer-group pecking orders and the stereotypical but familiar feel of the club and concert venues where we usually get to experience these artistic forms. They are important questions: it is they alone that constitute the real and basic motivation behind this year’s programme; that put the gas in the performers’ tank, so to speak. And in the light of these questions, the CTM 2005 lineup revealed itself to be very much part of the answers.

«Wer Ohren hat zu hören, der lasse sie bluten...»
→ Berliner Zeitung

«Das erstaunlichste aber war, wie auf der Club Transmediale scheinbar nebenbei demonstriert wurde, dass zeitgenössischer Jazz doch noch zu retten ist...»
→ Die Tageszeitung, Andreas Hartmann

«Aber CTM wäre nicht eines der vielseitigsten und interessantesten Festivals zu elektronischer Musikkultur, wenn es sich nicht jedes Jahr neu erfinden würde.»
→ Beam me up

«… wird das Maria für 9 Tage in das elektronische Zentrum Deutschlands verwandelt mit einem Programm bei dem einen schon mal der Mund offen stehen bleiben kann.»
→ De:Bug

«Als opulente Großveranstaltung in Sachen elektronische Musik hat sich der Club Transmediale die letzten fünf Male einen wichtigen Namen weit über die deutschen Landesgrenzen hinaus gemacht. Auch 2005 will und wird das neuntägige (!) Festival in Berlin Maßstäbe setzen.»
→ Intro

«Der Club Transmediale ist die aufregendste musikalische Reihe der Stadt: so vielseitig und zugleich so konzeptuell klar durchgeformt, so mutig in der Auswahl der Künstler und zugleich so massenbegeisternd wie gegenwärtig kein anderes Festival in Berlin.»
→ Berliner Zeitung