CTM 2023 – Portals

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Returning to our core winter dates after two unpredictable pandemic years, CTM 2023 moved its festival headquarters over to silent green for an edition that featured a focus on South Asian electronic music thanks to a large-scale collaboration with curator, researcher, and sound artist Paul Purgas under the title »We Found our Own Reality,« a showcase of collaborations between African and German artists via the Afropollination project, and sonic portals that ran the gamut of psychotropic journeys, intimate melancholia, experiences of war, ceremonies of grief and renewal, and full-blown hyperdrive club nights.

A multi-layered collaboration with sister festival transmediale highlighted several multi-disciplinary projects that expand and critique technologies, as well as a night of ritualistic noise and post-punk digital mayhem. With longstanding partner MONOM, an evening dedicated to newly-commissioned immersive soundworks that explore interplays between analogue and digital instrumentation was presented in 4DSOUND. A first-time partnership with KW Institute for Contemporary Art bridged art and music worlds with a multidisciplinary performance. A seven day-long Discourse programme of talks, a series of A2A Transmission artist workshops at Morphine Raum, the collaborative MusicMaker’s Hacklab for music technology took place, and two new Radio Lab commissions rounded out the programme.

With the Portals theme, CTM 2023 aimed to highlight the potentials of sound and music as gateways to other realities that give access to 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.

240 participants from 36 countries presented over 150 concerts, performances, DJ sets, presentations, discussions, workshops, exhibitions, and installations. The festival took place at multiple Berlin venues, including Berghain, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Festsaal Kreuzberg, RSO.Berlin, and more.

Leading up to the festival, CTM and transmediale also hosted the citywide Vorspiel initiative together with some 80 local venues and organisations.

»Cross disciplinary performances, sweaty concerts, all-night-long parties, shows at the intersection of IRL & URL, talks, and film screenings – literally everything for every taste.«
→ Olya Karlovich, CLOT Magazine

»Berlin’s theatre of the weird and wonderful.«
→ Exberliner

»CTM focuses on the radically contrarian: it investigates the innovative power of club and subculture, on the basis of art and discourse that looks beauty ideals straight in the eye.«
→ Juliet Hoornaert, Gonzo

»Es gibt wenig andere vergleichbare Musik-Zusammenkünfte mit einem ähnlich hohen Kontakt- und Diskursniveau.«
→ Thomas Venker, Kaput Mag

»Coming back to CTM after the years of the pandemic was a bit like coming home.«
→ Toni De Martino, The New Noise

»Breaking away from Eurocentrism is possible at festivals and clubs still in their infancy, but at CTM it is a natural part of the art world.«
→ Andrea Bodnárová, Full Moon Zine