CTM 2024 – Sustain

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CTM 2024 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.

CTM 2024 was titled »Sustain« – a fascinating word that touches opposite polarities of our contemporary experience as it speaks of the empathy and determination that nourish us, as well as of our anxieties, losses, and pains. In the word »sustain« we sense both what we are going through while hearing what needs to be done. What if sustain were a sound?

209 participants from 42 countries presented over 150 concerts, performances, DJ sets, presentations, discussions, workshops, exhibitions, and installations over the course of the 10-day festival. The festival took place at multiple venues, including Berghain, silent green, radialsystem, RSO.Berlin, and more.

Produced in collaboration with transmediale, the highlight immersive installation Oceanic Refractions relayed rare insights into the environmental relations sustaining Oceania's many worlds. Reflections from Fijian, i-Kiribati and Papua New Guinean elders on kinship, self-determination and care in the face of global ecocide, were layered with field recordings of the reefs of Fiji, the oceans and mangroves of Kiribati, and the shorelines of Papua New Guinea’s Duke of York Islands to create hyper-detailed soundscape compositions, combined with 360 videography, kinetic seating, and olfactory effects. A notable focus on artists from Ireland wove collective sounds and stories from the country thanks to the Zeitgeist Irland 24 initiative by Culture Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland in Germany. Goethe-Institut’s »Studio Quantum« presented a day of exploratory talks and groundbreaking performances around quantum technologies and music. Daily broadcasts in collaboration with Refuge Worldwide, a six day-long Discourse programme of talks, a series of A2A Transmission artist workshops at Morphine Raum, the 10th edition of the MusicMaker’s Hacklab, and two Radio Lab commissions rounded out the programme.

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

»This festival has been around for a quarter of a century now, from its small beginnings at the end of the nineties as musical outlet of the Transmediale media art festival, it has grown into the most important event of its kind in Europe thanks to the tireless curiosity and reinvention of its organisers.«
→ Jens Balzer, Die Zeit

»CTM isn’t just a festival of pure hedonism. From established artists pushing boundaries to emerging creators experimenting with sound, the festival is a breeding ground for innovation.«
→ Ransom Note

»This year's CTM, with the subtitle Sustain, once again ventured into the uncharted waters of experimental and fringe musical forms, the sustainability of which is proven by the show's twenty-five years of existence. Such an anniversary becomes even more achievable in light of the many challenges of recent years and the ongoing crises that have challenged and unsettled established orders, often false certainties, and have not spared music or nightlife.«
→ Full Moon Zine

»CTM showcases the current state of adventurous music, from pulsating dance floors to shared moments of
artistic intimacy«
→ The Next Day

»CTM is notable for presenting unusual, challenging works in a consistently diverse, inclusive and friendly atmosphere.«
→ Sonic State

»ten days and ten nights around the most radical electronic music research«
→ The New Noise