CTM 2025

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CTM 2025 unfolded a kaleidoscope of voices amidst chaotic and shifting realities, mirroring and amplifying the disorienting polyphony of the present moment. Its sonic melange reaffirmed the festival’s role as a space of togetherness, convergence, and porous exchange where artistic practices and musical traditions collide, mutate, and resurface in unexpected forms.

144 participants from 46 countries presented 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, MONOM, radialsystem, Alte Münze, RSO.Berlin, OXI and more.

This edition traced new and ongoing thematic strands, each opening portals into uncharted creative landscapes. Centred around an artistic lab, the »Resynthesising the Traditional« thread reimagined traditional art forms and aesthetics within modern sound and performance, bypassing (self-)exoticisation and the skewed power dynamics shaped by cultural mass production and stereotype. The unconventional sides and anarchic possibilities of AI were explored under the banner »Stranger AI,« incorporating performances, talks, and workshops, and the »Wilding AI« artistic lab. This year's AI strand often overlapped with the Immersive Audio theme, which explored the rapidly-developping technologies and possibilities of spatial sound, extending into special listening sessions at MONOM, and concerts and workshops presented with d&b Soundscape, among other at new venue Sonnenraum. The theme of »Affection« took shape through commissioned works for the CTM Radio Lab and a series of artist talks.

Opening the festival, the »DC25: Preserving and Archiving Electronic Music and Dance Cultures« conference presented with Dancecult further interrogated the preservation of ephemeral cultural movements, in collaboration with Technische Universität Berlin.

Running in parallel, our sister festival transmediale remained a dense nexus of hybrid art, forging pathways toward cultural transformation in the post-digital age.

»Every year, CTM invites us to question our perceptions, rethink traditions and imagine new horizons....This is not just a simple festival, it is a real educational experience. And, as always, we are ready to continue learning from CTM.«
→ Parkett

»This openness to new experiences and to experimental, boundary-pushing music offered a fascinating spectacle—and an opportunity to immerse myself in genres that I have never experienced in a club before.«
→ Groove

»...The real question is how to open our institutions, spaces, and stages to those who carry their time forward with pride and defiance. CTM's strongest musical moments achieved precisely this: upending conventional frameworks to carve out spaces of autonomous expression.«
→ Reincantamento

»...One of the boldest and best curated festivals of contemporary alternative, experimental, avant-garde, electronic (and other…) music.«
→ Swine Daily

»…Despite the difficulties due to a terrible political climate even here in the Berlin island, CTM has proven to be a garrison of other cultures, a strong guardian of the tradition of a city that is intimately tragic but historically always at the forefront in the arts as well as in the fruitful coexistence of different peoples.«
→ The New Noise

»I only hear that at the CTM, (and) it inspires and touches me in a way that only experimental music can.«
→ DJ Lab