Sound In The Garden: Hildur Guðnadóttir & Sam Slater, Slauson Malone, Eve Matin & Alex Rapp
Hildur Guðnadóttir & Sam Slater
00:00
Slauson Malone
00:00
Eve Matin with Alex Rapp
00:00
Neue Nationalgalerie26 €
From 12 – 16 August 2026, Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie once again teams up with CTM Festival to present the open-air concert series Sound In The Garden. After four nights of live concerts, Sunday will be dedicated to special sound installations created in honor of Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya, who is presenting a site-specific fog sculpture in the sculpture garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie.
Sound in the Garden follows in the tradition of innovative concert formats that have repeatedly taken place in the museum's sculpture garden since the Neue Nationalgalerie opened—from the Jazz in the Garden events of the 1970s and 1980s, where artists such as Alice Coltrane and Keith Jarrett performed, to the Sound in the Garden series, which has been established since the building reopened in 2022. The clarity and precision of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture, together with the ephemeral poetry of Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculpture, serve as parallel inspirations for understanding to conceive of music as a spatial art form. This is enabled by an immersive d&b Soundscape audio system that allows participants to experience the music intensively as they wander wandering among the garden’s plants and sculptures.
Oscar and Grammy-winning cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir is known for her terrifyingly heavy television and film scores such as Chernobyl and Joker, extreme minimalism and suffocating tectonic design manipulated to generate an overwhelming sense of cosmic terror. British sound designer and music producer Sam Slater won that Chernobyl Grammy right alongside Guðnadóttir. His murky electronic productions manipulate acoustic instruments and field recordings until they burst and bloom into metallic nightmares: the sound of the failing machinery running this world.
Tipping Points, by Hildur Guðnadóttir & Sam Slater
Tipping Points, by Hildur Guðnadóttir & Sam Slater
Slauson Malone inhales the anxieties of modern life and horks them out as frenzied collages. Shifting abruptly between fractured jazz loops and lofi punk spasms, brief flashes of soulful vocals and melody are violently cut off with roaring guitar, snippets of spoken word or other hyperactive ADD effluvia. Existing within the same logic of a fast-paced unpredictable variety show, his cut-and-paste performances drip and fizzle with syrupy existential dread and political frustration - an insidiously delectable genre-fluid counterweight to the harrowing that precedes it.
Half-Life, by Slauson Malone 1
Half-Life, by Slauson Malone 1
Peruvian-born harpist and composer Eve Matin's work grows from a lifelong sensitivity to sound, shaped by her Persian heritage and her upbringing in the Baháʼí faith. Guided by ideas of unity and spiritual inquiry, her approach to music brings people and histories into conversation. At the center of her practice is the harp, an instrument wielded as both an extension of her personal voice and as an open field for exploration. Blending composed material with improvisation, her performances respond to the spaces they inhabit, weaving together delicate textures with the environment itself into a quietly expansive sense of atmosphere. For this performance Matin is joined by composer and sound designer Alex Rapp, complementing her immersive site-responsive practice.
TRANSMUTANCIA, by Eve Matin
TRANSMUTANCIA, by Eve Matin
TRANSMUTANCIA, by Eve Matin
TRANSMUTANCIA, by Eve Matin
Sound in the Garden is curated by Gregor Quack, Volkswagen Group curator, in collaboration with Tessa Nijdam and CTM – Festival for Adventurous Music & Art, Berlin. The project is made possible by FREUNDE der Nationalgalerie and has received crucial support by audibene GmbH and d&b audiotechnik.
Neue Nationalgalerie
Potsdamer Str. 50
10785 Berlin
The Neue Nationalgalerie is fully wheelchair accessible.
Persons taking public transit may check the current status of elevators at the subway stops nearest each venue, via the BVG (both in German and English).
If you have further questions about event and venue accessibility, or to help plan your visit, please write to us at accessibility(at)ctm-festival.de.