The CTM 2026 Opening Concert will resonate with a band that harnesses the tensions and potentials of dissonance and resonance like few others: drone metal legends Earth. Other festival highlights include a dedicated spatial sound concert programme with acts such as Sote, Corin, Shapednoise, plus several d&b Soundscape workshops as part of our The Fifth Ear thematic strand; commissioned performances and an artistic lab exploring sonic traditions from modern perspectives, featured as part of our Resynthesising the Traditional thematic strand; collaborations with Seoul’s WeSA Festival and Disturbed Ground with Kyiv’s ∄, plus collectives Terminal, No_Stone, and Oroko Radio. Our exhibition Echoes of Tumult opens across Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien and daadgalerie.
The festival's daytime programme features the one-day Resident Advisor x CTM Rethinking Music Ecosystems conference; a multi-day Discourse programme examiming artistic practice, ear witnessing, and (embodied) listening as methods of navigating complex musical, social, and political interrelationships; the A2A Transmission workshops for artists by artists; and a broadcast programme with Refuge Worldwide.
From 23 January – 1 February 2026 at Radialsystem, Berghain, RSO.Berlin, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Morphine Raum, and Haus der Visionäre, CTM Festival’s 27th edition runs under the theme dissonate < > resonate, inviting us to inhabit the charged fields where frequencies meet, clash, and sometimes unexpectedly converge in moments of shared attunement.
transmediale
As in every year, our sister festival transmediale will be running in parallel to CTM, a cornucopia of hybrid art seeking cultural transformation from a post-digital perspective. 2026's theme »By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road: Compassing, Protocoling, Metaphoring« reimagines the festival as a living recursive carrier net – a hammock of relational technologies in practice that stretch across latitudes, rhythms, and root systems, asking: is your imagination hungry? What are the currents on our feeds? What’s at the root of our codes?
