At the core of CTM lies an impulse for collaboration – a methodology crucial to processing the richness of our heterogeneous and constantly-changing world. As always, many collaborations will shape this next festival edition. Special concerts resulting from ongoing partnerships with Forecast Platform and Somerset House Studios will be presented at the festival, as will events taking shape through brand new collaborations with Deutsche Oper Berlin or the Stefan Schulze Distributed Ensemble. Thanks to a collaboration with Musikfonds, a full day of presentations and performances on AI in sound will take place, highlighting work from year-long artistic fellowships, and more. A new collaboration with Sound Practice Research programme of the Folkwang University of the Arts and Futures of Listening seeks participants interested in engaging with collaborative spatial sound practices. Our ongoing partnership with transmediale will also manifest with shared concerts and presentations.
Early-Bird Passes, Tickets, Press Accreditation
Early-bird CTM Festival passes and Connect Passes for CTM + transmediale are on sale now in limited quantities. Weekend Passes for each respective CTM Festival weekend are also on sale. Tickets to the first few events are now available, with more going on sale throughout autumn.
Press accreditation is now open, with a deadline of 11 January 2027 to apply. Journalists can apply for accreditation to cover CTM Festival, our sister festival transmediale, or for a combined accreditation to both festivals.
Passes and tickets
First CTM 2027 Acts
We launch our 2027 programming with artists:
- 96 Back
- A.N.I.
- aya b2b Secretary (Jennifer Walton)
- Bára Gísladóttir presents »Víddir«
- Bilawa Respati, Karina Utomo & Süräle present »The Dream Has Still Not Whispered«
- Debit & biānjiè.systems present »Potpourri« AV
- Dis Fig presents »What To Make Of These Mortal Hands«
- Dumama »This Moment is Also Fleeting«
- Evil Grimace
- Genoël von Lilienstern & Zafraan Ensemble present »Terroir«
- Gudrun Gut
- Hanne Lippard & Renato Grieco present »Aficionado«
- Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith presents »Ruin: It’s Not Just Music«
- Kali Malone presents »Burning Song«
- Kabeaushé
- Kontronatura b2b Debit
- Kuntari & Rully Shabara (world premiere)
- Marina Herlop presents »Dja Dja«
- Mariana Carrilho presents »Flor Do Ibo« (world premiere)
- Microplastics
- Modeselektor present »MDSLKTR & Guests« (world premiere)
- MYEN
- Mütterlein
- NZIRIA presents »Syysma«
- Sainkho Namtchylak & HMOT (world premiere)
- Sound Practice Research group
- Spekki Webu & Matti Vilho present »Signal Transmutations«
- Stefan Schultze Distributed Ensemble »The Time Between Us« (world premiere)
- Tianzhuo Chen »Death by Sun« (world premiere)
Weekend One
For the first weekend, CTM takes over silent green as a festival hub with a focus on different modes of listening and performances connecting to our Resynthesing the Traditional thematic strand. It comprises the premiere performances of works commissioned through our new In Listening call, the winners of which will be announced in October. A series of concerts include »The Dream Has Still Not Whispered«, a new work co-commissioned with the Korkut Triennale, where Bilawa Respati, Karina Utomo, and Şüräle explore the concept of »arwah/äruax,« an ancestral spirit that appears in both Turkic and Indonesian cultures. Further concerts and performances will be complemented by films, talks, workshops, and listening sessions that will take place in the newly built Kino Arsenal and other spaces. Also taking place this weekend will be the »Spatial Audio Experimentation Lab« by Sound Practice Research group with Jan St. Werner and Michael Akstaller – more information and an open call for the lab are below.
Zooming in on a Berlin scene highlight, we’re thrilled to present the world premiere of Modeselektor’s new album MDSLKTR. The album quite literally returns the duo to their foundations, digging into nearly three decades of studio sessions and unfinished ideas, renewing and repurposing them into new beginnings. The album was built through reduction, arrangements pared down to clearer structures where their propulsive power shines brighter than ever. The performance will be joined by a variety of the album’s guests, including opening sets by Kabeaushé and Berlin icon Gudrun Gut. Tickets are now on sale.
Our club programme kicks off with a night showcasing global strands of hardcore, with multi-genre transitional superstar A.N.I., Casual Gabberz co-founder Evil Grimace, NZIRIA’s singular take on Neapolitan neomelodic songs smashed into the pressure chamber of hardcore, and a special b2b set by Debit and Mamba Negra resident Kontronatura digging through the facets of hardcore in the Americas, from Mexico City to Patagonia.
Another night will take on a hybrid format, interweaving concerts, performance and club sets. Dis Fig will perform her second full-length album »What To Make Of These Mortal Hands« with Fitnesss on drums, and Debit will also stage the AV show »Potpourri« based on her new album of the same name with visuals by Ian Margo & Alexandre Montserrat aka biānjiè.systems. Spekki Webu collaborates with visual artist Matti Vilho on »Signal Transmutations,« a transmission from a place where the machinery has begun to spore.
Our opening weekend will also see the first of a multi-part collaboration with the Deutsche Oper Berlin within their new Candatoras series. The collaboration features veteran improviser, throat singer and vocalist Sainkho Namtchylak performing with Stas Shärifullá aka HMOT.Tickets to this event are already on sale.
Another special project this year is the presentation of Genoël von Lilienstern’s composition »Terroir« with classical chaoticists Zafraan Ensemble, examining brutalist textures of place, slow progression, and down-pitched sound masses in microtonal tunings. The local conditions of the performers’ instruments, the bodies sounding them, and the performance room all become part of the work’s immersive aural ecology.
During the Week
Monday to Thursday will see a sequence of special concerts and projects. Turning toward a more immediate and intuitive compositional process, Kali Malone returns to the festival to present two radiant concerts at Gedächtniskirche of her new album »Burning Song«. Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on acoustic guitar join Malone’s pipe organ to play with almost singular breath. The programme will also include select compositions from Malone’s vast organ discography. Tickets for these shows are already on sale.
Following their residency at Somerset House Studios in collaboration with CTM and Goethe-Institut London, Hanne Lippard and Renato Grieco present the new performance »Aficionado« where Lippard’s sonic wordplay entwines with Grieco’s viola da gamba and piano. Applying methods of reduction rather than opulence the artists meticulously peg the poetic to the musical in a suite of works that will be released as an album this October on Shelter Press.
Mozambican artist and operatic singer Mariana Carrilho will premiere a new work following a mentorship with Heinali, supported by Forecast Platform, that centers on the female voice as a site of continuity and resistance.
The world premiere of Distributed Ensemble, developed by Stefan Schultze, brings together modular composition, improvisation, machine learning, and spatial sound in a longform multilogue. The ensemble of Almut Kühne, Elena Kakaliagou, Els Vandeweyer, Felix Henkelhausen, Leonhard Huhn, Magnus Schriefl, Moritz Baumgärtner, Peter Ehwald, Peter Meyer, Roland Neffe, and Stefan Schultze is spread out across the space in different stations, moving through shifting musical constellations. The ensemble’s collective music-making is shaped by machine learning, musical agent systems, and adaptive spatial synthesis developed with Nicola Hein and Pierre-Alexandre Tremblay. Responding to one another and to their machine interlocutors, the musicians continually explore new sonic relationships and contexts that emerge.
Mütterlein’s industrial black metal and darkwave doom harvests mind and spirit like the sweep of a scythe. The crush of distortion is mashed with punishing percussion live, an oppressive density shivering amid sudden stark passages of tension building to a bleak and fevered atmosphere.
Senyawa’s renowned vocalist and composer Rully Shabara joins newcomers Kuntari in a project that aims to dismantle centuries-old traditional ceremonial music, restructuring it into brutal primal-core.
Microplastics emerge from a warped zone of industrial anti-folk and noise rock, the traditions of pastoral songcraft dragged through the septic wreckage of the Now. Members of the collective will make solo appearances as well, with a live show of HDetailed futuristic productions by 96 Back featuring Fynn Dobson on drums, and a wide-n-weird DJ b2b between aya and Secretary (Jennifer Walton) channeling euphoric dancefloor pressure.
MYEN’s »sonic tulpamancy« summons entities crawl from beneath the club’s floorboards, granular textures and warped synthetics hovering between deconstructed club, IDM and industrial bass.
Throughout the week the next edition of our Resynthesising the Traditional Lab is running – an open call for participants is still out and detailed below. Lab fellows will give public performances and discuss their work during this week.
Together with Musikfonds, we’ll take over all rooms of Radialsystem for a day of artistic and critical explorations of AI in music, detailed further below.
Weekend Two
The second weekend of the festival is a packed succession of concerts, club nights, and conference formats.
Bára Gísladóttir brings classical rigor into the gnarly spaces of dark experimental music. In collaboration with the Deutsche Oper Berlin, she’ll perform her work »Víddir« together with an ensemble. Showcasing her new album »Ruin: It’s Not Just Music« in a special multi-channel spatial format, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s breakbeats and drum-and-bass patterns splinter through a dense strata of synthesis. Marina Herlop will present works from her forthcoming LP »Dja Dja«, layers of harmony and invented language blossoming into huge choral structures, orchestral brass and gamelan. With »This Moment is Also Fleeting,« Berlin-based sonic poet Dumama presents her shape-shifting body of electro-acoustic work that draws Southern-African musical traditions into a dialogue with gospel, left-field electronics and post-punk.
Following our 2026 collaboration, CTM and Resident Advisor will return with a new one-day conference programme exploring the conditions shaping independent electronic music communities. More details to be announced soon.
Also running over the second weekend is »Death by Sun,« a new work by Tianzhuo Chen with Ndoho Ange, Siko Setyanto, and Dis Fig that places the sun at the centre of a journey through mythology, technology, and the contested futures of solar energy. This event will not be included in CTM and transmediale passes.
Tianzhuo Chen »Death by Sun«
28–31 January 2026, HAU – Hebbel am Ufer, HAU1
In »Death by Sun,« multidisciplinary artist Tianzhuo Chen places the sun at the centre of a journey through mythology, technology, and the contested futures of solar energy. Moving between ancient solar imaginaries, the climate crisis, authoritarian symbolism, energy colonialism, and the geopolitics of renewable energy, the performance asks how our relationship with the sun continues to shape ideas of power, progress, and the future. Reimagined as a plural and unstable protagonist, the sun becomes both narrator and force: sacred and technological, life-giving and destructive. This event is not included in CTM and transmediale Festival or Weekend Passes. Ticket pre-sales will start on 1 December.
Open Process…ing: Engaging with the Musikfonds AI in Music Fellows
29 January 2026 | Radialsystem | Free entry
The critical, unconventional, and anarchic sides of AI have been an ongoing focus of CTM under the Stranger AI thematic strand. As the use of AI in creative spaces continues to evolve at breathless speed, we all find ourselves constantly processing ways of engaging with the technology and its massive implications.
This year, in collaboration with Musikfonds, a group of 15 artistic fellows supported by the Artificial Intelligence Scholarship Programme STIP-5 will present their research developed over the past year that looks into implications of AI in sonic spaces. Formats ranging from presentations and talks, to performances, installations, films and more will be shown across Radialsystem’s various rooms.
With: Alejandra Cárdenas, Axel Dörner, Bruno Gola, Christina Köhler aka TinTin Patrone, Dong Zhou, Eveline Vervliet, Fá Maria, Federico Visi, Friederike Bernhardt, Genoël von Lilienstern, Gerriet Krishna Sharma, Olsen, Pablo Garretón, Paul Hauptmeier, and Portrait XO.
Open Calls
CTM Festival x SPR x Futures of Listening: Spatial Audio Experimentation Lab
The Sound Practice Research (SPR) group, comprising students from various disciplines at the Folkwang University of the Arts and led by Jan St. Werner and Michael Akstaller, has teamed up with CTM Festival and the Futures of Listening initiative to create an artistic lab that invites international artists to engage in several days of theoretical discussion and practical experimentation around spatial sound. The lab will run 21 – 24 January 2024 at silent green. Over several days, participants will work through discussions, practical experiments, recording field trips, and collective research, looking at the ways space can become an active element of musical composition. The lab will culminate in a public afternoon of presentations at CTM Festival to share the methods and ideas developed by the group. The call is open until 15 October 2026.
Resynthesising the Traditional: At the Extreme
The next Berlin edition of the Resynthesising the Traditional lab is titled At the Extreme and will take place 25–31 January 2027. The lab takes on a specific subfocus on the intersections and tensions between the traditional and the extreme, with hosts Karina Utomo and Luigi Monteanni. The call is open until 28 September 2026.
CTM 2027 Theme: Process…ing
We live in a present shaped by predefined scripts, hungry algorithms, and extractivist protocols that erode our capacity to process, act, and think. But nobody lives in outcomes alone. We live inside the doing, and what we repeatedly do shapes what we become. Therefore, the process is the message: how we do what we do – and how we design infrastructures and protocols – matters.
As an attitude and method, experimental and undetermined processes driven by continuous feedback are a fundamental constituent of artistic work and of CTM’s own history. Within CTM 2027, Process…ing means resisting closure and elevating the collective acts of making and sharing above the polished artifact. In a world that demands finished results, we choose to remain unfinished, in relation, and present.
transmediale 2027
Our sister festival transmediale celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2027, marking four decades of bringing together art, technology, and critical thinking in Berlin. Tracing their history back to 1988 when it began as VideoFest, this Ruby anniversary unfolds through two connected strands: »groundstates« at silent green from 28–31 January, and the exhibition »Fragile Currents« at the Akademie der Künste, from 28 January to 7 March 2027.