One of the guiding lines of CTM throughout nearly three decades has been to platform newly-seeded experiments all the way to beloved performers or club mainstays, and everything in between. Within CTM 2027, artistic labs, commissioned works, student interventions, improvisational experiments, evolving performance-installation hybrids and more point to Process…ing as a means of resisting closure and elevating the collective acts of making and sharing above the polished artifact.
A big part of such experiments arise due to intensive collaboration, among other a new edition of our Spatial Radiants club night exploring the artistry of live spatial mixing in collaboration with Futures of Listening and Ambrio, the UdK Berlin University of the Arts Sound Studies programme exploring dome performance environments at the Zeiss-Grossplanetarium, and the winners of our In Listening open call presented with Deutschlandfunk Kultur and ORF.
The festival calendar is online with a selection of event tickets available, with the full listings and tickets to come late November.
Festival Passes and Tickets
CTM Festival and Weekend passes, Connect Passes for CTM + transmediale, and tickets to many events are on sale in limited quantities. Tickets to further events will be available with the third programme announcement late November.
Second CTM 2027 Acts
We expand our 2027 programming with artists:
- ABADIR & Hogir present »The Primitivist«
- Cinna Peyghamy
- DJ Strawberry
- eid55558.55
- Everything Is Psychedelic
- Gloorp
- Javier Areal Vélez presents »Corriente parásita«
- Klara Lewis presents »Opening«
- Nadia Struiwigh
- Pette
- Polygonia, Simon Popp
- Radie Peat
- SHERELLE
- T.NO
- Tshegue Soundsystem
- State OFFF
- Thomas Ankersmit presents »The Tcherepnin Series«
Winners of the In Listening Open Call:
- Pedro Oliveira presents »The Devil Can’t Copy«
- Zara Julius in collaboration with Larissa Johnson and Gugulethu Duma present »Spectral (After Pneuma)«
Fellows of the Resynthesising the Traditional Lab:
- Anqi Liu
- DJ Würm
- Jasmine Tutum / Ntoutoume-Obame
- Ken Ueno
- KINDASA
- Mauricio Velasierra
- Shamica Ruddock
Process…ing Works
CTM 2027’s programming further evolves to reflect on a multitude of processes – from long-term research to momentous experimentation, into unpredictable systems and through collective negotiation. It allows for the unfinished to entice while still existing in flux.
Opening CTM 2027, Polygonia and Simon Popp bring their shared polyrhythmic sensibilities together to build from their collaborative work »Apiformes«. Improvisation is their starting point: acoustic percussion and synthesised sounds entangle, momentum emerging from spontaneous decisions. Popp’s interlocking rhythms and Polygonia’s sequenced electronics evoke the natural world of patterns and collective signals, bringing it into realms no less beautiful for their unnaturalness.
The Serge Modular analogue systems present no fixed allegiance to established laws of musical tonality. A psychonaut of the psychoacoustic, Thomas Ankersmit has devoted two decades to the exploration of these powerful instruments. From this inquiry emerges »The Tcherepnin Series,« a succession of sonic portraits each fashioned in response to the dispositions of each unique system. The living action of Ankersmit’s own Serge system is joined to material developed upon these massive mothership machines surviving within historic studios worldwide. For the first time, these otherwise isolated systems are brought into dialogue together.
Klara Lewis has a deep sensitivity to the latent character of recorded material and the minute discrepancies that emerge when subjected to deformation. She’ll perform her new album Opening, its illuding feints and beguilements built of discombobulatory processes which veil, unveil, collapse, and reform in a flickering half-light.
DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellow Javier Areal Vélez’s spatial work-in-process at Berghain starts the first festival weekend and will run for (nearly) a week. Utilising dozens of motors and solenoids attached to its architecture, he will transform Säule into an instrument, resonating parts in controlled, speakerless spatial audio, creating a work that changes and evolves over the course of the festival.
In Listening Commissioned Works
Drawn from over 1000 applicants, two selected artists of our sound-focused In Listening open call with Deutschlandfunk Kultur and ORF explore speculative histories and experimental audio environments to challenge traditional perspectives and explore new modes of process.
Pedro Oliveira’s »The Devil Can’t Copy« is a para-genealogical account of AI, imagining the genesis of contemporary paradigms of machine listening at reggae and dub studios in Kingston, Jamaica. What would AI have been like if it had been invented in Lee »Scratch« Perry’s studio?
In »Spectral (After Pneuma)« by Zara Julius with Larissa Johnson and Gugulethu Duma, breath is made to wander between the Xhosa musical bows umrhubhe and uhadi and the human voice, using the body as a resonator through which breath, vibration and timbre are shaped.
Resynthesising the Traditional
Our ongoing thematic thread enquiring into traditional reconceptualisations evolves with the German premiere of Lankum vocalist and instrumentalist Radie Peat’s new album No Human Tongue Can Tell. Peat has become a custodian of the Irish song tradition, wielding her magnificent contralto with preternatural command. Each piece is a repository of forgotten calamities and concealed rebellions, staggered by emotions long outliving the circumstances which engendered them.
The Resynthesising the Traditional artistic lab this year welcomes seven fellows selected by co-hosts Luigi Monteanni and Karina Utomo from a pool of over 250 applications – Anqi Liu, DJ Würm, Jasmine Tutum / Ntoutoume-Obame, Ken Ueno, Mauricio Velasierra, KINDASA, and Shamica Ruddock. Over the course of the seven-day lab they’ll engage in theory and practice workshops, share their research through public presentations, take part in sonic improvisations and site visits, and exchange ideas with other artists and researchers. We’ll get to witness their work through public performances as well as a roundtable discussion for the lab’s finale with a special guest still tba.
Among already-announced performances touching on this theme are Marina Carrilho as well as the commissioned work by Bilawa Respati, Karina Utomo, and Şürale.
Further Additions to the Club Programme
Advancing our exploration of new technologies and artistic possibilities in club music, our Spatial Radiants night brings cutting-edge spatial audio to the monumental Berghain sound system to unlock new levels of depth and expression. Joining the previously-announced Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Cinna Peyghamy focuses on the Persian tombak drum and an elaborate constellation of oscillators, resonators, control voltages and signal pathways through which each strike acquires an unforeseen afterlife. Nadia Struiwigh and State OFFF continue the processes they’ve begun for the collaborative Futures Of Listening project, navigating their emerging works and club vocabularies with Ambrio’s unique Spatial mixer.
ABADIR will return to the festival together with master percussionist Hogir to present their new EP The Primitivist. For decades, electronic music has treated futurism – driven mainly by Western and European ideals and aesthetics – as shorthand for innovation, recycling visions of technological utopias and dystopias while insisting on the next and the new. But whose future are we imagining when so much of the world is still struggling with the realities of the present?
Everything Is Psychedelic is a headtrip from the minds of Birmingham rapper Tony Bontana and London producer psychedelic ensemble delivered in that unmistakably Brummie voice. Deadpan humour and blunted confession ride fractured samples and industrialised percussion down roads cobbled in free-noise punk and art-rock rap, all prone to suddenly veer down entirely new and unexpected paths. Tshegue Soundsystem’s unique melding of Congolese rhythms and Lingala vocals with punky garage rock and Latin American electronics has captured ears wherever they’ve performed. Topics of racism and discrimination, hunger, and political corruption are all subjected to mischievous movements.
Quezon City rapper and DJ Pette spits an aural feast of vernacular invective and delectable wordplay. Thriving upon incongruity, her flow frolics ‘twixt collisions of incongruous registers and the prodigious possibilities of language when liberated from respectability. SHERELLE’s musical idiom is a whirling reverie of breakbeats, sub-bass detonations, serried percussion and precipitous syncopations, her sets unfolding with athletic virtuosity at 160BPM+.
DJ Strawberry combines the velocity of Chicago footwork with Japanese minimalism, beats fracturing into polyrhythmic configurations within his compositions to disclose unexpected emotional depths. A viscous blend of footwork, bass, and club with slick drumming chops, Philly weirdo Gloorp’s forward-thinking, textural electronics is as playful as it is forward-thinking/moving.
Dropping down out of Amsterdam, T.NO’s drumcentric sound is a hard-hitting force of percussion + concussion. His Surinamese roots carry his sets and productions, running gqom, grime, kawina, bubbling, kuduro, and funk carioca through the same restless groove.
Joining a hybrid RSO night interweaving concerts and club sets, Ulaanbaatar’s eid55558.55 proceeds by way of oblique rhythms, bending the standard formulae of electro, EBM, and breakbeat into new geometries.
Portale 2027: Audiovisual Works in Full-Dome
The CTM Festival 2027 and Stiftung Planetarium Berlin present »Portale 27,« an evening in the planetarium dome with new AV works created by students of the »Sound Studies and Sonic Arts« Master’s programme at the University of the Arts Berlin. Within the city’s largest planetarium, audiences recline within a sphere of vision as Ambisonic sound courses through the planetarium's 49.4 loudspeaker system across the vast dome. The eleven works unfurl within, giving an insight into and nurturing new voices in AV creation.
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.