The festival will take place 27 January to 5 February 2023 at multiple Berlin venues, including Berghain, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, silent green, and more. With the Portals theme, CTM 2023 aims to highlight the potentials of sound and music as gateways to other realities that give access to specific modes of experience, histories, communities, and speculative futures.

Final music programme confirmations are:

• Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet (INT) »Strobe.rip«
• Isabella Forciniti (IT/AT)
• Philou Louzolo (NL)
• Tanat Teeradakorn and Nuh Peace (TH)
• Team Rolfes (INT) »3-2-1-Rule

Film screening:

• »Can and Me« by Tessa Knapp and Michael P. Aust (DE, 2022) followed by an artist talk with Irmin Schmidt (DE)

A2A Transmission workshops with:

• Brian Bamanya aka Afrorack (UG)
• Audrey Chen (US/DE)
• Jay Mitta (TZ)
• Lush Lata (IN)
• Menzi (ZA)
• Stefanie Egedy (BR/DE)

Discourse programme with:

• Altay Bozkurt (TR/DE)
• Anna Kravets (UA)
• Authentically Plastic (UG)
• Brandon LaBelle (US/DE)
• Diana Azzuz (SY/UA)
• Eugene Angelo (UK)
• Fenna de Jong (NL)
• Film screening: »Singeli Movement: Greed for Speed« by Jan Moss / Nyege Nyege Tapes (2022)
• Ionana Vreme Moser (RO/DE)
• Jay Mitta (TZ)
• Kathleen Bomani (TZ)
• Mariana Berezovska (UA/DE)
• Miloš Hroch (CZ)
• Nazanin Noori (IR/DE)
• NZIRIA (IT)
• Queen Asher & Rehema Tajiri (TZ)
• Whitney Wei (US/DE)
• Yewande Adeniran (UK)

Despite an always-growing fanbase, the duo Amnesia Scanner have managed to remain relatively enigmatic. Their trajectory has over the last years brought forth a steady string of digitally-grotesque, aesthetically-cryptic videos and releases that jolt bodies into irregular dancing action and carnivalize the present. Revealed through these strong aesthetics is a deep fascination with system vulnerabilities, informational overload, and sensory excess. Closing out the 2023 editions of transmediale and CTM, Amnesia Scanner will premiere their new work »strobe.rip« in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Freeka Tet. The combination of provocative aesthetics from two celebrated artistic projects fuses into an affecting narrative about isolation and survival within today’s collapsing ecosystems and information environments. At the core of their work is an interest in how the contemporary experience is mediated, including the ways in which listening to music and live performance is evolving as digital ecosystems are proliferating. With extremely detailed, 16k, fantasy vivid colours, and maximum texture, the concert will serve as the launch to a new collaborative body of work to be unleashed throughout 2023 via further live performances plus digital and physical releases on the lauded label PAN, in various formats.

Opening the night are Team Rolfes with »3-2-1 Rule,« a VR-puppeted, motion capture avatar-ed, mixed-reality narrative project that will appear in a live stage adaptation at CTM. Directed by Sam Rolfes and written by spam poet Jacob Bakkila, the story follows Eris Wonderful, a memory hunter gig worker in a near-future metaverse. This manic AV mashup of real-time 3D avatar theatre, metaverse-parody games features an original score by Galen Tipton, a half-sardonic digital slapstick, half-hyperpop scream ballad.

Longtime friends and collaborators in Bangkok’s burgeoning experimental scene, Tanat Teeradakorn and Nuh Peace join forces with a meld of costume, performance, video, and party vibes, taking inspiration as much from noise and queer cultures, as from the politics, sounds, and scenes of their native Bangkok. They round out the collaborative CTM x transmediale lineup at Berghain Säule.

Rounding out the programme of special 4DSOUND commissions at MONOM is SHAPE+ supported artistIsabella Forciniti, who is interested in the potentials of sound within improvisation and spatialised settings, reaching also into the audiovisual domain through her scoring of gender-critical silent movies from the early 20th century. In her current research, she explores the musical and social potential of digital networking via mobile devices, taking into consideration artistic, scientific and technological perspectives. Furthermore, the previously-announced artist Aleksandra Słyż will present a limited-capacity open studio session ahead of her premiere staging at MONOM.

Joining the Refuge Worldwide floor at RSO.berlin is Philou Louzolo, who explores an intrinsic, deeply personal need to connect the traditional ancestral sound of his African heritage, with progressive sounds of afropop, r&b, trap, dancehall, fusion, and intergalactic electronic music.

A2A Transmission is a series of six workshops for artists by artists. The programme takes place at Morphine Raum and aims to help sound practitioners expand their skill sets and practices through direct exchange with seasoned artists. Experimental vocalist Audrey Chen will exchange on her practice, which aims to explore the physicality of voice and convey personal stories without language. Jay Mitta will give a workshop on his approach to producing singeli tracks, Menzi will lead a gqom production session, and SHAPE+ supported Stefanie Egedy will give an introduction to working with low-frequency sound waves. Lush Lata, a member of India’s first all-female/non-binary electronic music collective Coven Code, will give a DJing workshop aimed to share skills and tips with other womxn artists. The Ugandan artist and modular synth builder Brian Bamanya, also known under the artist name Afrorack, will introduce his practice in a session that aims to show beginners how to build electronic sound generators with limited resources. Bamanya’s workshop is presented with and at FabLab Neukölln – a collaboration of workish.berlin & 42 Berlin.

CTM Festival will continue its long running focus on pioneering artists and achievements in experimental and electronic music, which this year will feature the presentation of a work by Maryanna Amacher, a performance by Limpe Fuchs, the exhibition »We Found Our Own Reality« on India’s first electronic music studio, and, on the opening day of the festival, the Berlin premiere of the new documentary film »CAN and Me« by director Michael P. Aust. The film offers an intimate look into the life and work of Irmin Schmidt, founder of the Cologne-based band CAN, widely hailed as pioneers of the German krautrock scene, which shaped generations of musicians in pop and electronic music. The film will be shown in the presence of Irmin Schmidt, who will join a conversation with the director after the screening.

How and when do we prepare for an emergency? What does it do to our bodies and what sense of responsibility does it evoke, practically and emotionally? As part of her winning Radio Lab proposal, »An Emotional Encyclopedia of War,« winner and Kyiv-based Anna Kravets proposes a series of exchanges on matters of (emotional) emergencies in a bunker-like setting. Materials recorded during these sessions will form the basis of her radio piece, which will be aired on Deutschlandfunk Kultur and ORF Austrian Broadcasting service. An open call is forthcoming this week.

The 2023 Discourse programme will provide multiple entry points into the festival theme of Portals.

Opening the programme will be artist, writer and theorist Brandon LaBelle,with a presentation on the brand new Listening Biennial Reader, which draws attention to listening as a relational capacity, a philosophical and ecological proposition, a creative practice, and research method.

Two artists and researchers – Yewande Adeniran (aka Ifeoluwa) and NZIRIA– will present their explorations of different temporalities, and how artistic means of the digital can be used to combine techno-futuristic ideas with elements of folklore rooted deep in the past, ancient spiritual traditions, and mythological ideas. While Adeniran will explore the role of the drum in the spiritual traditions of the Yoruba in Nigeria as a medium of communication, which experiences subversive re-articulations in the colonial era, but also in the techno music of the present, NZIRIA will delve into their research into Neapolitan culture, interrogating and reinterpreting its origins and some of the topoi of Neapolitan culture through a queer lens.

As a consequence of the progressive disappearance of performative spaces caused by economic and political policies and the multiplication of niche »no-audience underground« subgenres, many artists have moved into a thriving online digital underground that shuns spatio-temporal specifics to create its own folklore vernacular. These global communities of artists will be explored in a panel discussion with music writer Miloš Hroch, and musician and researcher Luigi Monteanni among others.

In the physical venue sphere, a panel discussion moderated by Resident Advisor’s Editor-in-Chief Whitney Wei assembles representatives from Generation Z – Altay Bozkurt, Eugene Angelo, and KLAUW Collective's Fenna de Jong. This generation is often missing in clubs and festivals, run by millennials, or Gen Xers. As these nascent 18-25 year-olds become acquainted with this counterculture, what's their take? And what challenges will arise? How has the era of social media and post-pandemic pains affected this generation's ability to socialise?

Within the context of Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine and the current uprising in Iran, a panel discussion moderated by Mariana Berezovska of Borshch Magazine will bring together several performers from the RIDNE/Rybachka evening at HAU2 – Diana Azzuz, and Nazanin Noori – plus Radio Lab commission winner Anna Kravets, to exchange on their experiences of the expectations around cultural production in times of war and oppression.

Singeli is the raw, unpolished sound of Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. A panel moderated by Kathleen Bomani will bring together some of singeli's key players, including Queen Asher & Rehema Tajiri, and Jay Mitta. Jan Moss' new film Singeli Movement: Greed For Speed, documenting the rise of singeli in its birthplace, will also be shown.

In her MusicMakers Hacklab Input talk, Ioana Vreme Moser will dive into the mineral realms of computer hardware and take a look at fluidics, in a talk that reimagines the morphology of our electronic machines.

Previously-announced, a daylong discourse programme »We Found Our Own Reality« will reflect upon exchanges and resonances between the Indian and global experimental music and design communities both historically and into the present, featuring talks by Rahila Haque with Paul Purgas, Regina Bittner, You Nakai, Nabihah Iqbal, and Coven Code’sLush Lata.

The 2023 Portals Discourse programme will come to a close at HAU2, under the title »The Time For Denial is Over.« Led by GROUP50:50 and presented as a companion event to their evening performances »The Ghosts are Returning,« the afternoon programme that regroups activists and thinkers from Europe and Africa to further discuss the foundations for a transnational restitution movement.