CTM 2023’s Portals morph into curatorial shapes through which to make contact with specific modes of experience, histories, communities, and speculative futures – and to reflect on the preconditions, thresholds, regulation, and fundamental function of sound and music as gateways to other realities.
The CTM 2023 festival programme grows with:
- 3OK (Zoë Mc Pherson, DJ Diaki, Jay Mitta) (INT)
- ABADIR (EG/DE)
- Ahadadream (UK)
- Asep Nayak (ID)
- Black Cadmium (NL)
- INSHINZI (Bloomfeld b2b Phatstoki feat Miziguruka) (INT)
- Binghi & Astan KA (INT)
- Christina Wheeler (US/DE) – «The Totality of Blackness Trilogy«
- Coby Sey (UK)
- Crystallmess (FR)
- Diana Azzuz & Nazanin Noori (INT)
- Happy New Tears (NL/DE)
- Falyakon (PS/DE)
- HVAD (DK)
- Jessica Ekomane & Afrorack (INT)
- jpeg.love (DE)
- Katarina Gryvul & Alex Guevara (INT)
- Keeley Forsyth (UK)
- Limpe Fuchs & Afrorack (DE/UG)
- Lush Lata (IN)
- Marie Davidson DJ set (CA)
- Menzi & Debmaster (INT)
- Merche Blasco (ES / US)
- Nala Brown (NL)
- Nana and Zai (TZ)
- NZIRIA (IT)
- Participatory Audio Lab (INT) – »Collective Control 0«
- Poulomi Desai (UK)
- Puce Mary (DK)
- Queen Asher feat Rehema Tajiri (TZ)
- Ruhail Qaisar (IN)
- Sara Persico (IT/DE)
- Siu Mata b2b Amor Satyr (FR)
- Standard Deviation x Remote Control (INT) pres »Ridne«
- The Body (US)
- Violet (PT)
- ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U (JP)
- Zand (UK)
And the special project »We Found Our Own Reality« – an exploration of India's first electronic music studio and its resonances into today, curated by Paul Purgas and featuring:
- Exhibition and sound installation by Paul Purgas (UK)
- Live performances by: Suren Seneviratne with Poulomi Desai (UK) / Imran Perretta (UK), Nabihah Iqbal (UK), Paul Purgas (UK)
- Film programme curated by Nancy Adajania (IN)
- Discourse programme with Rahila Haque (UK) with Paul Purgas, Regina Bittner (DE), and You Nakai (JP/US), Nabiha Iqbal (UK), Lush Lata (IN)
»We Found Our Own Reality« examines the cultural, political, and post-colonial echoes of South Asia’s avant-garde sonic pioneers, proposing an alternative reading of Modernist history that weaves together threads of the past with speculations of the future. At the core of the project is a large-scale exhibition at silent green Betonhalle, bringing together architecture, furniture, textiles, and sound to explore India's first electronic music studio, founded in 1969 at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad – as well as a new soundwork, developed by Paul Purgas from a collection of unheard recordings by five previously unknown Indian electronic composers.
Several supporting events will take place around the exhibition, including the »Zigzag Afterlives« film programme curated by Nancy Adajania, which engages with a set of pioneering film experiments made by Indian artists, filmmakers, and composers during the 1960s and 1970s. A one-day discourse programme 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’s Lush Lata. Also the exhibition’s geometry will set the scene for a series of live musical events where Imran Perretta, Nabihah Iqbal, Paul Purgas, Poulomi Desai, and Suren Seneviratne will step into a dialogue with the sonic echoes of the NID’s electronic music studio through a series of improvisational performances presented across the exhibition’s duration.
Founded after India’s independence, the NID was a multi-disciplinary facility to train a new generation of free thinking modern designers, animators, ceramicists, film-makers, and sound artists. The exhibition explores the technological and experimental ambition of the NID’s electronic music studio across its four year lifespan at a moment of unprecedented national transformation and cultural exchange between Western and Indian Modernist ideologies, narrating its dialogue with the international sonic and visual avant-gardes of Europe and the USA.
Artists that will expand upon the South Asian narratives of »We Found our Own Reality« are club acts HVAD who incorporates elements of breakcore, techno, and industrial into many of his unconventional productions, the percussive bass-filled energy of British-Pakistani producer Ahadadream, and a DJ set by Lush Lata, member of India’s first all-female/non-binary electronic music collective Coven Code. An improvised concert will be given by Poulomi Desai, who combines a modified sitar with a range of exploratory devices such as modified cassette decks, circuit bent toys, optokinetic instruments and massage tools. Her sitar forms the basis for her sonic improvisation, and is a conscious response to the idea of »authenticity,« seeking to break the expectations of how a »sacred« instrument should be played, and affirming her personal manifesto of noise as protest. Ruhail Qaisar explores the confines of memory, intergenerational trauma, and the operational swarm of the unconscious through the use of improvisation and vernacular poetic gestures. He will be supporting his forthcoming debut release, Fatima (Danse Noire), which screams with the trauma and decay of life in his hometown of Leh – a high-altitude plateau located in the contested Ladakh region of Northern India, which extends from the Himalayas to the Kunlun Mountains.
A notable programme feature this edition is Afropollination – A TURN-2 funded project by Piranha Arts Berlin and Boutique Foundation / Nyege Nyege together with CTM Festival, MS Stubnitz, Festsaal Kreuzberg, and Radio Cosmo. The project aims to encapsulate the process of artistic and social cultural pollination, facilitating creative encounters between artists, genres, disciplines, identities, ideas, cultures, technologies, and communities from various regions of Africa and Germany. Among other, the artists will take part in residencies to create new work, and host workshops.
Within this project, two live improvised sets by Ugandan DIY synth builder Afrorack will be featured, who will perform on different nights with sound artist Jessica Ekomane, and legendary improviser Limpe Fuchs respectively. Rwandan producer Binghi collaborates with Berlin-based singer and dancer Astan KA, while the new trio INSHINZI sees future-forward bass music proponent Bloomfeld take on a b2b set with Pussy Party resident Phatstoki and Rwandan MC/vocalist Miziguruka who works with themes of resilience, the female body, female freedoms, and memory. Berlin-based producer and frequent Nyege Nyege collaborator Debmaster joins pioneering gqom producer Menzi, who has crafted a unique sound by diverting from the genre's usual structures and arrangements. Adopting the stage name 3OK, prolific collaborator Zoë Mc Pherson will appear with DJ Diaki – whose hard-thumping electro balani live sets channel the quintessential African rave sound – and Jay Mitta, one of the core producers of Sisso Studios – the Dar es Salaam collective responsible for popularising singeli worldwide. The inimitable dance duo Nana and Zai join the fray on two separate occasions.
Known for the intensity of her performances, ranging from cinematic soundscapes to piercing harsh noise, Puce Mary will present new material ahead of an upcoming release on PAN. Prolific musical force The Body have over the course of two decades consistently challenged categorization, redefining what it means to be a heavy band. They continue to push boundaries to explore the extremes and microtonality of distortion.
Keeley Forsyth will engulf the audience with her critically acclaimed album Limbs, a slowly expanding and lyrically oblique creation that remains wide open to emotional interpretation. Forsyth’s strong, distinct vocals cut through drones, organic and electronic effects, on a journey that walks the line between threadbare comfort and a cold and vast minimal landscape.
An evening presented together with initiatives Rybachka, and Standard Deviation x Remote Control focuses on engaging and transmitting to audiences the stories and realities of Ukrainians as they continue to resist Russia’s cruel war. For the first part of the night, Standard Deviation x Remote Control will present »RIDNE« (Рідне, Ukrainian for native/dear), a series of point of view-style video walks shot in various locations around Ukraine, each scored by a musician closely connected to the place depicted in the video, whether it is their hometown, a former place of comfort or a place symbolic to their own experience of war. In Kyiv, for example, tofudj walks through the haunting darkness of a city in blackout, while Diana Azzuz scores scenes from the border to Poland, recalling the time when she herself had to flee. The second half of the evening presents the first edition of Rybachka (Ukrainian for »the fisherman’s wife«), a project created by Mariana Berezovska of Borshch magazine which references the namesake poem by Lina Kostenko, one of Ukraine’s foremost poets. The first edition will premiere commissioned audio-visual collaborations that aim to decode traumatic experiences and honour the willpower of people in Ukraine and elsewhere who are enduring man-made destruction, exile, or displacement dictated by invasions and wars. Musician Katarina Gryvul joins forces with Peruvian multimedia artist Alex Guevara, while Diana Azzuz showcases her visual work over the sounds of Nazanin Noori. In these pairings, the artists transgress fear and shock and build new connections between neurons, creative powers, generations, and cultures. Together these two initiatives create a portal into the subjective emotional states, perspectives, and relationships of ordinary Ukrainians whose voices are normally not heard in newsfeeds and military analyses. Presented in collaboration with Goethe-Institut in Exile.
SHAPE+ supported artist NZIRIA works in the self-described genre of »hard neomelodic,« a hybridisation of the Neapoletan neomelodic song and hardcore gabber influences. As a non-binary artist, NZIRIA attempts to bring a different perspective to Neapoletan song by metamorphosing heteronormative and discriminative narratives of neomelodic into new stories of fluid identities, queer love, and hybridisation between northern and southern Italian cultures. For their CTM performance, they will interact in a tableaux vivant of multiple performers, under the direction of visual artist Bianca Peruzzi, who has also prepared a special light environment of lasers, projectors, and haze. Their debut album XXYBRID came out this past summer on Gabber Eleganza's Never Sleep.
Christina Wheeler will premiere her full tone-poem suite titled »The Totality of Blackness Trilogy,« a multimedia, surround-immersive performance work devised to engender a space that reframes our experience of Blackness and the accompanying fear often intrinsically enmeshed therein. Respectively titled »Emerge from -,« »Surrender to -,« and »Resonate in the Totality of Blackness,« the trilogy will be presented over three consecutive nights. Tone poems sung through subtle, elongated vocal techniques with effects processing allow the audience to experience the music’s message as both a meditative invocation as well as a transportive experience, creating a new relationship with Blackness, where fear can be released, and a place of love for the self relative to and included in the larger context of the world and the universe can be encouraged.
Multimedia artist Merche Blasco appears in a partnership with the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Program. She explores alternative forms of performance by engineering collaborative spaces with instruments and technological assemblages that are given their own agency in compositions. Her body and the live exploration of organic materials are central elements of these electroacoustic works.
CTM’s club programme swells with more voices.
Appearing for the first time in Europe are mother-daughter combo Queen Asher feat Rehema Tajiri. Sisso affiliate Queen Asher is one of the few female singeli producers. Her mother Rehema Tajiri is a famed Tarraab and Singeli singer, who will grace Asher’s productions with unparalleled flow. They will be joined by the contagious movements of singeli dancers Nana and Zai.
Another first-time European appearance will be West Papuan producer Asep Nayak, who has been redefining the local wisisi music of his home region. Nayak became interested in producing wisisi upon discovering that local Papuan hip-hop was being made and played on computers. Since then, he hasn’t stopped creating this relentless, fast paced euphoric sound asking us to just let go and have fun.
Rotterdam duo Black Cadmium are crate-diggers with a penchant for ravey dance floor bangers. Expect equal parts Bristolian bass & soul, noughties London beats, early jungle and broken beats, and 80s bare bones Chicago jack. Beloved for her heavy-lidded coldwave and synthpop with a touch of humor, Marie Davidson will appear with a fun-fuelled high-octane DJ set that cycles through straight-up techno, EBM, electro, and the occasional dip into psy trance. mina resident Violet has been propelling Lisbon's underground with elegant blends of techno, breakbeat, and acid basslines, and will hit Berghain late Thursday night with a rare dnb set. Curl collective member and frequent collaborator of Tirzah and Mika Levi, Coby Sey will bring his debut album performance, fusing the collaborative force of multi instrumentalists Alpha Maid and Ben Vince with deconstructed electronics and the hypnotic power of spoken word. Moving from abrasive zouk and dancehall to afro-trance and Detroit techno, Crystallmess has been a regular at parties such as Berlin's Janus nights, Hyperdub'sø monthly, Yves Tumor's Terms of Endearment, or Paris's Concrete. Ampfeminine collective member Nala Brown blends Detroit techno, New York's new generation club, pop and r&b edits, and high energy percussion into highly infectious, danceable sets. jpeg.love’s productions vary from sex positive to punky vibes, propelling an understanding of club culture as community driven and intersectional. Happy New Tears plays machine processed music for the melancholy self. Falyakon twists, layers, and bends sounds and genres into unique and erratic sets of distant memories, interruptions, and projections of what is to come.
A few first names are also announced for our Saturday lineup at RSO.Berlin. Osaka’s spirit force ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U brings an unhinged and limitless versatility to his heavy DJ sets. The respected DJ and organiser runs the Zone Unknown parties in his hometown, and has curated some in-demand mixes for Bedouin Records and Midnight Shift among other. Proclaiming the role of »ugly pop star« Zand is ready to cause a stir with their unapologetic and empowering sound that spans gritty pop-lyricism to full on screamo trap metal. With tongue-in-cheek assertive lyrics and pouring bass lines, the singer aims to empower anyone who’s been judged for demonstrating their right to bodily autonomy and sexual liberation. Siu Mata b2b Amor Satyr left a big dent on the dance floors this year with their unique and fast-paced take on dembow, showcasing the fast changing and diversifying landscape of the Parisian underground. They will bring their polyrhythmic DJ booth wizardry peak time to RSO, showing that fast dance music doesn't necessarily need to be hard music. SHAPE+ affiliate ABADIR comes fresh off his massive Mutate release on SVBKVLT. What started out as an experiment in layering maqsoum rhythms with the Amen break turned into an entire album in which ABADIR used the same technique with some of his favorite club genres – collecting Arabic rhythms and mutating them with styles such as jungle, jersey club, or reggaeton. Sara Persico will jump-start the main stage that night with an energetic DJ set of coarse electronics. Also on the lineup is the aforementioned collab INSHINZI – Bloomfeld b2b Phatstoki feat Miziguruka.
The MusicMakers Hacklab is an open, collaborative environment where participants work together during CTM Festival week at the silent green Ateliers, to explore and realise new musical ideas. It culminates in a public finale performance on Sunday 5 February Hebbel am Ufer (HAU 2). Hosted by Verónica Mota and Peter Kirn, 15 fellows selected via open call will work together to explore the theme of »Rifts« – the connective possibilities of disruption / collapse along boundaries: Alan Affichard, Corazón De Robota, Filip Ruisl, Juliana Santacruz, Katarzyna Debska, Laura Guarch, Lia Mice, Maoyi Qiu, Matrix Navrot, Saana Pohjonen, Sophia Bulgakova, Stefan Maier, Sumugan Sivanesan, Willstone Sibamwenda, Yin Cheng-Kokott.
The Participative Audio Lab (PAL) is a newly-formed initiative focused on collective creation and the development of open source tools that allow artists to create and distribute their own participative musical experiences without the need of coding skills. The group was initiated this autumn thanks to support from the initiative »Prototyping Sonic Institutions« organised by Black Swan and CTM Festival 2022.
At CTM 2023, PAL will present their first creation, a live participative music installation, at HAU2 and via a dedicated website participativeaudiolab.com. Developed via an open-call hackathon, »Collective Control 0« – or »cc0« – allows users to create and register collective compositions remotely.
Festival passes are on sale in limited quantities. Festivalgoers can choose between the CTM Pass, which grants access to most of the festival’s events, or the Connect Pass which offers additional access to transmediale festival programming. Tickets to certain concerts and events are on sale now, with more becoming available in the coming weeks.
The press accreditation application period is open, with a deadline of 9 January 2023 to apply. Journalists can apply to cover CTM or transmediale respectively, or for a combined accreditation to both festivals.