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.

Information on the festival’s discourse programme and workshops will follow in the first week of January.

Announcement highlights include confirmed performances by:

• bela (KR)
• Daniel Blumberg (UK)
• Dreamgirls (IE)
• Espectra Negra (MX/DE)
• Hekla (IS)
• Iceboy Violet (UK)
• Jana Woodstock (UA)
• Jennifer Walshe & Jon Leidecker (INT)
• KILLA & Monibi (INT)
• Nico Adomako (DE)
• Richard Akingbehin (UK/NG)
• Vieze Meisje (BE)
• WIDOWS showcase featuring Assyouti (EG/DE), BAE.CON (DE), BLK SLK (US/DE), creo en todo (INT), DJ hot bitch (DE), Geisha online (CL/DE), lamb (US/DE), Makossiri (KE/GE)
• Wiegedood (BE)
• Xzavier Stone (CH/DE)

The event »Spatial Live x CTM 2023« at MONOM with newly conceived performances in 4DSOUND by Aleksandra Słyż pres »Softness, Flashes, Floating Rage« feat Judith Hamann and Gerard Lebik (INT), Andrea Belfi (IT/DE), and Hüma Utku (TU/DE)

And a partner event at Kunstwerke featuring Alexis Blake (US/NL) with mobilegirl (DE), Sofia Borges (PT/DE), and Stefanie Egedy (BR/DE).

The lineup at Festsaal Kreuzberg featuring screamo meme queen Lil Mariko is now rounded out with two further musical personas, each in their own way aiming towards genre-defying productions. Deep, brooding, and broad, the dreamy lyricism of Iceboy Violet channels the energy, emotionality, and resistance of grime. Their 2022 EP saw the MC and producer release collaborations with an impressive cross-section of contemporaries from Space Afrika and Jennifer Walton to Slikback and aya under her LOFT moniker. With a penchant for rap, R&B, and regional bass-heavy styles, Xzavier Stone teasingly offers a lush and off-kilter sensuality all lacquered with the shiniest production imaginable.

A double-bill concert at silent green Kuppelhalle will feature Icelandic artist Hekla, whose highly-expressive songs exist outside of any particular scene or genre. Hekla’s haunting, spectral soundscapes take listeners on a singular walk through folkloric magick, sonic black holes of corrosive beauty, and mesmerising darkness. Appearing that night is also Daniel Blumberg, with the first performance of his striking new work GUT, an intensely personal piece of music that hails the next chapter in his artistic journey. Led by Blumberg’s soaring vocals and supported by an exploratory palette of bass harmonica, Steinberger bass, and drum machine, the artist channels a unique and captivating inner world with unflinching emotional directness. GUT will be released in May on Mute.

The concert is followed by a club night hosted by local Berlin collective WIDOWS, which aims to bring local, migrant, and international queer FLINTA* artists together through projects and events. Representing the collective is a cross-section of artists: assyouti, bAE.CON, lamb, creo en todo, makossiri, BLK SLK, plus Geisha online and DJ hot bitch playing both live and solo and b2b dj sets.

Following their triptych De Doden Hebben Het Goed, on which they processed their grief for a deceased friend, Wiegedood’s 2022 album is an uncompromising sonic assault that draws an impressive cathartic intensity from the dark core of black metal: On There is Always Blood at the End of the Road elegiac chord progressions, caustic noise and furious vocals lead through a sheer impenetrable wall of tremolo riffs and blast beats towards a liberating release of energy. The band rounds-out Berghain’s Wednesday night programme with acts Ana Fosca, Ruhail Qaisar, and Maria W Horn and Sara Parkman.

For our 2023 editions, transmediale and CTM will present a multilayered collaboration in three parts.

A two-night performance by Jennifer Walsheand Jon Leidecker.»MILLIONS OF EXPERIENCES (HUGE IF TRUE)«explores the paradoxes of scale in our current socio-economic environment. If the purpose of scale is to ensure costs remain low while growth is maximised, what is the opposite of scale? What could be made possible through unscaling? Walshe and Leidecker’s performance descales and unscales the technological processes at the core of their collaborative practices. Taking place on Feb 3rd and 5th with an ensemble of musicians, Walshe and Leidecker combine live voice, machine-made loops, AI-generated Enya, and an archive of voice samples to unsettle ideas of what is purely technological and purely human. On Sunday 5 Feb, Walshe and Leidecker bring this performance to a close with their epilogue, »MOREOVER,« an intimate performance that explores the idiosyncrasies of machine listening and digital sound while surfing the outer reaches of online culture. This event is not included in transmediale, CTM, or Connect passes – additional tickets must be purchased to attend.

transmediale and CTM will also meet in Berghain Säule for a programme which features a series of live sets somewhere between ritualistic noise, post-punk, digital deconstructions, and gabber, each with a unique performative edge that conjures portals to distinct worlds and fictions. The South Korean musician bela takes strong conceptual narratives to their works, as heard most recently through Guidelines, a release investigating Nongak, a traditional form of Korean folk music. Through a process of meticulously uncovering sheet music from government archives and ensemble performances on YouTube, bela has crafted an astonishing album of pulsing, splitting, time-warping music, rooted in a traditional past and yet entirely distinct from it. The duo Vieze Meisje bring pop, performance, humour, and rave in one dazzling act. Singer Maya Merten’s idiosyncratic poetry – heartwarmingly honest, hilariously funny and, at times, brutal – glides over the acrobatic beats and loops of producer Azertyklavierwerke. Donning pink hazmat suits, a noisy, industrial, femme waste removal service is performed by Dreamgirls(Clíona Ní Laoi and Michelle Doyle) who have come to clean up all the waste, spray disinfectant, and remove human stains. MusicMakers Hacklab co-host Verónica Mota appears as her Espectra Negra moniker, unfurling experimental, industrial, and ritualistic sonics between the Säule’s booming concrete pillars. Frequent CXEMA guest Jana Woodstock links the night’s sounds through wide-ranging interventions, pulling from her love of the many textures of music’s noisier and beat-propelled techno spectrum.

A unique closing concert, to be announced in early January, will explore isolation and survival in today’s collapsing ecosystems and information environments.

CTM partners with Refuge Worldwide for a second year, expanding the collaboration with this local Berlin radio and community that has quickly become a fixture for a thriving multitude of new artists and voices of the city. Together we’ll be bringing daily radio shows with festival artists over CTM’s 10 days, a DJ workshop with Happy New Tears at Refuge’s studio, as well as a dedicated dancefloor at RSO.Berlin.

The duos Menzi& Debmaster as well as Binghi&Astan KAwill grace the Refuge Worldwide stage at RSO.Berlin, joined by a group of Refuge regulars and collaborators. When not busy throwing events with  Einhundert or Paperwork, Nico Adomako surfs the UK bass horizon, adding selections of RnB, ghanaian sounds, and reggae to the brew. Lecken & Wax Treatment affiliate KILLA will go b2b with bass and leftfield house proponent Monibi. Refuge Worldwide co-founder Richard Akingbehin will warm up the room with a mix of dub-influenced club styles.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present the performance »Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve« by Alexis Blake during CTM 2023’s opening weekend. 

Alexis Blake’s multidisciplinary practice brings together visual art, dance, and performance. She perceives the body as an archive of embodied knowledge and investigates how women’s bodies are represented, which she critically examines, questions, disrupts, and renegotiates. Blake conceived »Crack Nerve boogie Swerve«in 2019 and will further develop the piece for this first presentation of her work in Germany. In it, Blakefocuses on notions of transparency, resistance, resonance, and breaking in relation to norms, constraints and oppression. The meaning and act of breaking are explored using sound, the voice, and the body in an installation made of glass and steel. Glass as a material becomes a performer as well as a metaphor for the individual and collective body as both inherently fragile and strong, depending on the way it is handled or treated. It is constantly in an in-between state, shifting between visibility and invisibility, clarity and opaqueness.

The performance brings together three musicians—producer and DJ mobilegirl, low frequency sound researcher Stefanie Egedy, and percussionist Sofia Borges—and six performers from a variety of dance backgrounds—breakdance, hip hop, house, waving, Afro-fusion, contemporary, and ballet. They aim not to appropriate each other’s sonic and body language. Rather they use the glass as a tool to communicate, break patterns, and collectively give rise to a new vocabulary of sound and movement, albeit without losing their subjectivity.

Holders of the CTM 2023 Pass and the transmediale+CTM 2023 Connect Pass can purchase reduced-price tickets

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 most concerts and events are on sale now.

The press accreditationapplication 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.