Moving between pressure and reflection through collective listening and dancing, CTM 2026 dissonate < > resonate invites us to inhabit the spaces in-between: the charged fields where frequencies meet, clash, and sometimes unexpectedly converge in moments of shared attunement.
Individual event tickets are going fast; check our festival schedule for full information.
Final Wave of CTM 2026 Artists and Projects
Newly confirmed acts and projects:
- Batu
- Coco Calypso
- ∈Y∋ and C.O.L.O
- Dror Feiler's NO Orchestra »No IS«
- DJ MELL G
- Lukas de Clerck
- Miss Tacacá
- Nunguja
- ohjeelo b2b Nico Adomako
- Shapednoise & Sevi Iko Dømochevsky »Absurd Matter Continuum«
CTM x transmediale collaborative concert with:
- Nursalim Yadi Anugerah »Lawing«
- Vica Pacheco »Animacy or A Breath Manifest«
Film screening: »Even Hell Has Its Heroes«, a documentary about the band Earth by Clyde Petersen
Resident Advisor x CTM Conference: »Rethinking Music Ecosystems« with:
- Austin Robey
- Anthea Caddy
- Assyouti
- Chloe Lula
- Gabriel Szatan
- Jan St. Werner
- Jarl Schulp
- Kathleen Wallfisch
- Lenny Watson (Sister Midnight)
- Lena Brecht (Khisdapaze)
- Louisa Pillot (Louisahhh)
- Lucia Udvardyová
- Maria W Horn
- Nino Pedrone (Shapednoise)
- Stefanie Egedy »Sonic Energetics« (World Premiere)
- Rabih Beaini (Morphine)
- White Prata
The CTM 2026 Discourse programme is completed with:
- Talks and discussions at the intersection of eco-violence, embodied artistic practice, and vibration and sound as indices of violence and power: Gascia Ouzounian, Ioana Vreme Moser, Mariana Berezovska, Nursalim Yadi Anugerah, Signe Lidén, and Svitlana Matvienko
- Artistic and research-driven examinations of the aesthetic and socio-political potentials of dissonate < > resonate with: Dror Feiler, Eiliyas, Leslie García (Microhm), Lottie Sebes, Mattin, and Vita Zelenska
- Artist talks with Hoda Afshar, Pinar Öğrenci, and Nikitan Kadan with moderators Natalie Kepler and Övül Durmusoglu
- Listening session with Isuru Kumarasinghe and Salomé Voegelin
- Resynthesising the Traditional talk by Anuar Duisenbinov
d&b Soundscape Workshops with Ralf Zuleeg & Marcin Pietruszewski, Felix Deufel, and Serge Graefe.
New Concerts & Club Acts
Three new acts join our spatial club night at Haus der Visionäre. Presented in collaboration with the collective No_Stone, who also curate a floor at our Friday RSO night, ∈Y∋, founder of avant-noise institution Boredoms and central figure in explosive performances from Hanatarash to BOADRUM, unites with C.O.L.O, the founder of Cosmic Lab and an architect of immersive visual realms, to dissolve the line between sound, image and space in real time. Together the two summon a unified sensory field where XR visuals, synchronized lighting and pulsating audio converge into an unbounded experience of perception and ritual.
Built around his recent albums Absurd Matter and Absurd Matter 2, Shapednoise’s »Absurd Matter Continuum« was developed in collaboration with Barcelona-based producer and visual artist Sevi Iko Dømochevsky, a specially conceived spatial audio-visual performance plunging the audience into a sewer-like CGI underworld. The night closes with a spatial DJ set by DJ MELL G of fast-edged industrial-electro, a cyberpunk’s Vurt-addled dream of warped breakbeats and pulses.
Joining the Oroko Radio-curated floor at RSO.Berlin, Batu reshapes techno and soundsystem language with deliberate focus, guided by evolving concepts and sources of inspiration. Recent releases strip that curiosity back to the core, sharpening the physical charge and immediacy of his dancefloor material. ohjeelo snaps together Afro-Caribbean rhythms, bass pressure and club sounds from around the world: bouyon, coupé-décalé, grime, gqom, jungle, and percussive electronics collide and refract in her selections. She’s going B2B with co-founder of Oroko Radio and DJ collective Einhundert Nico Adomako. Opening the night, Coco Calypso's high impact underground sets merge Afro-Caribbean and Latin rhythms with bass-heavy club music, gritty electronics, R&B, rap and UK soundsystem groovage. Her club selections move fluently between sweat soaked anthems and percussive pressure, while her sets on Oroko Radio are driven by rhythm-first storytelling.
Closing the CTM x transmediale night in Säule, Miss Tacacá is shaping a futuristic vision of Amazonian club music. Rooted in tecnomelody and tecnobrega, Caribbean rhythms slip into her mixes alongside brega funk, synthesizers and distorted melodic hooks, creating sets that feel fast, physical and hypnotic.
Completing the No_Stone curated floor at RSO:Berlin on Friday, Nunguja’s sets are exploratory and grounded at once, steeped in experimental textures and structures, strands of traditional African music interlaced into a borderless sonic language.
Dror Feiler channels his uncompromising engagement with politics and resistance into his new project »No IS«. The phrase forms a tiny rebellion against »what is,« negating the »is« that justifies violence, hierarchy, markets, dispossession, and obedience by claiming that things are simply »as they are«. Joined by his NO Orchestra – this time composed of fellow experimental musicians Boris Baltschun, Laure Boer, Greta Christensen, Mazen Kerbaj, Mats Lindström, Magda Mayas, Gustavo Obligado, and Camilla Sörensen – high-pressure sonic fields collide with the poetry of Ghayath Almadhoun, speaking from the wound of exile, war, and ongoing destruction that the world prefers to describe as »the way things are.«
A solo acoustic performance by Lukas de Clerck dives into speculative music reimagining the aulos, an ancient Greco-Roman double-reed pipe for which we have no sonic record. Creating replicas of the instrument thanks to the written archive, De Clerck opens-up the aulos to personal and collaborative sonic experimentation, reaching into microtonality, psychoacoustics, texture and abrasive drones.
transmediale x CTM 2026 Collaborative Concert
A concert with our sister festival transmediale brings together two artists redefining indigenous methods and how we relate to breath. In »Animacy or A Breath Manifest«, animism and technology merge into an immersive sound performance by Vica Pacheco. Inspired by pre-Columbian Mesoamerican whistling vessels, hydraulic ceramic sculptures function as both instruments and objects, producing sound through air and water. A composition and installation drawing from deforestation maps and empirical data from Kalimantan gathered between 2006 and 2013, Nursalim Yadi Anugerah’s »Lawing« translates this environmental loss into sound, weaving personal memory with ecological record. Central to the work is the modified kadedek, a reimagined Dayak free-reed mouth organ which becomes both instrument and witness, carrying data and environmental rupture into an embodied aural form.
CTM x Resident Advisor »Rethinking Music Ecosystems«
Resident Advisor and CTM team up for a conference dedicated to the future of independent electronic music communities. Bringing together artists, organisers, technologists, venue operators, and cultural workers, Rethinking Music Ecosystems is an ongoing CTM festival thread. With this new collaboration with Resident Advisor, the strand takes new shape with a one-day programme that looks at how global electronic scenes are responding to mounting pressure from platform monopolies, venue closures, political instability, and economic precarity.
The opening session with Assyouti, Gabriel Szatan, Maria W Horn, and White Prata explores how contemporary noise and experimental artists use extreme volume, dissonance, and distortion as an aesthetic strategy for navigating positionality and experiences of dysphoria in response to tense times.
Two companion panels examine the shrinking space for independent culture in Europe and the concurrent need for DIY independent frameworks in the face of rising economic and political instability. A session with Choe Lula, Lenny Watson (Sister Midnight), Lena Brecht (Khisdapaze), and Tresor Foundation addresses ongoing and urgent need for durable grassroots frameworks that can protect artistic autonomy. Expanding into cross-disciplinary exchange and technological infrastructures, a conversation with Austin Robey (Subvert), Louisa Pillot aka Louisahhh, and Michail Stangl dives into cooperative ownership models and community-run spaces as concrete responses to venue closures and platform consolidation.
A discussion with Kathleen Wallfisch (Music in Vision), Lucia Udvardyová (Easterndaze), and Sam Slater explores the immense impact of independent experimental music scenes and aesthetics into the film industry, suggesting a need for new models of support in a highly asymmetrical relationship.
A panel discussion with Anthea Caddy, Jan St. Werner (Mouse on Mars), Jarl Schulp (Fiber Festival), and Nino Pedone aka Shapednoise looks at spatial sound as a shift in how listening, and performance are being redefined inside clubs and concert spaces, while keeping a critical eye on artistic agency, accessibility, and structural exclusion.
Opening and closing the conference is the world premiere of Sonic Energetics by low-frequency sound artist Stefanie Egedy, a shared coping ritual for overstimulated times. This experiential environment invites participants into a field of sub-bass vibration and softened light where sound is felt through the body as pressure and resonance.
CTM 2026 Discourse programme
This year's Discourse programme engages with dissonance and resonance as companions in a complex dance. Artist talks and presentations, lecture-performances, and panel discussions examine artistic practice, ear witnessing, and (embodied) listening as methods of navigating complex musical, social, and political interrelationships.
The programme opens with two days exploring sonic and eco-violence with a keynote by Svitlana Matviyenko, artist presentations by Ioana Vreme Moser and Signe Lidén, and a discussion on how artists work at the intersection of sound and ecology with alen hast, Nursalim Yadi Anugerah, Ioana Vreme Moser, and Mariana Berezovska. Approaching ecology as something felt through vibration, pressure, toxicity, resonance, and interference, inviting audiences into ways of listening that move between studio, fieldwork, archives, and self-built technologies.
On the second day, sound and vibration recur as key epistemic tools to show how infrastructures and landscapes become recording surfaces for violence, while also offering possibilities for resistance and counter-memory. The day features a lecture-performance by Gascia Ouzounian, as well as an artist talk with Nikita Kadan, examining his ongoing deconstruction of the visual narratives of empire, nationalism, and nation-building through the lens and history of Ukraine.
The third day features performances and discussions with the fellows of the Resynthesising the Traditional Lab – Bint Mbareh, Dorothy Carlos, Maarja Nuut, Marina Tantanozi, Miłosz Kędra, and Saba Alizadeh led by Stas Shärifullá and Yara Mekawei – as previously announced.
Day four threads through our theme of dissonate < > resonate, treating sound as both diagnostic and method. Talks by Vita Zelenska and Mattin explore social dissonance as a structural condition of contemporary life, through the lens of migration at the EU border, and contemporary life in Germany respectively. A panel discussion with Dror Feiler, Eiliyas (Mixtape Menage), Leslie García (Microhm), and Lottie Sebbes frames the aesthetic and socio-political potentials of noise as practice, approaching dissonance as a way of building and breaking systems.
On the fifth day a presentation and listening session with Isuru Kumarasinghe and Salomé Voegelin trace experimentation as an ethic of attunement, offering ways to consciously reorient them.
For the festival closing day, the poet and artistic producer Anuar Duisenbinov examines the tension between preserving and breaking open past knowledge, braided with examples from various projects rooted in Kazakh knowledge. His talk is followed by a roundtable discussion with the Resynthesising the Traditional artistic fellows who will share insights into the discussions, prototyping, and imagination that took place during the lab week, inviting the audience to jump into the circle with their own questions and inputs.
d&b Soundscape Workshops
Immersive, spatial, or object-based audio make a significant difference in today's audio productions and performances. Within CTM’s dedicated thread on the expanded possibilities of spatial audio The Fifth Ear, several workshops will take place in collaboration with d&b audiotechnik around their Soundscape spatial audio system to allow everyone interested to familiarise themselves with the idea of immersive audio and understand the concept of object-based audio.
The first workshop of the series aims to inspire new modes of thought towards audio, opening up a new dimension of creativity. d&b’s Soundscape creator Ralf Zuleeg will introduce the different technologies available, while composer Marcin Pietruszewski will share creative ways to compose and produce with object-based audio based on his »Oto Aulos« project, a collaboration with instrumentalist Lukas de Clerck, to premiere at CTM 2026. The session will also include a brief introduction to a piece of open source software, developed by Pietruszewski for the realisation of »Oto Aulos« and aimed at connecting object based audio systems with machine listening for responsive automated real-time spatialisation. The workshop’s goal is to inspire you to create object-based audio pieces yourself.
Hosted by Felix Deufel, another workshop gives an introduction to Grapes 3D, a universal 3D audio control software designed for live performance, show control, and the composition of spatial audio formats. Developed by Deufel’s Not a Number Studio, Grapes 3D is supportive of varied workflows while opening up an intuitive way of choreographing sound objects in space, bringing an intriguing foregrounding of gesture and expressivity to spatial composition.
Drawing on decades of experience and his work as front-of-house engineer for the legendary band Kraftwerk, host Serge Gräfe takes participants deep into the d&b Soundscape ecosystem, revealing real-world mixing and control workflows used on the highest professional level.
Festival Passes and Accreditation
CTM Festival passes remain on sale in limited quantities. You can choose from CTM Festival passes which grant access to most CTM events, weekend passes for each respective CTM Festival weekend, and Connect Passes for access to both CTM + transmediale.
Event tickets are also available.
The press accreditationapplication period is now closed.