This new constellation of performances, club nights, exhibitions, and research formats coalesces across experimental electronics and intimate songwriting, trance-inducing rituals, and razor-edged bass mutations, diving into the complex musical, social, political interrelationship explored within this festival edition’s dissonate < > resonate theme.
Our festival schedule with individual event tickets is now online.
Stay tuned for news on our festival exhibition plus workshops next week. The Discourse programme and final acts will be announced in January.
Third Wave of CTM 2026 Artists and Projects
Newly confirmed acts and projects:
- Aunty Rayzor
- Blawan
- Clementaum
- Container
- CRRDR
- Daniel Brandt – »Without Us« Live A/V
- Dengue Dengue Dengue
- DJ Chad
- Emma Ruth Rundle
- Ellen Arkbro with The London Crumhorn Consort
- JADA
- Jay Mitta x Anti Vairas
- Jensen Interceptor
- Khalil Epi – »Aïchoucha«
- Microhm
- Milkweed
- NET GALA
- ophélie
- Sam Slater – »Lunng« with video by Lukas Feigelfeld, lights by Theresa Baumgartner, and guest appearance by Maria W Horn, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Hilary Jeffery and Cavid Dhen
- Tony Njoku
- tripes
- UTILITY
A co-production with HAU Hebbel am Ufer: Kat Válastur & Aho Ssan – »MoonJar«
Plus Research Networking Day presentations hosted by Anita Jóri (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Darsha Hewitt (Kunst Universität Linz), and Sarah Indriyati-Hardjowirogo (Universität Oldenburg) with presentations by: Aleksei Borisionok, Ana Rita Costa, Angus Tarnawsky, Eleanor Griffiths, Federica Notari, Gabriele Murano, Kika Echeverría, Lefteris Krysalis, Morten Poulsen.
Concerts and Commissioned Works
Presenting the live premiere of the album and A/V show »Lunng«, Sam Slater’s heavy experimental electronics and layered sound design takes on new dimensions through Lukas Feigelfeld’s chilling cinematic visuals and Theresa Baumgartner’s monumental lighting display. Over Slater’s distorted and energetic compositions, Feigelfeld’s eerily processed dashcam footage merges seamlessly with Baumgartner’s immersive light theatrics, creating a dialogue between the identity-defining urgency of adolescent roadtrip listening and the uneasy bandwidth of the current moment. Memory and immediacy collapse into a disorienting, genre-bent reverie: one eye on the rearview and the other fixed on the unknown. This performance features special guest appearances by Maria Horn, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Hilary Jeffery and Cavid Dhen.
Emma Ruth Rundle remains a restless spirit at the edges of doom-folk and ambient existentialism, drawn into shadow and myth. Since the stark emotional exposure of her work Engine of Hell, her work has moved even further inward, embracing restraint and negative space as active forces. Her music now unfolds less as narrative songwriting and more as emotional architecture, slow-burn structures honed by the sharp winds of grief and memory. After having to cancel her previous CTM appearance, she'll be presenting a new performance.
Premiering the results of her CTM × Somerset House × Goethe-Institut commission, Ellen Arkbro performs alongside The London Crumhorn Consort in a new work for reed organ and crumhorns. Developed during her early 2025 residency in London, the piece continues Arkbro’s inquiry into finely tuned harmonic architectures. The performers lean into the trembling nature of fully in-tune sound, listening and sounding as a single body. Working with seven-limit just intonation, they hold tones attempting to create stable compositional blocks almost like a synthesizer, juxtaposed with the crumhorn’s inherently unruly breath-bound nature — a buzzy timbre and rich resonance which resists perfect steadiness. The music’s core is found in that tension between the unreachable ideal of a pure tone and the effort required to approach it.
Presenting his new album »Without Us« with a live concert interwoven with his film of the same name, composer and percussionist Daniel Brandt pushes his exploration of collective dread and ecological unraveling into a speculative narrative driven by the slow violence of climate collapse and the possibilities and limits of individual agency. Directed together with Anthony Dickinson and produced by ANORAK and STRRR, the film mirrors the album’s molten textures: skittering percussion and melted-mellotron haze, throbbing with the restless churn of an »apocalyptic rave« born from Brandt’s field recordings, including the ambient hum of Europe’s largest mall. Charged with the uneasy pulse of a freefalling world, Brandt’s work is a human-scaled response to forces far larger than us.
Milkweed twist fragments of memory and myth into lo-fi folk songs, grinding tradition through experimental productions simultaneously evocative of uncanny age and contemporary sharpness. Working from a setup of detuned guitars, salvaged tape decks and deliberately crippled softsynths, the duo build broken heirloom melodies patchworked from half-forgotten nursery rhymes and rhythms traced from communal dances, slow-burning rites of the ancient and the handcrafted present blurred into one trembling luminous thread.
Tony Njoku layers granular vocal fragments over detuned pads, letting harmonies smear into respirating consistencies. The world of the Nigerian-British artist is one of fragile synth etudes and hyper-detailed percussion, haunted by a falsetto ache of a spectral voice. Intimate whispered melodies erupting suddenly with distorted low end and swarms of metallic drum clusters mirror the emotional whiplash he pulls from the spirits of r&b and avant pop, live-looped and saturated in blown-out droneage before being peeled back to reveal a stark heartbeat rhythm.
Our Resynthesising The Traditional thematic thread – encompassing a namesake artistic lab as well as performances by artists such as Sote, CORIN, Ellen Arkbro, Marcin Pietruszewski and Lukas de Clerck, and gamut inc – will close with Khalil Epi’s immersive solo performance »Aïchoucha,« an encounter between live synths and instrumentals with sweeping three-channel imagery that traces a raw and intimate cartography of Tunisia’s musical lineages. Filmed and composed by Hentati across the country, this contemporary reactivation of living traditions summons women’s chants, trance rituals, work rhythms, and songs carried by place. The performance, as well as an artist talk and workshop tba in our next announcement, are presented with AL Berlin, a vibrant SWANA music and art node in the city.
The previously announced Growlers Choir will be seeking new members based in Berlin and Europe to be part of future European productions and performances. Selected applicants will be invited for an online interview in January 2026 as well as to participate in a two-hour casting session on January 25th, 2026 at Radialsystem as part of CTM 2026. The casting session will be open to the public. Applications are open until January 9.
Club Programme
Our club programme expands with a unique Saturday night rager at Haus der Visionäre, delivering special spatial audio sets on d&b Soundscape’s system. Headlining the night with a specially conceived spatial version of his 2025 LP SickElixier in his premiere German live performance, Blawan has long been a defining figure in the more confrontational edges of club and techno music, from his early post-dubstep cuts to the industrial-inflected techno he helped pioneer. Across his solo work, collaborative projects and live hardware sets he’s shown a rare ability to bend harsh textures into groovage that feels alive and deliciously addictive.
Jensen Interceptor fuses the precise geometry of Detroit electro, the swagger of Miami bass, early Italo groove’s cheeky wiggle, EBM’s brooding weight, and the twitchy impulse of mutated ghettotech. Australian-born and now based in Berlin, his fearless synthesis has dropped through heavyweight outlets like Boysnoize Records and Central Processing Unit as well as his own co-run imprint International Chrome: deep slabs of metallic electro-funk rhythms, hard-edged 808 bursts and serpentine basslines, all chilled nicely with industrial coldness. Berlin-based French DJ and producer ophélie crafts HD low end-driven music drifting across dubstep, techno, and IDM, shaped by UK sound system culture and melancholic sound worlds. Drawn to organic and emotional weight, her bass-driven narratives and sophisticated percussion often tint and tinkle with strands of psychedelia and trancey elements inspired by forests and oceans. She’ll be driving down strange aural avenues with her special Ambrio Mixer spatial set. NET GALA'smeticulously carved rhythms splice percussion logics with the tension-and-release pneumatics of death drops, distorted signals and queer-coded references jostling each other through the kinetic sensibility of Seoul’s experimental club underground. First sparked in the queer DIY rave circuit, their lurching rhythms discard snares and hi-hats or swap them out entirely to lay atop footwork-speed grids, pitched-up hooks and softsynth leads pushed until they rasp.
Saturday night’s RSO main floor features co-curation with Ghana’s Oroko Radio. Operating as a not-for-profit project, Oroko frames its programming around collaboration and community building, broadcasting weekday sets and conversations that braid local Accra scenes with global diasporic flows.
Joining the already announced Boutcha Bwa come three names that bring just that. Tanzanian MC and performer Anti Vairas is fast becoming one of the biggest faces in Singeli, the high-velocity streetborn genre rooted in Dar es Salaam’s working-class neighborhoods. Blending frenetic 200–300 BPM beats with rapid-fire Kiswahili, she channels the daily hustle and the sweet resistance of nightlife through a roughness born of second-hand gear and street-level production. Joining her is one of Singeli’s foundational producers. Where some peers lean more toward abrasive maximalism, Jay Mitta’s productions have a more layered personality, varied in tempo and texture with moments that flirt with swung rhythms and fleeting dubbage, alive with subtlety. Mauritius-based producer tripes draws on the polyrhythms of the Indian Ocean, bringing elements of traditional Sega and Maloya together with pulses of Angolan kuduro, Moroccan gnawa and South-Indian percussion traditions. These references are then transmogrified into a modern electronic dialect, their rhythms maintaining their ancestral swing and complexity and bolstered with sharp percussive hits, shifting meters, shattered effects and sleek digi-textures.
Joining our collaborative RSO floor with the collective No_Stone, Container is one of electronic music’s most reliably unhinged visionaries. He’s been blending his unique mishmash of noise rock, hardware tape experiments and club rhythms since 2009, carving out concrete slabs into a brutally unique niche: unsubtle, abrasive and distorted yet unyieldingly rhythmic and dance-driven. Perfectly described as »Lollapalooza 1996 held at Berghain 2006«, his latest album Yacker leans deeper into the rock-addled energy, sweaty drum machines channeling grunge aggression and hardcore absurdity alongside the relentless forward drive of warehouse techno.
A wave of new artists completes our January 29th Panorama Bar lineup: DJ, dancer and curator JADA has quickly made waves in club and ballroom circles, her sets traversing house and breakbeat to bass-heavy club music weaving in R&B, rap, baile funk and soulful jazzy touches. Carved by club knowledge and community awareness, she programs rooms and reads crowds with a deft eye and ear.
Chicago’s DJ Chad grew up in the echo of footwork’s birth and the global ripples of his father DJ Rashad. By the early 2020s he began stepping onto lineups, layering juke-influenced rhythms and glitch-driven bass into his pulsing sets. This collected work within his 2024 release Ghetto Origins rattles with underground urgency, samples pitched and drums off-kilter, footwork moves reframed through his own simmering perspective. Composer, producer and founder of the Trackwork imprint, the Sydney-based UTILITY drives the forward edge of club rap and experimental rhythms, shaping scenes as much as he crafts tracks. His label has become a platform for cross-genre storytelling and striking A/V worlds that travel from local communities to international airwaves.
In An ITCZ of Many Tongues, transmediale × CTM invite a night where sonic currents meet like winds in the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Across Säule, hemispheric pulses collide and braid. These artists speak in many tongues—of bass, breath, drum, texture, glitch, and time-honored signal. Their poly(algo)rhythms function as vibrational languages, carrying the atmospheres of many skies, mountains, and waters, into Berlin’s subterranean chamber.
Joining the previously announced DJ Love, the artists turn the dancefloor into an ITCZ: a convergence zone of climates, cultures and cosmotechnical imaginations, where compassing algo·rhythms become method, orientation, and multi-world-making. Aunty Rayzor cuts through dancefloors with fierce punk-sharpened power. The Lagos-bred rapper, vocalist and performance artist hones industrial edges with gqom grit and left-field hip-hop, threaded with a sharp sense of satire and feminist bite. Her live shows bolster this confrontational energy with a theatrical flair. Long at the centre of Lima’s psychedelic club renaissance, Peruvian duo Dengue Dengue Dengue warp cumbia, dub, and bass-heavy electronica into neon-lit fun with a cratehead’s appetite for folkloric textures. Their productions slither and blossom quivering synths, hand-woven percussion threaded with low-end pulses that throb like an Amazonian night. Masked and steeped in visual mystique, their collective fever dream of digital futurism is built on the shivering bones of their past.
At the forefront of a new wave of post-pandemic producers pioneering new forms of guaracha and latincore, CRRDR twists guaracha’s kinetic rhythms into the playful and unruly mutation Uwuaracha, where cartoon physics collide. His productions favour elastic grooves and skewed dembow references, gleefully warping textures and folding street-level energy into unstable club forms. The pressure percolates from imbalance and excess, a sound that teases, glitches and spirals. Hailing from Paraná, Brazil, Clementaum has quickly become a force in the global underground electronic scene. With roots in fashion and deep ties to the ballroom community (where she holds the title »Overall Princess Harpya«), her presence transforms any dancefloor into a vibrant and inclusive world. Her sets are a high-voltage fusion of baile funk, tribal house, techno, Latin rhythms, and ballroom flair , celebrating identity and community. The alias of Mexican electronic artist, producer and member of the collective Interspecifics, Leslie García’s DJ sets as Microhm are dark and contemplative, pulsating beats detouring down disorienting ambient lanes into glitch-riddled Latin rhythms.
Research Networking Day 2026
Our yearly Research Networking Day will assemble nine scholars and artists/researchers from a variety of fields who will present research addressing the CTM 2026 dissonate < > resonate theme. Speakers were selected via open call, this year numbering over 100 applications. They will give short presentations within different thematic modules, moderated by Anita Jóri, Darsha Hewitt, and Sarah Indriyati-Hardjowirogo, with discussions after each presentation and at the end of each session. This year’s speakers are: Aleksei Borisionok, Ana Rita Costa, Angus Tarnawsky, Eleanor Griffiths, Federica Notari, Gabriele Murano, Kika Echeverría, Lefteris Krysalis, and Morten Poulsen. Presentations will be in English, and entrance to the event is free. This RND edition will take place on Saturday 31.1.2026 at daadgalerie in collaboration with Leuphana University Lüneburg, Kunst Universität Linz, and Universität Oldenburg.
Partner Programme: MoonJar
CTM Festival is a co-production partner for »MoonJar,« a new performance by Kat Válastur and musician Aho Ssan, which will run parallel to CTM Festival 2026 over four consecutive nights at HAU2. In »MoonJar,« choreographer and performer Kat Válastur and musician Aho Ssan sculpt a poetic interplay of sound, movement, and clay that gathers into an intense, near-ceremonial performance. Inspired by ancient creation myths and the materiality of earthen forms, they transform the space into a resonant vessel where Válastur initiates a ritual of renewal. Lifting magical ceramic objects crafted by Latika Nehra, her spiral and circular motions echo lunar cycles, ancestral traces, and the helical patterns of life.
Expanded by contributions from Sam Slater and Jakob Vasak, Aho Ssan’s immersive aurals entwine the archaic and the contemporary. »MoonJar« emerges as a charged site of transformation and radical potential.
This event is not included in festival passes.
Festival Passes and Accreditation
CTM Festival passes are 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. Single tickets to most events are available.
The press accreditation application period is open until 9 January 2026. Journalists can apply to cover CTM or transmediale respectively, or for a combined accreditation to both festivals.