Go to CTM 2026 Sub-site Festival Passes
Spanning concert and club programmes, our first lineup tunnels through doom and drone, erupting in blackened choral metal and mutating into amalgams of noise-laced chaos and bass-heavy tropical heat. From spectral Americana to Afrofuturist cartographies mapped through pop’s distorted mirror, we open with every frequency aching to break form.
Running 23 January – 1 February 2026 at Radialsystem, Berghain, RSO.Berlin, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Morphine Raum, and the new warehouse venue Haus der Visionäre, CTM Festival’s 27th edition will dive into the complex dance between dissonance and resonance, where spectral textures, melodies on the edge of tonal precipices, and frequencies oscillating between harmony, shrouds of distortion, and sharp ruptures sonically evoke existence in multiple, often extremely contradictory realities simultaneously. The CTM 2026 theme 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.
A reminder that our open call for the 2026 Research Networking Day is still open until 26 October. RND invites researchers and artists conducting self-guided research to submit proposals for short presentations traversing the fields of audio, arts, media, design, and related theoretical disciplines. The Vorspiel 2026 call for participants, aimed at independent project spaces, platforms, initiatives, curators and artists based in Berlin, is also currently running until 5 November.
First Acts
We launch our 2026 programming with artists:
- ABOPF
- Stygian Bough – A Bell Witch & Aerial Ruin Collaboration
- Boutcha Bwa
- CATNAPP
- CORIN – »Resonance«
- Cortisa Star
- Earth
- Emiddio Vasquez – »21s«
- GAZAEBAL
- Growlers Choir – »Voices of the Void«
- Guedra Guedra
- KAVARI
- Khrystyna Kirik x Mark Bain with lighting by zeroday – »The Core«
- Marcin Pietruszewski with Lukas de Clerck – »Oto Aulos«
- Nataša Grujović & Steve Moore
- Pain Magazine
- RONI
- Sote – »Sound Design In Far Sea«
- Tohal Kyna & Sara Persico
- undo despot x Zeynep Schilling x alen hast + myk rudik – »Heavy Waters«
- Valesuchi
- Vartan Markarian – »Horizons of Extinction«
- Yetsuby
Opening our 2026 edition, Dylan Carlson’s Earth embodies the very friction and harmony at the core of dissonate <> resonate: their slow-motion gravity pulls distortion and clarity into continual negotiation. Masters of building emotional weight so glacial it dismembers perception, each performance becomes a mirage, songs blossoming, collapsing inward, and reconstituting into heaving new shapes. Across the decades they’ve stretched outward to encompass minimalist doom, ambient country and folk-psychedelia into their time-warpage. At CTM these legends will be performing their 2005 album Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method in full. Tickets for this show are already available here.
They’ll be supported by Nataša Grujović and Steve Moore whose accordion, analogue synthetics and trombone shape resonant fields that breathe within the rooms they inhabit: waves of tone that move between ritualised drone, spiritual jazz, and the echoes of Western classical forms in which resonance reigns suspended between the tangible and the transcendental. Tickets for this concert are now on sale.
Founded by composer Pierre-Luc Senécal, the ten-piece Growlers Choir is composed solely of metal vocalists called »growlers,« coming from different metal subcultures. Their compositions are cacophonic beasts that pull from the vast palette of the genre’s distinctive styles to combine grunts, fry screams, pig squeals, snarls and wails with whispered breaths, ASMR textures and effects, metamorphosing between blackened hellpits and acappella compositions pulled gasping from hallowed places.
Together, Bell Witch's Dylan Desmond and Jesse Shreibman and Erik Moggridge’s Aerial Ruin breathe a vast, slow-burning fire. Doom's gravity is harrowed toward something spectrally devotional, a reverence dragged across the threshold of death's hush, ever deeper into desolation. Their new album Stygian Bough: Volume II is a slow awakening of faith under duress. Circling a desolate sun of worship and consequence, the form is cyclical, ascending and folding back into itself while being reshaped by the shadow of what it has already consumed.
Influenced by found-footage horror film and gaming’s immersion, KAVARI shakes viscerally and grips cinematically with a relentless collision of brutalist bass, industrial weight, dubstep grit, and gnawed-open club freakage, driven by stark emotional passages drifting between decompositions.
Valesuchi channels the complexity of Latin America’s aural fabric into a deliciously oddball form of techno, drawing from experimental electronics and the percussive traditions of her surroundings. Presenting her new album and live set, expect a synthesis and rhythm evocative of the melancholy of cities, brightened with the warmth of community.
A fusion of French post-hardcore outfit Birds in Row with Maelstrom and Louisahhh, Pain Magazine make their German premiere at CTM. Their debut album Violent God wrests with internal and external tyranny, harshed-out guitar energy and pulses of smoldering-circuit bleepage bleeding into raw-voxed confrontationisms, the corrosive effects of unchecked capitalism eviscerated to show how it devours dignity, necessity, and hope.
As Boutcha Bwa, Ken’zii and Koko are at the cutting edge of Caribbean shatta and bouyon, each track an open-wide invitation to move, grind, flirt, shatter and rise again. Their emergence from the underground circuits of Guadeloupe to global club institutions traces a lineage of inherited basslines and riddims as rebellion. Hymnographers to dance and sex in all its forms, they make subs strut with a sassy flex.
Leaning into the collision of techno, bass, Latin-driven percussion and club mutations, Nehza Records founder RONI twists threads from across the globe to curate restless dancefloors. A dab hand at uncovering unexpected connections in sound, her label has become a space of thriving experimentation and essential new voices.
19 year old rapper Cortisa Star yoinks from the flavors of rap, drill, and hyperpop, stitching them together with heavy 808s and vocal distortion bordering on violence. MP3s feel like they’re clawing their way out of a screen: magnetic anthems for the perpetually online.
Premiering her new album and live set, CATNAPP’s aggressive low-end and blunt confessionals billow with the incense of club ruin and bedroom breakdown, a blend of futuristic, nostalgia-laden pop laced liberally with trance hooks, R&B slap, and numetal aggression sewn up with tenderness.
Guedra Guedra grounds his work in the philosophies of Afrofuturism and decolonisation. His debut album Mutant gathers sounds from across the African continent: field recordings, hand percussion, ancient instruments, and electronic pulses all treated equally as part of an ongoing dialogue. His name itself - a pot turned into a drum - encapsulates this transformation: a vessel to feed both body and spirit.
CTM Radio Lab
The CTM Radio lab returns again this year with one commission selected via open call. Active for more than a decade in shaping the Cypriot underground, CTM 2026 Radio Lab winner Emiddio Vasquez reweaves personal memory with deep historical research to probe how mediated sensing influences subjectivity and power.
The Cypriot-Dominican artist and musician traces how sound and computation (often mistaken for the immaterial) are rooted in the textures of substance, resonance, and history. His project »21s« is a dense confabulation radio drama permeating the nexus of militarism and club culture in Ayia Napa, Cyprus. The piece aims to reflect on the »resonant circuit« as a point of departure that makes tuning to radio frequencies in the ether possible, and how that resonant phenomenon is always confronted with »unwanted« noise and interference during its transmission.
The Radio Lab is a project by Deutschlandfunk Kultur – Hörspiel / Klangkunst and CTM Festival in collaboration with Goethe-Institut, ORF Ö1 Kunstradio, the Radio Lab sought proposals relating to the festival theme »Sustain« that also engaged with the artistic possibilities of radio and live performance mediums. This year it is also presented within the framework of the sound art initiative tekhnė, which is co-funded by the Creative Union programme of the European Union.
Resynthesising the Traditional
Our Resynthesising the Traditional thematic strand will return to the festival with performances, talks, and an artistic lab. The initiative takes resynthesis – a processing method in computer music that analyzes sounds to extract their fundamental components – as a guiding metaphor to confront conservative views of culture as something frozen and thus resistant to any transformative practices.
The first announced highlight performances will take place at Haus der Visionäre, a new warehouse venue in the heart of Berlin-Kreuzberg which will house a programme dedicated series on spatial and immersive sound thanks to a partnership with d&b audiotechnik, creators of the pioneering object-based audio system d&b Soundscape, providing high-resolution spatial audio and virtual acoustics to create immersive experiences.
»Oto Aulos« by Marcin Pietruszewski and aulos performer Lukas de Clerck centres on the creation of a new composition for aulos and computer, using machine listening and machine processing techniques to transform the instrument’s live signal into a dynamically spatialised hybrid real-time environment. Unfolding where myth, media archaeology, sound politics (past and present), and speculative human–machine interaction meet, it centres around the aulos – an ancient double-pipe instrument entwined with the mythology of Pan, god of wilderness and ecstatic disorder. The aulos is reimagined not as a museum artefact but as a volatile, contested sound technology whose mythic legacy of dissonance, rupture, and ecstatic embodiment resonates with today’s fractured sonic landscape. The project also explores how spatial sound technologies can reshape musical structure and listening practices by embedding machine perception into real-time spatial dramaturgy.
In collaboration with Berlin’s Forecast Mentorships programme, another spatial concert will feature a pillar of Iran’s music community, Sote, and rising talent CORIN, who were paired in 2025 through Forecast’s mentorship programme.
At CTM 2026, Sote will preview »Sound Design In Far Sea«, a live exploration departing from the confines of structure. Transformed echoes of Persian instruments and field recordings from Iran dissolve into shimmering layers of synthesis, microscopic sonic detail and tactile density shaping a landscape where memory turns liquid and history drifts through circuitry. Performed in an immersive surround format using the d&b Soundscape system, the piece submerges its audience in a sea of disorientation and awe, a shifting zone where resonance and abstraction entwine like light refracted underwater.
Haunted by future folklore, the work of CORIN converges into a portal built from speculative fiction, ancestral memory, and hyperdigital production: ambient drift, warped polyrhythms, and long hikes through the uncanny valley. Her performance »Resonance« creates harmonic and rhythmic systems within non-Western musical ecologies by sampling the kulintang, a Filipino precolonial gong chime instrument: alternate futures tethered to ancestral memory.
A Resynthesising the Traditional artistic lab will also take place at the festival again this year with co-hosts Yara Mekawei and Stas Shärifullá, following a lab edition within the Korkut II Sonic Arts Triennale this October in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Selected fellows for CTM 2026 will be announced later this month.
WeSA x CTM
We join forces with Seoul festival WeSA for a collaboration with four Seoul-based artists: WeSA founder GAZAEBAL, Yetsuby, ABOPF, and Tohal Kyna performing together with Berlin artist Sara Persico in a specially developed collaboration. Founded in 2014, WeSA has grown into a year-round institution that combines its annual festival with the WeSA Academy, a platform for workshops, studios, and performance spaces that nurture and support emerging Korean artists.
A key figure in Korea’s experimental scene, WeSA founder GAZAEBAL's meticulous analogue synths breath dark, immersive drones and modulations merging precision and emotion. Influenced by Pan Sonic and Merzbow, Tohal Kyna sculpts raw noise and feedback with intense control. His collaboration with Italian artist Sara Persico will merge his heavy sound with her awareness of what’s often unheard. Kyna will also join an artist talk exploring the psychology of noise. Yetsuby bridges experimental and dancefloor sensibilities in her solo work and duo Salamanda. Rounding out the lineup, ABOPF fuses bass, IDM, ambient, and hip-hop into hybrid soundscapes shaped by her fascination with consciousness and fantasy.
Ahead of CTM Festival, our cross-collaboration in Seoul at WeSa features performances by Jessica Ekomane, Thomas Ankersmit, and Jan St. Werner, plus Sara Persico performing both solo and with Tohal Kyna.
∄ x CTM present Disturbed Ground
Disturbed Ground is a collaboration by Kyiv’s ∄ and CTM Festival, supported by the Goethe-Institut Co-production Fund, bringing together Ukrainian and international artists to create two audiovisual performances responding to the ecological consequences of war in Ukraine. At ∄’s u2203 studio in Kyiv this past June, the artists worked with scientists and researchers investigating environmental destruction caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion.
In »The Core,« Khrystyna Kirik and Mark Bain use seismic data–from daily base readings in Poltava to missile strikes and explosions in Kharkiv and Kherson to translate violence into vibration and sound – layering low-frequency waves, sonic winds, frequency pools, dense drones, voice, and high-frequency textures – asking what the land feels and whether we can learn to feel with it. Their performance will be enhanced by special lighting from Kyiv artist zeroday.
In »Heavy Waters« by undo despot, Zeynep Schilling, and alen hast + myk rudik of u2203 Studio, visual language from folklore, research, and ecological documentation are combined with sound to transport the voices of war-ravaged waters: rivers such as the Seym and Oskil, the destroyed Kakhovka dam, their sediments, and the landscapes they shape. Toxic substances sink into riverbeds or flow through systems, leaving millions without drinking water, contaminating agricultural lands, and threatening food security. Waters also carry memory – trauma and loss that settle beneath the surface, like buried memories that may shape the future in ways we cannot yet see.
Supporting these works will be a video work by Vartan Markarian, created as part of the Echoes of the Earth residency which inspired Disturbed Ground. Markarian’s »Horizons of Disappearance« navigates the tension of the forest as a space of ecological richness and respite, and potential catastrophe due to large-scale anthropogenic factors such as climate change and war.
Festival Passes and Accreditation
Early-bird CTM Festival passes are on sale now in limited quantities. You can choose from CTM Festival passes which grant access to most CTM events, or Connect Passes for CTM + transmediale. Weekend Passes for each respective CTM Festival weekend are coming soon.
Tickets to the CTM Opening Concert with Earth on 23 January are on sale now. More event tickets will be released with our November announcement.
The press accreditation application period will run from 21 October 2025 – 9 January 2026. Journalists can apply to cover CTM or transmediale respectively, or for a combined accreditation to both festivals.