Advertising for a music event these days feels painfully out of place. Yet, our support and solidarity will need to last for a long time. And so we hope to keep finding meaning and value in the continuity of music activity that stands in contrast to the war and its catastrophic destruction. Might music and art, in their capacity to rally people together; to provide space for collective and bodily expressions of grief and emotions; as an outlet for collective emotional release; or as a tool to subvert but also to connect, offer a way to resource ourselves? There can never be enough music in our lives – especially when it fuels open, independent, and experimental music communities.
Today’s announcement highlights our much-awaited return to immersive nights of music, and the joy of meeting old friends and new strangers on the dancefloor. Against the backdrop of a war that is likely to impact us for a long time, we can only hope that such moments of celebration and togetherness will strengthen us and keep us striving for a kinder and more just society.
If you haven’t already, we invite you to read our post on how to support Ukraine and Ukrainians. The CTM team is committed to supporting in various ways, and among other, will raise funds to support the people in Ukraine and those that had to flee the country, during the festival in May. More details will be given soon.
Meanwhile, read on to learn about what to expect at CTM 2022 Part 2 in May, and check the programme schedule.
Fresh Wave of Confirmed CTM 2022 Acts
Join previously confirmed artists and projects:
With CTM’s Part 2 programme, we are looking forward to forging new connections and reuniting with artists, friends, and collaborators that we could not meet throughout the pandemic’s 2 years. Personal attitude, humour and rage, and an explosion of impossibly-paced sonics that resonate the intensity of the past two years call us to reconnect and dive together into riveting sounds.
A pivotal figure in the electronic music scene in Iran, Sote will premiere a live audiovisual rendition of the harmonically maximalist and symphonic-synthetic Majestic Noise Made in Beautiful Rotten Iran, just released on Sub Rosa. In Sote's words, »the making of this album was intentionally a very personal process, contemplating tolerance, destruction, compassion, misery, grace, and tyranny in an auditory manner.« The AV show is developed with longtime collaborator and critically acclaimed visual artist Tarik Barri, known for creating striking live visuals for the likes of Thom Yorke, Monolake, and Nicolas Jaar.
Theresa Baumgartner and Sam Slater premiere a new audiovisual installation. »Vandals« is a piece about inevitability, the sudden event of potential energy becoming kinetic, captured in ultra slow motion, barely detectable in its near frozen motion. The work speaks to moments of personal and social collapse and recovery, and will be shown during each of CTM's events at Berghain, in the ground floor Säule space. The work is commissioned by Arctic Arts Festival and CTM.
CTM partners with RSO for the first time, to present a night of uninhibited release. Noisy punk, rap-tinged metal and high speed styles crash together in an amalgam of rage and unabashed, tongue-in-cheek fun. Joining Machine Girl and Haxan is Swiss-born, Nepalese-Tibetan producer Aïsha Devi with a hypnotic DJ set that takes influences from her interests in dark trance, abrasive techno and the transcendental qualities of Tuvan throat singing. An affiliate of Nyege Nyege and Kampala’s female DJ collective 4manysisters, Turkana fiercely connects left-field electronics, hard dance, techno, and other sounds from the underground. Named one of the most influential DJs in the underground music scene by Mykki Blanco, DJ, producer, boss of Naive records, co-founder of Rádio Quântica, and mina resident Violet has been shaking up Lisbon’s nightlife culture with her talent for elegantly blending techno with breakbeats and acid basslines. Duma is a grindcore and doom duo working on the fringes of Kenya’s thriving metal scene. Their unique blend of acid doom lyrics and polyrhythmic drum patterns are warped into a frenzy of noise and drones.
Offering futuristic takes on the subcultures of bass and hardcore, the artists on RSO’s second floor create unique imprints upon the ever-evolving global map of underground rave. Mixtress embraces UK jungle and hardcore with her relentlessly fast breakbeats and atmospheric moments of sustained release. She is creative lead of the Sisu collective, a community platform for women and non-binary aspiring DJs and producers, as well as a member of the south Asian dance music crew Daytimers. One half of the duo Gabber Modus Operandi, Kasimyn’s personal research broaches the sounds and development of Indonesian harmonic scales, pelog and slendro, alongside contemporary dance music. Meth Math, a collaboration between vocalist Angél Ballesteros and producers error.error and Bonsai Babies, takes the digitised, synthy vocals of Ballesteros and sets them against infectiously playful hybrids of pop, neoperrero and happy hardcore as well as downtempo electronic soundscapes. Their EP m♡rtal was released in March 2022. Based between Berlin and Hamburg, Slic Unit is a five member femme, bipoc DJ collective that formed during the pandemic as a way to provide support for each other by sharing skills and resources. At CTM they’ll be represented by slimgirl fat and SENU’s wide-ranging selections of afrobeat, UK bass, house, dancehall, jungle and r&b.
CTM’s closing concert will embark on a cathartic journey of distorted strings, frantic rhythms, and rave. The high-voltage live shows of previously-announced Berlin hardcore-punks Urin join avant-garde titans Senyawa, the duo of Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi that uniquely manages to embody the aural flavours of Javanese music while exploring the framework of experimental music practice, pushing the boundaries of both traditions. Following their doom and folk metal-heavy release Sujud, Senyawa rang in the start of their second decade with Alkisah, an apocalyptic tale of a fictitious nation’s collapse. Released as a decentralised album by 44 labels worldwide and growing into a namesake network, Alkisah suggests the rebuilding of better structures out of these ruins. After a tremendous performance for CTM 2019, Bali-based Gabber Modus Operandi aka shouter Ican Harem and producer Kasimyn return with otherworldly velocities and the fiery energy of their dancefloor favourites PUXXXIMAXXX and HOXXXYA. Translating the sounds of jathilan ritualistic trance, dangdut koplo, folk music, and funkot, Harem and Kasimyn offer a dazzlingly new hybrid between Indonesian sound cultures and select tropes of global hard dance.
The CTM 2022 afterparty heads down to SchwuZ, where previously announced Nyege Nyege acts Ecko Bazz and Arsenal are joined by a range of artists representing sonic communities around the globe. New Orleans rapper Delish Da Goddess has gained appreciation for her confident repping of bounce and fearless, politically blunt bars about her experiences as a queer Black woman artist. Following her 2020 release, Bye America, a trap-fused personal and political meditation on the state of the times, is her new EP Violet EP 2, a poetic ode to her hometown. Hailing from Brazil is BADSISTA, the MC, DJ and Tormenta collective member that palpably harnesses the energy from her emo days, and funnels it into high-energy sets full of rave cuts, funk carioca, and bassy tunes. Her newest compilation of dance-ready tracks, Lucy 4D, will be released in March 2022. Highlighting queerness within Caribbean music culture, emerging vocalist and producer Grove exhibits a distinct style echoing dancehall, pop, punk, and jungle influences. Inspirations for their hybrid lyric and rap-laced productions are the hip hop collective 5 Mics, as well as the electronic project BAAST, the latter which is jointly run with producer and DJ Diessa. Testing the possibilities of slower dance music, Diessa focuses on tempo and rhythmic textures. Her latest EP Between Rooms was released in March 2021 on the London label Edited Arts.
On the second floor, dark tones and polyrhythmic textures form winding narratives imbued with folkloric traditions and cultural histories. Raja Kirik, the collaborative project of Yennu Ariendra and J. Mo'ong Santoso Pribadi, emerged from the pair’s extensive research into the colonial history of Java, Indonesia, and the resulting local expressions of resistance that took form in shamanic trance dances such as jaranan buto and jatilan. Using traditional Indonesian percussion and digitised noise produced by an arsenal of homemade instruments, Ariendra and Pribadi weave rhythmic narratives of collective memories and trauma. Hüma Utku utilises abstract sound and music as tools for storytelling, fusing field recordings and acoustic instruments into harmonious noise and harsh rhythms. A relentless collaborator even through pandemic times, Zoë Mc Pherson strives to connect sonic and visual aesthetics through her music and her Berlin-based label and community SFX. Following the critically acclaimed 2020 release, States of Fugue, and a collaborative track with Jessica Ekomane for Ostgut Ton, Mc Pherson will be supporting their forthcoming full-length, Abyss Elixir at CTM. Spawned from London's underground hip hop scene and obsessed with horror themes, DJ Die Soon creates an artistic universe by weaving demon masks, manga, and other elements of Japanese culture with dystopian freak beats. As host for the entire evening, Marylou provides rare selections intertwining traditional ritualistic music and percussion with bass, psychedelic dub, and experimental electronic sounds.
CTM 2022 Discourse
CTM’s Discourse talk series focuses on multiple threads related to »Contact.« Having kicked-off with several online modules at CTM Part 1, the series will continue with hybrid in-person/streamed discussions running 25–28 May at Kunstquartier Bethanien.
A number of speakers will explore the rich and inextricable interactions between music and sociality, asking how music cultures actively shape social life, and vice versa. The work of Nakul Krishnamurthy, who will perform his new album Tesserae, is shaped by contact with and between Indian classical, Western classical, experimental, and electronic music. Yewande Adeniran, also performing at CTM as Ifeoluwa, is a scholar and DJ; her participatory seminar »What the hell is the Black Avant-Garde?« asks audience members to join her in thinking through how liberation and Blackness can be felt and understood in dance music. Composer, performer, and researcher Leila Adu-Gilmore considers Ghanaian hiplife and afrobeats as crystallisations of moments of social and convivial improvisation. A veteran of Berlin’s queer club scene, Geoff Mak teases out the intimate and psychosocial implications of different modes of contact in club culture. Preeminent Black studies scholar Dhanveer Singh Brar discusses his new book Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski – The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century, uncovering how Black electronic dance music enables the reorganisation of urban social life, and can subvert the logics of racial capitalism. He is joined by founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective Edward George whose work has examined dub through questions of diaspora, race, history, memory, longing, and loss, uncovering much in the reveries of dub, in its strangeness, and its margins; together the two consider shared resonances across their work.
Another thematic module explores how we might make stronger and more compassionate contact with our surroundings and other, more-than-human entities. What modes of listening are relevant and urgent in our present moment? An introductory lecture will be given by researcher and electroacoustic composer Jono Gilmurray, who focuses on ecology and environmentalism in contemporary music and sound art by emphasising the significance of the ecological sound art movement. Sound artist and researcher AM Kanngieser and anthropologist Zoe Todd’s performative lecture will give insights into modes of listening, especially to fish.
More Discourse speakers and themes will be announced in April.
Open Call: MusicMakers Hacklab
»Closeness/Nähe«
Dates: 23.–29.5.2022
The yearly MusicMakers Hacklab is a collaborative environment where participants work together during CTM Festival week to explore and realise new performance and musical ideas. Originally scheduled for January 2022, the Hacklab will now take place at CTM 2022 Part 2 in May – a new open call is out. Hosted by Peter Kirn of CDM and Ariel William Orah of Soydivision and L-KW, fellows are invited to consider intimacy and physical proximity in their Hacklab creations, but also how they might reshape their artistic identities or local communities/scenes, building unfamiliar selves while remaining in a familiar city/place. Application deadline is 20 March 2022.
IMPORTANT: If you previously applied through the original open call in Sept/Oct 2021 and do not have significant changes to your proposal, you do not have to re-apply. Your application will be automatically considered. Should you have significant updates to your application, please feel free to send a new application.
Tickets and Accreditation
Festival passes as well as tickets to most CTM 2022 Part 2 events are now on sale in limited quantities. Tickets to further events will become available shortly. Streamed content will be offered free of charge via CTM’s YouTube channel.
In-person Access to CTM 2022 Part 2 music events is offered under the »2G+ rule« (vaccinated and/or recovered, plus negative test). Discourse events will be held under the »3G rule« (vaccinated, recovered, or negative test). Please check our detailed event access rules.
Press accreditation is open once again, with a deadline of 15 April to apply.