The CTM 2026 programme expands with more additions to our spatial audio focus, including a special spatial live performance by Blawan, premieres of new works by Ellen Arkbro, Sam Slater, and Daniel Brandt, collaborations with Ghana’s Oroko Radio, AL.Berlin, and transmediale, as well as our 2026 Research Networking Day programme.
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. Check out more in the festival’s announcement.
CTM festival schedule with individual event tickets is now online.
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 take 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, 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 free-falling world, Brandt’s work is a human-scaled response to forces far larger than us.
Milkweed twists 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 builds 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.
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 the 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.
【 The full festival line-up can be found on the CTM’s website 】
Source: CTM Festival press release
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