Since 25 years, CTM has been highlighting new strains of pop and fringe cultures that venture through the weird, the challenging, the cathartic, the esoteric, the contagious, and the ecstatic – simultaneously exploring sonic histories, contexts, and political and technological entanglements. Though international in its approach, CTM remains deeply rooted in and committed to Berlin’s DIY and club scenes, from which it emerged in 1999.
Listening and dancing within the gaps between musics, communities, and scenes, CTM defies easy categorisation and tests the current possibilities and limits of sound and music. Programming supports a multitude of voices, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives – CTM is for all forms of music as long as they dare to experiment, question, and demonstrate conviction. Our work reaches out to all corners of the globe to explore and explode wildly different, experimental, mutating global scenes.
CTM is an independent, non-profit initiative built, from the very start, on constant collaboration. We work closely with artists, guest curators, and researchers to support them in realising new projects and to produce and transmit new knowledge across performances, exhibitions, talks and artistic labs, writing, and more. Through a multi-perspective approach, we aim to respond to the diversity of an increasingly polycentric, polychromatic, and hybrid (music) world, always with empathy, openness, and a desire to counter global asymmetries.
Because of CTM’s mutually collaborative nature, activities highlight a large and ever-expanding range of practices in and around sound. Through yearly themes, the festival experiments with formats, locations, technologies, and ways of listening, creating multiple entry points from which to engage with sound and their contexts.
Music is not a parallel world, but rather a seismograph of our current societies, a powerful force with which to cope with uncertainty and change, and a medium through which to imagine different futures.
26 500 visitors
Over 200 particpants from 42 countries
39% female-identifying, 39% male-identifying, 8% non-binary, 14% mixed projects
150 concerts, performances, installations, lectures, talks, exhibitions, and workshops
10 venues across Berlin
»CTM is more than a festival—it's a frothing petri dish of musical ideas, in equal measure entertaining and enlightening, for the artists as well as the audience.«
Resident Advisor
»Adventurous in its quest for ideas that no one else would consider, let alone have the gall to execute.«
Gabriel Szatan, Crack Magazine
»Considering the ugly political climate outside the festival, it’s a beautiful thing that CTM’s programme avoids any inward looking eurocentrism with a lineup that sprawls over continents.«
Claire Sawers, The Quietus
»CTM excels above other festivals: not because it sidelines traditional festival hedonism in favour of discourse but because it has found the empathetic balance between the two«
Karl Smith, The Quietus
»CTM is filled with moments where exposure to new sounds and viewpoints encourages both openness and a more analytical outlook – not just through discourse, but via relentlessly fun club nights.«
Patrick Hinton, Mixmag
»Neben großartiger Musik fernab des Mainstreams bietet das CTM Festival somit auch einen Raum dafür, das, was wir als Realität annehmen, zu hinterfragen und neu zu verhandeln.«
Laura Aha, Musikexpress
»CTM est peut-être le festival le plus résolu à montrer l’importance socio-politique de la musique, passée comme contemporaine.«
Lucien Rail, Trax
»Véritable porte sur le futur de la scène électronique«
Estelle Morfin, Tsugi
»Das CTM Festival bietet jedes Jahr aufs Neue zehn Tage Hochleistungssport für die Gehirnwindungen.«
SPEX
