Berlin’s CTM Festival supports an open, networked, mutually-collaborative, global music culture through its yearly 10-day festival as well as countless collaborative and research initiatives, co-commissions, concerts, and other constantly-evolving formats. The 23 year-old festival stands out for its conscious pairing of daring artistic content and adventurous club experiences with an in-depth discourse programme, framing today’s sounds and music cultures within a shifting, hybrid global society.

One of the most important things that music and a music festival like CTM can bring about is contact – with diverse sonic worlds, communities, and experiences, but also between traditions, temporalities, geographies. As the social functions of music and festivals have been weakened, and as we grapple with a multiplicity of waves and meanings of »reopening,« CTM 2022 aims to highlight the importance of creating space for many forms of contact, and to reflect on their requirements. How can we revive, rethink, and strengthen music and its spaces of possibility for exchange and emotional resonance? Because without new and challenging forms of contact in the present, we cannot expect a more collective, just, and joyful future.

First confirmed artists and projects.
The first CTM 2022 confirmations feature personal/artistic responses to lack of human contact; the unease of increasingly consolidated authoritarian power structures; attempts to create new musical spaces that bridge traditions, histories, artforms, and more-than-human worlds; as well as exhilarating club sounds celebrating the joy of collective dancefloor experiences.

deli girls | US
De Schuurman | NL
DJ Fuckoff | NZ/DE
Edna Martinez | CO/DE
Fronte Vacuo – «Humane Methods (ΣXHALE)» | IT/DE
Jennifer Walton | UK
Loraine James | UK
Machine Girl | US
Nakul Krishnamurthy | IN – «Tesserae»
NURSE3D | DE
Ostbam | PL/DE
Raed Yassin | LB/DE – «Phantom Orchestra»

Modular Organ System by Phillip Sollman & Konrad Sprenger | DE with interventions by:
Arnold Dreyblatt | DE
Brass Abacus | INT
Ellen Arkbro | INT
Kali Malone & Stephen O’Malley | US
Will Guthrie | AU/FR

CTM Radio Lab and Kontinuum commissioned works by:
Andrius Arutiunian | LT/NL – «Incantations»
Fronte Violeta & Martha Kiss Perrone [BR] – «What is Not (O Que Não Está)»
Jonathan Reus | US/NL

Open Calls.
Berlin-based initiatives can currently apply to participate in the city-wide Vorspiel programme that takes place parallel to and in collaboration with transmediale and CTM each year. The MusicMakers Hacklab open call is open to Berlin-based artists that wish to collaboratively explore and realise new musical ideas reated to the contact theme.

H/T CTM festival.