Berlin 2019: Music, Tech and Live Audio Visual

First stop CTM ‘Festival for Adventurous Music and Art’; 10 days of performance, talks and exhibitions across multiple venues in the city. This year is the 20th edition with the theme of Persistence. For me CTM is the ultimate urban festival, championing the experimental, the underground in audio-visual art and exploring new ideas and technological horizons within the current state of music culture.  Kunsthaus Bethanien is the festival hub and home to the daytime talks series. The programme includes research networking for scholars and students and the discourse series takes the temperature of current topical perspectives within music linking to politics and society. Highlights for me were Pedro Oliveira’s fascinating talk discussing the growing industry around ‘Borders and biometric technologies’, Matt Dryhurst looked to the future of music consumption, interrogating algorithmic populism, playlists and platforms as a threat to independent music in his talk ‘Duty, despair and decentralisation’, and Anja Schwanhäuser’s poetic talk ‘Persistence in Berlin’s subcultural scenes’ conjured up a past Berlin, “a landscape has disappeared but in many people’s imagination this world still does exist.”

With brain cells duly fed, it was time to lose a few and jump into the night time live programme.  Navigating the city, there’s a CTM tribal attitude, clocking fellow tote bag wearing festival goers on the U-bahn or braving the snowy misty streets, very much living up to the adage… ‘everyone wears black in Berlin’. From the cavernous depths of Berghain to the art nouveau splendour of Hebbel am Ufer, the venues are as much a part of the festival experience as the acts themselves. Stand out shows for me were the warped tones and live harp of Eartheater spiralling round Halle am Berghain, a visceral noise performance from Maria W Horn at Hau2 and an outer body experience at MONOM ( ‘the world’s most advanced spatial sound instrument’) the 4D soundspace – feeling sound move architecturally through the body.

I met up with Jan Rohlf, CTM Director to talk about the festival’s evolution from ‘Club Transmediale’ – the after event for Transmediale – to highlight in the city’s cultural calendar. Our conversation covered spaces in the city, Berlin planning policy and citizen protests. The festival’s theme of Persistence being testament to the ability to adapt and a will to persist in championing the underground, subcultural, supporting diversity and difference, and ‘embracing fluidity, uncertainty and flux’ in increasingly polarised times. I discussed my experience as a participant of the Music Makers Hacklab for the ‘Fear Anger Love’ edition two years back, and how the MMHL closing event had been a highlight for me this year. The project led by Create Digital Music’s Peter Kirn brings together 20 artists around a theme to create a new DIY performance in one week at HAU2. This year was guest hosted by Indonesia’s Nuasonic collective. Audiences interacted in a networked phone performance and witnessed Oliva Jacks stunning visual live coding framework Hydra in action. For me it epitomises what CTM is about, the coming together of people, communities and ideas through music technology. Jan concurred that although CTM it is known for its live acts, for him the festival is as much about the sparking of ideas, new collaborations and starting communities through shared experience of music cultures.

A mainstay of my trip was hanging out at KOMA Elektroniks. Famous for kickstarter sensation the ‘Field Kit: electroacoustic workstation’. The team are based at Common Ground in Neukolln, their shop and DIY community space. Here you can peruse synths, hire a desk to build your own electronics projects and have a beer. They also have a new and superb public programme of workshops including such topics as  introduction to video synthesis and machine learning for sound art. I was invited to lead a DIY Light Theremin session which ended up in a noise jam in the shop window! Evelyn Saylor who runs these programmes is creating a fantastic community here around accessible music technology sessions from both Berlin based and visiting international tutors such as electronics legend and author of ‘Handmade electronic music’ Nic Collins.

March the 8th, Independent Women’s Day is a public holiday in Germany, this year Berlin launched their ‘Frauenticket’, a 21% cheaper ticket for women highlighting the gender pay gap. Female Pressure, the Berlin based international network promoting female electronic and digital artists, celebrated in the most appropriate way with a Sunday rave, ‘Rituals’ at Suicide Circus, Friedrichshain. In Manchester I’m part of Brighter Sound’s BOTH SIDES NOW initiative, so I was keen to see what was happening in this field. The Amplify Series at ACUD hosts month long residencies for two emerging female electronic musicians who are mentored by more established artists. The outcome is a live event where both mentees and mentors perform on the same bill. I attended a couple of these events and felt this was a great model for creative artistic development. Something to look out for later in the year is the second conference and festival from the wonderful group behind DICE, I spent a lovely evening chatting to the producers, musicians and techies at their meetup.