CTM Festival

History

CTM Festival started in 1999 as club transmediale, put together by five friends: Marcus "Marc" Weiser and Lillevan Pobjoy of the electronic duo Rechenzentrum, visual artist Timm Ringewaldt, photographer and lighting engineer Remco Schuurbiers, and experimental media design student Jan Rohlf. The first edition, titled "10 Tage an der Schnittstelle von Bild und Ton" ("10 Days at the Interface of Image and Sound"), ran at Maria am Ostbahnhof, a club that had only just opened in a former GDR post office building. It set the template the festival still follows a quarter-century later: club nights and dancefloor-facing electronic music sitting alongside gallery-style sound art and audiovisual work, rather than treating the two as separate audiences.

The festival's first decade was restless in terms of real estate. It moved to the seventh floor of Haus des Lehrers on Alexanderplatz for its second edition, skipped 2001 entirely, then landed at E-Werk, one of the clubs that had defined Berlin's early-'90s techno explosion, before settling into Maria am Ufer (the renamed Maria am Ostbahnhof building) for most of the 2000s. Behind the scenes, the organizers formalized things by founding DISK, Initiative Bild & Ton e.V., in 2005, giving the festival a proper institutional base, and in 2006 rebranded the event's own self-description from "Festival of Electronic Music and Related Visual Arts" to "Festival of Adventurous Music and Art," widening its remit beyond club-adjacent electronic music. The club transmediale name was shortened to CTM around the 2011/2012 editions, under new artistic director Kristoffer Gansing.

Today CTM runs every January into early February as a ten-day event that mixes late-night club programming with a full daytime schedule of talks, workshops, listening sessions and a dedicated discourse program, plus the RA x CTM conference held in partnership with Resident Advisor. Recent editions have used venues across Berlin including Berghain, the club long treated as techno's most mythologized room, alongside Radialsystem, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and smaller spaces like Morphine Raum. Taking over Berghain's Main Floor, Panorama Bar and Säule for a week each January is now one of the clearest signals of how far CTM's reach extends into Berlin's actual club infrastructure, not just its art institutions.

The festival's 20th anniversary edition in 2019, themed "Persistence," is a useful marker of how far the format had traveled: alongside a lineup that included Yves Tumor, Tirzah, Lotic and Eartheater, the festival installed a functioning ice rink, Eishalle, inside Berghain's Halle space, soundtracked by rotating DJ sets that ran well past the festival's own closing date. It's the kind of gesture that only makes sense for an event that has spent two decades treating a nightclub as legitimate a venue for serious sound art as a concert hall. CTM has also built outward-facing ties over the years, co-founding the ICAS (International Cities of Advanced Sound) network in 2009 and maintaining ongoing partnerships with festivals including MUTEK, Nyege Nyege and Novas Frequências, part of what's kept it positioned as one of the reference points for experimental and club-adjacent electronic music in Europe rather than a strictly local Berlin event.

FAQ

When does CTM Festival happen?

CTM runs annually in late January into early February in Berlin. The 2027 edition is scheduled for January 22-31.

Is CTM only for experimental or "art music" fans?

No. While CTM is known for pushing into sound art, noise and experimental territory, its programming has always included straightforward club nights, and recent editions have run full nights at Berghain, one of the world's best-known techno clubs.

Do I need a separate ticket for the daytime program?

CTM's daytime discourse program, including talks, workshops and the RA x CTM conference, typically runs alongside the club and concert program under the same festival structure, though specific ticketing details change year to year and are confirmed on the festival's official site closer to each edition.

Where can I find the full venue list?

CTM publishes an official venue map each year on its website ahead of the festival, since the lineup of spaces (which has included Berghain, Radialsystem, HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Volksbühne in recent editions) can shift from one edition to the next.