Opening Concert

CTM Festival returns to HAU Hebbel am Ufer from 30 January to 7 February. The 17th edition’s music programme is elaborated through intensive collaboration with guest co-curator Rabih Beaini, while the exhibition and discourse programme is created in close collaboration with Swiss-based Norient. Special projects and commissions, as well as artists and sound cultures emanating from less familiar countries and localities and often operating on the fringes of the electronic circuit are featured in greater numbers than ever before. Under the shadow of a global conflict centered on increasingly radical disputes over drawing or dissolving borders, the festival’s “New Geographies” theme aims to explore music and sound practices that respond to these developments, and to provide the conceptual tools needed to approach the complexities of a polycentric, polychromatic, and increasingly hybrid (music) world with greater openness.

Throughout past and present, trance rituals and spiritual journeys have perhaps served as the most powerful methods of detaching us from the material in order to communicate and chase new worlds where all borders are dissolved. CTM 2016’s Opening Concert unites two explorations of how to reach the unbound.

With “Híbridos”, wanderer, independent filmmaker and sound researcher Vincent Moon, previously announced with an installation that will be on display all festival week at HAU2, creates a portrait of a contemporary Brazil as a laboratory of cultures, suggesting a path of coexistence and open geography. Through a lecture and screening of his transmedia project created with photographer, writer and director Priscilla Telmon, Moon explores what people who didn’t break their connection with planet earth, or are going back to that connection, have to tell us as a new way of living together via a cine-trance of emotions, words, gestures, silences, and intuitions.

CTM guest co-curator Rabih Beaini then premieres “For The Right Red Hand”, a work especially composed for CTM that divides an ensemble of eight instrumentalists into two mirroring groups of trumpet (Liz Allbee, Mazen Kerbaj), guitar (Sam Shalabi, Sharif Sehnaoui), drums (Daniele De Santis, Tommaso Cappellato), and voice (Sofia Jernberg, Rully Shabara). Although identical in instrumentation, the two groups at times create opposing and conflicting counterpoints, tensions, and uneasy coexistence. Through barely audible tones, repetition, and extended techniques, this interplay of standpoints is punctuated and gradually enhanced by Beaini at the mixing desk, reaching a

For the complete CTM Festival programme, please go to: www.ctm-festival.de.

The CTM 2016 Opening Concert is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media, supported by Music Norway and Institut français.

CTM 2016 is funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, the Musicboard Berlin and the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. In collaboration with transmediale, Kulturprojekte Berlin, SHAPE and SoCCoS.