CTM2023: Stefanie Egedy, NZIRIA, Ruhail Qaisar, 3OK & more...
Time is the proving agent of all; with the annual CTM Festival now comfortably in the past, it's time to take a retrospective of the events' successes, and a handful of shortcomings.
I’m discovering more and more that I’m very much a summer-loving mammal, and my creative juices are a gloopier, stickier sort of liquid when closer to 0 Celsius, so the event taking place in January certainly froze my writing hand a little, after returning home from wintry Berlin at the start of February.
I think most writers would agree that leaving a review of a live event for over a month can lead to some problems: memory’s accuracy, never a singularly reliable thing in the first place, wanes into a pale shade of itself, and events that used to trigger a spike in blood pressure dimly ricochet about the inside of the skull rather than burst out of the body in colourful beams when recalled from the more distant future.
Leaving my review for some time has, in this instance, given me room to sit with my experiences and, now my thoughts and thinkings on CTM are steeped in their juicy marinade, it’s time to share them. For the first time I’m able to write a festival review with more candid honesty, being on my own platform, so expect a few thorns among the roses.
Starting a new role as a lecturer at a uni here in Prague certainly didn’t help with keeping Reach running on time. I’m steadily reaching the end of what I called my warm-up period with the newsletter, so expect things to run a little more fluidly from April onwards.
Pictures in this article are sourced via CTM’s Flickr, which sparsely credits the photographer, but I believe that mostly they’re from one Udo Siegfriedt. A great number of the events I attended were in Berghain, which famously has a no-photo policy, so images may not reflect the musicians and topics discussed in the related text.
First up, visiting Berlin in January is largely an ill-advised move. The city is icy, and precipitationally unstable; bring your biggest coat. In the 6 days I spent in the capital I experienced bright sunny days, fleeting blizzards, and one thunderstorm that was as violent as it was spontaneous. A mixed bag, mirroring the festival’s offerings.
CTM Festival 2023 took place across a broad area of the city’s central districts, and I’d be happy with my decision to buy a week travelpass had I been checked by a patrol even just once. Consequently, my time in Berlin felt quite subterranean, sneaking through U-bahns, vying for the warmest seats on the way to the next venue, a hard juxtaposition with a summertime visit’s hallmarks of verdant parks and late sunny evenings, späti beers sweating in the hand until warm as you stroll to the next club, bar, or friend.
I decided to make the trip to CTM for the first time to hear/feel “A Sub-Bass dose”, a performance from SHAPE+ artist Stefanie Egedy. I’ve been pretty impoverished of a certain weight of sub frequencies since moving to Prague (which is a topic for different day), so the idea of a full-body immersion in sub-50hz sound was a particularly tempting one. I’ve been an advocate of the sub frequency as a powerful force on the body — one that goes beyond raw enjoyment and into more esoteric realms — since my first time in front of a full dub stack (V.I.V.E.K’s SYSTEM, for the curious). Egedy’s performance seemed to be a prime example of what I consider to be the good stuff in the sound healing regard: backed by enough science of long wavelengths, well-adjusted speakers, and bodily resonances, yet also a touch of supernatural ponderings, I was drawn to experience her investigations into moving air with sound.
Arriving to Berghain early is probably a universal symbol of ‘Uncool’ (a badge I wear proudly) but I was only there so early due to the sheer impossibility of entering the showing of ‘Ridne’, a very exciting-sounding film broadly about contemporary life in Ukraine. When I discovered that the entire main floor of Berghain, neither massive nor small, was also completely occupied, I couldn’t help but feel choked by the masses. The bar areas ended up as the most comfortable place to enjoy the bewitching vocal performance of Audrey Chen, and it was still an inspiring and confounding show in all the best ways, but an extra half-meter of personal space would have made it immeasurably more so.
Heinali - Rare Birds [Injazero]
The issue of space at a venue is nothing much in control of the organisers but rather the door staff, who were slapped with the extremely tough task of regulating inside space while admitting ticket holders, as well as the apparent oceans of press, artists and guest listers. I only point this out in criticism since Egedy prefaced her work with an encouragement to “move around the space, feel and experience with your body how the soundwaves change in colour and force” [paraphrased from memory].
These words, inspiring creative experiential listening with my body, rang around my ears as I pried my arm out from beneath the Ketamine Kouple having a ‘special spiritual moment’, mouths full of face, while simultaneously trying to instill the air directly in front of me with enough malicious energy to discourage a group of rowdy Press Passers from setting up camp on my toes to have their long and unyielding conversation.
Yeah, I can be grumpy at parties, and I recognise these are experiences very specific to me. I’m not trying to mark down the festival for poor vetting of attendants (they let me in after all), but rather to explain the mood of the events to those not there. That mood, at this point on the first night, was decidedly distracted, which frustrated me. A friend of mine touched on what I’m touching on here recently, calling out listening show attendees in Berlin (where they live) for talking, substance use, or general party/club behaviour while at a listening performance. I talked in the first longform piece for Reach about the need for more club / ambient crossover music and events; this is not the merging of experiences that I had in mind.
As far as Egedy’s actual performance was concerned, however, the boxes are all ticked: the subs were the only powered speakers in the whole place, and the rafters were shaking, air made thick with sound. My scavenged position was sadly indirect to the subs, but it made little difference to the overall impact (and I use that word very consciously) of the music. However, receiving any actual therapeutic effect from the show was a challenge thanks to the ‘pure sound’ environment being dispelled by audience members, a shortfall of available space, and the general party mood jarring with my hoped-for mood of introspection.
Thankfully, I managed to get inside Egedy’s workshop at Morphine Raum on another day, which was far more instructive in how sub frequencies can have a very direct and powerful impact on the body and mindstate. After a bit of technical information on correct positioning, some very light speaker brand evangelism, and some science related to the nature of sound generated by sub-50hz waves, we got a private demonstration of Egedy’s music on her preferred subs. In a small audience of around 20, we took turns in sitting or lying directly on the speaker units while she played, and I absolutely felt the things I was hoping to feel at Berghain.
A true “sub-bass dose” is a kinetic experience in the same capacity as it is an auditory one. Many would argue there’s no difference between those two realms anyway; the boundary line is imperceptible when done properly. Egedy ensured we made some steps to take note of how our bodies felt before the sound (muscles tight, anticipatory) and after (loosened, an induced physical relaxation almost as if medicated). Morphine Raum’s host came into the room after the first piece to tell us that the windows on the towering Berlin warehouse were ringing and rattling as if being played as an instrument themselves. I wondered what was happening inside my tissues, ligaments, vessels and arteries as I sat on the corner of one unit, my eyes rattling out of focus in sync with the boxed hurricane beneath me.
Ruhail Qaisar - ‘Namgang’ [Danse Noire]
The night following Egedy’s performance at Berghain was another evening of more experimental music (i.e, performances ended before 2am — a solid tick after a full day of big city life). This night I’m there for Ruhail Qaisar, who had recently released a debut album for Danse Noire — one of those labels one perennially returns to discover dark new avant-garde treasures. ‘Fatima’ had already been released at the time of the performance, but I attended the event with a blank impression slate, having not listened yet.
Afforded retrospect, Qaisar perfectly recreated the album’s shrill, piercing magnetism. As an aesthetic attribute in music, I often find a heavy hand with high pitched frequency to be overkill: it makes a singular physical statement in sound, sure, but overuse numbs my hearing and synthesises a kind of mental apathy towards the sonic tool. Qaisar dodged this bullet by wielding his highest frequencies with care and brevity: moments of the set could be compared with the sound of sharpening glass, but these areas of the performance were used as a disjunctive link inbetween microphone shrieks or decay-layered vocals and gristly electronics, not the basis for an entire song.
Perhaps the most important feedback on the performance is that listening to the recorded version evokes memories of the live act left in my body from this night. ‘Namgang’ has the most power in this regard: those whispered phrases lifted above a brewing storm of sound, soon to break, are hard to forget. When every eye was either closed or glued to the performance, and mouths blessedly silent, I felt a very real sense of feeling connected to a higher concept of music and art — perhaps for the first time of the festival.
NZIRIA at HAU2 — courtesy of CTM
Thursday brought with it the ocassion to attempt a revisit to the HAU2 venue (where ‘Ridne’ was held), and this time I was sure to be painfully early. Today, another current SHAPE artist, NZIRIA, would debut a new performance, and I was correct in my assumption that space would be extremely tight. Before I had arrived in Berlin they had delivered a talk for CTM on the themes and subjects of the show, entitled ‘Hard Neomelodic’, a nod to the 1970’s musical genre from the Neapolitan culture which the artist is incorporating into their brand of Hardcore music.:NZIRIA, a Queer, non-binary artist themself, draws inspiration from an aspect of Queer Neapolitan culture, the ‘Femminielli’, a ‘third gender’ in the regional culture of Naples.
I learn later that this performance was among the first SHAPE+ performances involving active investment into realms of art outside sound — NZIRIA was joined onstage by two dancers that brought the theatrics of the Neomelodic genre to life, as NZIRIA’s bold and emotive singing rang clear above the music.
Of everything I went to CTM for, this performance was the most moving for me. I don’t typically get moved to tears much by music and art, but this made me well up. I didn’t understand the words, and I can’t profess to know enough about the dramas and themes of Neomelodic to be able to follow some narrative, but it wasn’t necessary to understand — only to feel. And feeling was so easy.
Blending the flamboyance and exaggerated dramaticisms apparently part of the Neomelodic culture with the thrust and slam of hardcore percussion and synths, NZIRIA was a tenderly dominating force onstage. The physical duet between the dancers was like a set of subtitles beneath the ‘action’ of the music; one could read their expression, the movement of the two bodies, and feel closer to understanding the subtext.
NZIRIA’s dance performers & choreographer, Franka Marlene Foth and Janan Laubscher.
While the musical themes were generally grandiose, NZIRIA’s presence seemed to underwrite the towering pillars of sound and climactic energy, building in the mind a narrative of fragility and emotional tenderness — a silver-gilt flower blooming amongst harder stuffs, brick, concrete, steel and chrome.
While NZIRIA ruled the moment with their light-touch “modernising” of an older genre, CTM has always been chiefly about relatively novel music and arts, and there was plenty of evidence of this, but my favourite was Zoë Mc Pherson’s latest all-star collab, 3OK, with singeli musician Jay Mitta and DJ Diaki (“whose hard-thumping electro balani live sets channel the quintessential African rave sound”). I’d caught Zoë for the first time last year and it is a lasting physical memory.
Zoë has a unique sonic/semantic code, and an inimitable method of turning this into dance music which hijacks your nervous system into moving your body. Since the festival they’ve released a phenomenal new album that demonstrates this perfectly. Having followed Zoë on social media for some time I am well aware of their ability to synchronise and perform with other musicians to astonishing finesse, and especially their affinity and experience of working with certain African musicians’ liquid-fast compact rhythms.
Finally, the simmering social hum was warranted: after many interesting but somewhat dour experimental performances, the energy could at last boil over into outright frenzy — and an outright frenzy it was. The world was, for a long hour, a kick-drum heaven, percussive layers stacked upon stacks; rhythms were flipped through, altered, subverted then demolished in a nail-biting climactic force which plastered grins over all faces. A musical experience sharing likeness with few others in my memory, all but impossible to properly transcribe: precisely the kind of thing I’d hoped for at CTM.
Zoë Mc Pherson - ‘The Spark’ [SFX]
After taking a much-needed night off on Friday to recoup strengths, the final evening of my festival awaited at RSO with a decidedly more club-oriented lineup. Locked in the maze of the nightclub (I almost never felt certain of which way I was heading), and finally into my nightlife groove, I spent the evening flip-flopping between friends and the two stages. The fever pitch reached during the 3OK performance reinstated itself, this time during ABADIR’s blisteringly hot liveset.
The Egyptian musician and writer/journalist, who I feel fortunate and grateful to call friend, is quite the shapeshifter: this was the third time that I’d seen his live performance and each time he has surprised me with a completely different set to the previous one. The first time I saw him was for a night in celebration of his cranium-zapping release through the excellent Prague label Genot Centre; the second time he joined Kuthijin, myself and Oliver Torr for a low-key night in Prague — the excellent ambient sound design touches remained, but reframed through a more dubby lens. This time, ABADIR set a steely gaze on the club, with a sound not dissimilar to the percussive fury of his ‘Mutate’ album for SVBKVLT.
About halfway through the performance at RSO I recall stepping to one side, away from the crowd’s seething centre: I’m struck by his music into motionlessness, a downright paradox given just how fucking danceable it is. I take this moment away not because its boring, or because I’m not feeling the music, but because of the sheer cliff of intensity we being driven towards. I take stock of my surroundings, noting just how in command of his audience ABADIR is, how subtle changes found themselves reflected in the shifting of the mass. At the exact moment I feel capable of rejoining the dance he slices some jagged hardcore breaks in and I just lose it. The rest is lost in a mass of blurred flailing limbs amid screams of excitement — a mental image which also sums up the blinding, everlasting closing set from ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U.
ABADIR - Blame it on SUTRA [SVBKVLT]
Over these memories of my personal highlights I hope to have conveyed deeper thoughts around specific moments from CTM. Typically when I review a music festival I try to be as broad and informative as possible. I’m usually very busy, and I want my writing to reflect that; it feels rude to have witnessed a show and not to write some comment about it. This time, I’m self-limiting myself to these core tales from my trip, but below are some brief further impressions and moments from the festival’s programming.
I want to start with a negative note to counter the very significant positives above: I arrived on the Tuesday, and just had enough time to poke my head into some of the talks. While I missed one talk with a fellow Prague-based writer, Miloš Hroch, hosted by a figure in my field whom I respect, Luigi Monteanni, I was in time for the next panel. With sharper words than I normally use, I might compare it to an MTV young music award panel, with Resident Advisor’s Editor in Chief asking a group of strategically diasporadically unrelated youf some questions that you might better expect to see posed by the Duolingo owl early on in your new course.
I’ll use my sharpest words around this subject later, hopefully in the context of this newsletter, to discuss this in great detail, but this panel has all the hallmarks of the most tiresome conversations — the ones which lead nowhere, never giving confidence that there was some intentional goal to even having the conversation in the first place. It wouldn’t be the first time in all my years that I listened to such panels hosted by or including members of RA. Elsewhere at the festival the panels were strong: one by Borschsh magazine gave stirring personal insight into the plight of expatriated Ukrainian artists, and that of their friends still in the country. It’s true that some panels are always going to be more interesting than others, or to have naturally more entertaining subjects and participants, but I worry that there are plenty of panels earmarked for (apparently un(der)prepared) individuals, simply because of their status or role within an organisation.
A further downside to the festival was its apparent selectivity with promoting its own events: only on the Friday did I realise there was an entirely separate series of arts under the Vorspiel moniker. These ranged from events and installations to exhibits and performances, some of which sounded very interesting, but I failed to see promotion of these parts of the festival. Yes, I coulda shoulda looked harder, but I felt sad for the artists who could have gathered more eyeballs to their art with a little extra help.
There were of course many installations and performances that were better advertised. I took 40 minutes at Isuru Kumarasinghe’s installation piece; instruments and machines were placed centrally in a grand room, with plenty of soft spots and cushions in the periphery. After spending one of the sunnier days trekking about the city, the invitation to spend a while listening deeply to the sounds in the room was welcomed, and well rewarding too.
Mentioning only specific performances from the nights at Berghain was tough. Palestinian DJ Falyakon created an excellently eclectic set of what can only be defined as club music — genre and style were so subsumed into a potent mix that any more specificity would create a list almost as long as this whole letter. One of my ones-to-see for a good year or more now, bela’s set was also one I was eager for, and it delivered on expectation but, again, suffered somewhat from a lack of space, thanks to the amount keen ears waiting for their set.
Isuru Kumarasinghe’s installation space for CTM
Overall, I feel that CTM delivered its promises of providing enlightening new musical and artistic works. At the same time, my experiences of the festival were jaded by some elements, albeit those chiefly out of the festival’s control. Personally I felt that the festival’s close relationship with Berghain led to some shows taking place in the venue to the detriment of the performer’s vision of their set, and they perhaps would have had more impact in a smaller or otherwise less claustrophobic setting.
While I absolutely enjoyed the festival’s offerings, I must be candid with the fact that I had a press pass, which cost me €15 and admitted entry into all talks and CTM Festival programming at Berghain and RSO (but not the concerts with, for example, Amnesia Scanner). So, while I enjoyed exceptional music at a ridiculous value, my mind was constantly on the running tab of how much this festival would have cost me if I were buying all my tickets. Bringing so many stellar acts from such a broad area of the globe has obvious knock-on impacts to the cost of a ticket, and I’m sure they were still priced relatively fairly, but without the privileges of my occupation I’d not have been able to see nearly as much as I did. With a more selective approach to attendances, by dictat of bank balance, a shorter trip to Berlin for CTM would undoubtedly still see you leaving inspired, but exhausted.
Stefanie rocks!