The first club transmediale (CTM) took place in the - at this time newly launched - Maria am Ostbahnhof. The venue itself became famous for its great view on East Side Gallery and for its progressive programme. In 1999 CTM focused mainly on the German and especially Berlin-based electronic music and visual experimentation scene, especially showcasing the labels Chain Reaction and Payola and the emerging Berlin visual scene. The dutch label Staalplaat was showcased with dry but funky minimalists Goem and a rare appearance of Belgian sound-collageist TMRX. CTM.99 very clearly stated one of the main aspects of our mission: to fuse the fields of electronic music, video, motion graphics and visual art by connecting club culture, contemporary art and academic context. Consequently CTM.99 presented a number of installations and performances by artists such as Andreas Schimanski, Angelika Middendorf, Herwig Weiser, Christoph Musiol and Mariza Maza.     close

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Club transmediale (CTM.00) created a dense, emphatic and experimental nucleus above the rooftops of Berlin. Situated on the 7th floor of the Haus des Lehrers - a sixties modernist high-rise at Berlin Alexanderplatz, where the GDR "Ministerium für Volksbildung" had trimmed its future teachers to the official SED political party line before the fall of the Berlin wall - CTM.00 revealed the strong convergence of media experiments within the club context and the urban experience of its protagonists. Providing a fantastic view on Alexanderplatz and Berlin-Mitte next to the club's wall-sized video screens, the location joined urban space with the artificial architectures created by sound and moving images. Openness and transparency of this special venue served as perfect setting for an increasingly international programme. Highlights of the second club transmediale were appearances of Kit Clayton together with Monolake's Robert Henke and visuals by visomat inc., BBM's robot-performance, the Raster-Noton showcase, one of the first shows of cult-label Shitkatapult and not to forget a legendary set of dutch elektro wizard I-F.     close

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Germany's formerly best-known techno temple E-Werk served as venue for club transmediale (CTM.02). The E-Werk had to close in 1997 but five years later club transmediale had the opportunity to present the state-of-the-art of electronic music there. Focusing on the "experimental side of techno" at its intersections with contemporary music and art, the programme featured audiovisual experimentation that left the rave format far behind. In thirteen days a broad selection of leading edge international electronic and visual projects again made the E-Werk a still freezing but thrilling experience.
In 2002 club transmediale also launched a supporting programme with screenings and presentations in the early evenings, meant to open up the already engraved borders of the club format, which increasingly become marked by the demands of economic efficiency. Another step to mingle the academic and the subcultural fields. Cooperations with the Canadian MUTEK festival and Sonic Acts Festival in Amsterdam underlined the international context of CTM and its aim to promote a pan-national exchange. The festival theme GO PUBLIC! subsumed the attempt to open club transmediale to inform and entertain a broader public.     close

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In 2003 club transmediale (CTM) will present the latest developments in the fields of experimental electronic music intertwined with related media art. Achim Szepanski - in charge of the mille plateaux label - coined the term 'media-music' to describe a process, that challenges traditional musical concepts as it forces us to focus on factors like code, programming, hardware and connectivity to describe and understand contemporary digital music. But it also adds to the increasing interplay of music with other media-formats such as installation, video, motion graphics and design. More and more these aspects grow together by the use of similar hard- and software, the reconciliation of art, science and design as well as the requirements of a specific methodical approach that is able to reflect the media-inherent structures.
The upcoming festival - like the years before - wants to contribute to the further discussion and development of the outlined topics. The festival theme PLAY GLOBAL!, which provides this year's overall topic for transmediale as well as for club transmediale, will draw the artistic and cultural effects of globalization into focus.     close

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club transmediale (CTM) for the fith presents the state of the art of electronic music and related visual arts in a sound and club context in cooperation with the transmediale - international media art festival berlin (TM).
club transmediale's main emphasis is the crossover: Increasingly stringent economic constraints and forced professionalism are a brake on potential crossover collaboration between clubs and the fields of visual arts, fashion, design and theory. The playful, ironic treatment of socio-cultural issues has yielded to a new sobriety, which, instead of the exploration of creative potentialities, focuses on economic competence. This situation There calls to take a stance, which enables to conceive the club as open space for a programmatic experimental artistic practice.
Spy Utopia! is the title of an artwork for CTM.04 and describes our primary issue: CTM and TM have chosen the common motto FLY UTOPIA! at a time when several events with a similar theme have already taken place. The question as to the significance of contemporary utopia seems at any rate to still be unanswered. Or maybe the question is thoroughly passé. Is Utopia a contemporary issue at all? Or should we simply call the Festival: Utopia Is Over!?
Spy Utopia! - in the sense of 'checking out the situation' - thus describes the methodology to approach utopian ideas in the various programme points of the festival. Further East, the continued focus on Eastern European electronic music and its potential to promote understanding beyond cultural borders, will bring us closer to an utopia hopefully no longer too distant, namely: European unification and the dismantling of distorted clichées, which are still too evident in the exchanges between East and West. Performing Sound, concerns representation of the human body in electronic music. This same topic is taken up to explore the situation of female producers in electronic music in the cooperation with the HTMlles Festival from Montréal. Free information exchange, possibilities of autonomous distribution of art work and the potential of collective projects are tackled in concrete, practical ways with this year's cooperations - for example with the Berlin radio project reboot.fm and with Share from New York.     close

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The sixth edition of club transmediale (CTM) - the independent platform for electronic music that runs parallel to transmediale - evinces new structural clarity and sets opposite poles: in accustomed opulent style, the weekends are dedicated to long and lavish nights with the very best in electronic dance music, whilst throughout the week our "concert-ed" efforts take centre stage and investigate "Density" in its most positive sense: as a concentrated form of listening and looking.
With the festival theme BASICS!, CTM.05 navigates between poles of musical and artistic practice that seem at first glance to have little in common - and traces the connecting lines:
What unites the orchestral search for the sublime with digital Death Metal? Is it perhaps the reclusion of producers that live far away from big city lights? How can nerve-wracking thunderous Breakcore merge with the unpretentious-spontaneous headphone concerts of a Le Placard Festival? Are they not, paradoxical as it might seem, both based on the possibilities of global networking and immediate physical presence? And are they not both decidedly practical approaches to creating structures and situations that might facilitate experiment and participation? Is it therefore not manifest to put them on a level with a project such as Supersilent, whose music derives exclusively from spontaneous improvisation? Or with the Ambiunix sound system, whose spatial-sound research implicates the listener's physical presence in the here and now whilst simultaneously creating fictive sonic spaces? What do the minimal sounds of Biosphere have in common with DJ Marlboro's Baile Funk, the voice of the Brasilian favelas? Are they not both artistic reactions to the demands and stimulation of a specific environment?
All the forms of expression cited above pose fundamental questions: questions regarding the musical, visual and organisational structures that facilitate artistic work, open up spaces, broaden participation and debate, give artists and the audience a range of choice, and allow works to circulate as concepts; questions, too, that tend to remain invisible in the daily round of the music business, in territorial claims on defining style, in peer-group pecking orders and the stereotypical but familiar feel of the club and concert venues where we usually get to experience these artistic forms. They are important questions: it is they alone that constitute the real and basic motivation behind this year's programme; that put the gas in the performers' tank, so to speak. And in the light of these questions, the CTM.05 line-up reveals itself to be very much part of the answers. But that is maybe enough said. Just trust your instincts. Breathe in the potent fumes of the basics instead of analysing too much. Intuition is an excellent first step. Explore Basics!     close

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BEING BOLD! is to be brash, audacious, fierce, intrepid, risky, brazen and outrageous; and when these attitudes are applied in the creation of music and art the results are as radically diverse as the artists themselves - humor, irony, sincerity, absurdism and the grotesque all have equal currency.
club transmediale (CTM), the Berlin festival for experimental music, takes off in its 7th edition on a multifarious trip into today's deepest club sounds, from Dada-Rave and Cartoon Music to Drone Metal, Cut-up Agitation and electronic Folk-Hybrids, through to the newest beats from the margins of Hip-Hop. Under the title BEING BOLD! our focus this time will be to present, along with the year's best acts and newcomers, more strongly individualist positions than ever before. Whether tried and tested in the limelight or backroom wallflowers, the conviction, creative innovation, courage and wayward approach of these artists add a decidedly emphatic edge to the program. BEING BOLD! presents artists and projects whose creativity lies in a personal, sometimes obsessive, eccentric, idiosyncratic and always remarkably enthusiastic attitude, characterized by a healthy distance to established scenes and would-be authoritative discourses. Well-balanced, harmonious and flawless sound is not the primary concern of these artists, but strong statements, humor, spontaneity and daring, obscure research interests or simply their own unbounded enthusiasm.
With both feet firmly in the here and now, the Festival dares to delve deeply into recent musical history while keeping a careful eye on parallel worlds to catch a glimpse of the sounds of tomorrow. Between Dancefloor, Experimental and Serious Listening, the Festival presents outstanding music, sound and visual arts projects and discourse.     close

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Club transmediale (CTM) enters its eighth round with a program, the like of which has never been seen before! It's no coincidence that this festival in Berlin is renowned as Germany's most important rendezvous for electronic experimental and adventurous music.
Under this year's motto, BUILDING SPACE the main program focus of CTM.07 will investigate how music and the interplay of sound and moving images can create new dimensions in our experience of space. Once again, the CTM Festival's approach is interdisciplinary and intensive: media arts meet experimental music. Besides questioning the synergy of sound and image - the sensuous, physical and technical basis of our experience of space and its configuration - the focus is also on imaginary, cultural, political and social spaces and the ways they overlap.
For 10 days concerts, club sets, AV-performances, installations, screenings and debates will throw light on current issues around music brewed and bubbling in the melting pot: oblique underground, Leftfield music, radical Noise, media culture, Improv, New Music, visual arts and club sounds.
One highlight this year will be the opening concert in front of and in the Volksbühne theatre on Rosa Luxemburg Platz with the first every European show of US Weird Folk pioneers Sun City Girls, Pierre Bastien and Mira Calix' new project Alexander's Annexe. The following 9 days of events will take place as usual in Maria am Ostbahnhof, starting with the Grand Opening with the legendary Techno-activists, Underground Resistance.
The special focus The Blind Spot conceived in collaboration with Ultrahang festival from Budapest introduces into current music production in Hungary.     close

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Club transmediale (CTM) - festival for adventurous music and related visual arts - is a prominent international festival dedicated to contemporary electronic, digital and experimental music, as well as the diverse range of artistic activities in the context of sound and club culture. The 9th edition of the festival will take place at various venues in Berlin from January 25 to February 2, 2008.
Under the theme UNPREDICTABLE, CTM.08 investigates artistic concepts that imply the surprising and unforeseeable, accidents, mistakes and coincidences as a means to alter the dynamics of creative processes and to discover new aesthetic forms.
The program features internationally renown artists - such as Vitalic, Mouse On Mars, Conrad Schnitzler, Alva Noto, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy or Larry Heard - and some of the most exciting discoveries of the past year - like Klimek, Ebony Bones, Joakim, Efdemin, Chrome Hoof, Wolves In The Throne Room and Surkin.
As always, the festival's two weekends are strongholds of the best of contemporary club music, while the weekdays present sonic experiments between digital Glitch, acoustic beauty, abrasive Noise and outrageous Metal. A selection of visual artists will set the right frame by applying new looks to our main venue Maria am Ostbahnhof. Workshops will give visitors opportunities for hands-on experience in building their own electronic sound devices. Lectures, a film program and dicussion rounds give in-depth information to topics related to experimental music culture. One of the definitive highlights will be the CTM.08 opening concert at Berlin's Volksbühne theatre, with Musique Concrète legend Pierre Henry presenting old and new pieces. The concert by Mexican electronic musican Murcof promises for a very special listening experience presenting his new album Cosmos under the starry sky of Berlin's largest planetarium.     close

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Club transmediale (CTM), Berlin's unique festival for electronic and experimental musical culture, invites you to its 10th Anniversary Edition in January 2009.
Expect a magnificent program of concerts and performance in honour of this grand occasion, in which the festival's long-standing friends and comrades-in-arms, the best of the season's newcomers and yet to be discovered talents will all do their utmost to highlight the festival's status as a forge of international talent and a creative network hub.
New this year will be a daytime program of events in Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, which under the theme STRUCTURES - Backing-up Independent Audio-visual Cultures will address both theoretical and practical aspects of today's independent and experimental music production at the intersections of pop and sound & media arts. Artists, experts, journalists and theorists will present their work and lectures as a means to pool knowledge and sketch out the sector's future prospects. Visitors can hone their personal skills in workshops designed to encourage and support DIY experimentation. Selected projects and initiatives will demonstrate what they do in a hybrid formats fusing exhibitions and work-in-progress sessions that engage visitors' participation. Actions and installations will illustrate further examples of creative output wiring music, art and digital culture.
For the CTM.09 Opening Concert on January 22nd Wolfgang Voigt will perform his legendary ambient project GAS live at Berlin's Volksbühne Theatre.     close

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The 11th edition of club transmediale (CTM), Berlin's unique Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Visual Arts, titled by many as Berlin's best pop and music event, is on from January 28th to February 7th 2010 under the title OVERLAP - Sound & Other Media.

WHAT'S NEW?
Neat routine has never been CTM's style, and in 2010, with new themes and new venues at Alexanderplatz, it will again be entering unknown territory. The festival's blend of club nights, performances and concerts will be staged at the shiny, newly reopened WMF, with performances by exciting contemporary artists from undefined convergence zones between out-pop, experimental music, noise, art and media technologies. The daytime program will run nearby at .HBC with a dense series of lectures, workshops, panel discussions and installations, and the new Festival Café as a central meeting place for festival visitors. And, not least, improved transport connections with our paralleling sister festival, transmediale, which takes place from February 2 to February 7, 2010. A joint program featuring top-class audiovisual projects at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the joint approach to the transmediale award emphasize the increasingly close ties between the two festivals.

OVERLAP - SOUND & OTHER MEDIA
With the theme OVERLAP - Sound & Other Media, the festival continues the discussions begun during the highly praised jubilee edition in January 2009 regarding the situations, terms and future prospects of self-determined music creation and experimental audiovisual cultures. While the focus in 2009 was on the internal structures of independent music and media cultures, OVERLAP will broaden the scope to interfaces between music and other creative and economic fields. CTM.10 takes a critical look at the opportunities and risks of developments where media and creative disciplines meld increasingly together, and where previously fixed roles are now in flux. The discussion on how mutations in music culture should be framed continues.
OVERLAP - Sound & Other Media, is not only CTM.10's festival theme, but also the second instalment of the two-year project STRUCTURES - Backing-up Independent Audio-visual Cultures.

PROGRAM
The music program will take place at WMF with an individual focus each night. Valued partners will present thematic programs, on, for example, the convergence of music and computer games curated by the A MAZE. Interact Festival. A series of special concerts at various venues complements the program, including two days of outstanding performances at the HAU 2 theatre, presented in collaboration with the Context#7 festival for contemporary dance. Maverick composer Charlemagne Palestine will play the grand Tiergarten Carillon and the organ at the Französischer Dom. Both performances are part of a string of outstanding concerts and av-performances conceived in collaboration with transmediale, featuring amongs others Ryoji Ikeda, Thomas Köner and Atom TM. The festival will close with an after party at the Panoramabar of Berlin's famous Berghain club, held in collaboration with Extrema Music, Joris Voorn's Green Label and TodaysArt Festival from the Netherlands.
The daytime program - this time at HBC - takes the same form as last year: a thematic laboratory. With a dense series of talks, lectures and discussions it will explore the various aspects of the OVERLAP-theme. Workshops with international artists and practioners will give festival-visitors the opportunity for hands-on experiences.
The CTM Festival Café, also at HCB, serves as a social hub during the festival, a place where participants and visitors can meet, exchange or work on their projects.
The two day Creative Independents Network Market will be happening again this year. On February 5 and 6, projects, companies and initiatives active in promoting independent sound and media cultures will present their activities and projects to colleagues and the general public.
Within the context of the festival a number of exhibitions will be presented. The A MAZE. Interact Festival will show an exhibition of computer games that are focused music and sound at the festival's daytime venue HBC. Around the corner at the SPA, the media art space <TAG> from The Hague will present media art installations. In addition, transmediale will present a number of installation projects in close proximity at the Hungarian Art Center CHB and the Instituto Cervantes. The initiative La Condition Japonaise will present new works by japanese sound and media artists at the project space General Public.     close

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The 12th edition of Berlin's unique and radically open-minded music and art festival, club transmediale (CTM), takes place from February 1 to 6, 2011. The festival, repeatedly designated as "Germany's prime meeting point for electronic and experimental music" and as "Berlin's best pop festival", puts down roots at new venues in Berlin Kreuzberg, namely the HAU theatre and a cluster of spaces around the "Kotti" square - Festsaal Kreuzberg, West Germany, Monarch, Kotti-Shop and Paloma Bar - where a Berlin stronghold for daring, independent music and art has developed. High profile club nights at Maria am Ostbahnhof and Berghain are planned too, as well as a concert series reviving chamber music at the .HBC and an exhibition at the Kunstquartier Bethanien.
With these new and already established venues as partners, the festival follows not only a new agenda, one that helps create optimal conditions for each of the many musical styles and projects within the wide-ranging program - minimalist synth drones, audio-visual experiments, conceptual performances, retakes on cold wave, neo kraut and psychedelia, contemporary club sounds and combinations of neo classical music and electronica. But the festival again, and more than ever, makes a strong statement for an independent, experimental and risk-taking music culture, one that steers clear of commercial concerns and shallow routines and keeps operating with an alert socio-political sensibility. Something that is, despite Berlin's exceptional musical and cultural diversity, still by no means a given.
Staying true to itself, CTM.11 again assembles a unique blend of concerts, parties, laboratories, exhibitions and conferences, which will inspire nightlife hedonists, friends of breakneck experimentation and critical minds alike - not to mention those in who all three qualities are fused.     close

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With an extensive program of concerts, discourses and an exhibition space, CTM.12 – Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Arts is appropriating the festival theme SPECTRAL to explore the current reemergence of all things ghostly and dark in experimental music, avant-pop, and art – and to speculate about its possible causes and inherent potentials.
The thirteenth edition of the Festival will be held from 30 January to 5 February 2012. As always, CTM runs parallel to and in cooperation with Berlin’s festival for art and digital culture, transmediale, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2012.
In addition to a comprehensive music program at HAU, Berghain, Passionskirche, Gretchen, Kater Holzig and Horst Krzbrg, a discourse series developed in collaboration with the philosopher, psycho-historian and author Andreas L. Hofbauer will address the festival’s theme by pursuing questions concerning art, theory, and music.
Ghosts Off the Shelf is an exhibit created by the curator, art critic, and architect Thibaut de Ruyter at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, and explores the artistic use of the exponentially growing capacities of technical archives and their “inherent ghosts”. The exhibit opens on 27 January as part of Vorspiel, a comprehensive partner program within which a number of independent Berlin art, music, and media spaces will present their activities.
transmediale and CTM will once again present exciting collaborative projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.     close

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The CTM team has rigorously engaged with all the ramifications of this year’s festival theme, The Golden Age, to reflect on the (over-)abundance of music in the modern world, and its consequences for individuals, aesthetics, politics, and economy. Never before has such a plethora of fascinating and exciting new music existed, never before has communication between artists and their publics been so direct, and never before have listeners so eagerly opened their ears. The seven-day CTM.13 festival can at best only begin to convey an idea of this colourful cornucopia. And yet, even in this measure, the risk of overtaxing festival visitors and organisers is very real. That which can be described as the Golden Age of unbridled creativity also has its shadow sides: the dire economic situation of many artists; the constraints imposed by major technology and communication providers’ own agendas; the breathless pressure of real-time media; and the justifiable fear of going under in the current mass of fast-track productions, if ever one fails to constantly feed new output into the sheer endless channels through which music must make its mark today.     close