RITUALS OF SOUND: INSIDE BERLIN ATONAL
editor MAGDALENA ROE
For Berliners and global music lovers alike, few events ignite the city quite like Berlin Atonal. More than just a festival, it’s a five-day gathering that pushes music and art into the deepest folds of the body and mind. This year’s edition unfolded once again inside the monumental Kraftwerk Berlin, expanding into Tresor and OHM, with a programme of new commissions, premieres, installations, and club nights.
As one of the world’s most daring platforms for contemporary sound, the festival’s mission has always been clear: to mobilise artistic risk in order to reimagine how we listen, gather, and make sense of the present. That mission gained further weight this year as Berlin Atonal was officially welcomed into the International Biennial Association, a recognition that situates it firmly among the world’s most significant platforms for experimental, interdisciplinary, and non-commercial art. This new alignment underscores Berlin Atonal’s ambition to become the leading music-first biennial for contemporary sonic and interdisciplinary art. At the heart of Atonal is the Kraftwerk main stage: 70,000 cubic metres of industrial space transformed into a sonic laboratory. For five nights it became a haze-filled experiment in sound, bodies, and light, hosting large-scale, total-format performances across the spectrum of contemporary music.
The opening set the tone. Limbus – a spatial intervention developed by Bill Kouligas with artist Niklas Bildstein Zaar and Berlin architecture studio sub, reimagined recorded sound as an embodied, transducer-based environment. Activated nightly, the piece flickered between memory and projection, conjuring a conceptual anatomy of nocturnal time.
Other highlights included Billy Bultheel’s A Short History of Decay II: The Fugue State, an ongoing performance cycle treating collapse as both a sonic and political condition. With music for flute, bass, and harpsichord interwoven with fragments of speech, Bultheel’s work transformed Kraftwerk into a ritualistic space where survival and enchantment meet ruins, a pulpit-like tower engraved with medieval tapestry motifs and Berlin protest graffiti acting as both score and altar.
Across the week, audiences encountered a staggering range of performances that blurred genre, form, and geography. Lee Ranaldo with Leah Singer’s interdisciplinary collaborations, and Peder Mannerfelt’s restless sonic experiments set the tone for discovery. Bendik Giske’s breath-driven saxophone merged with Barker’s electronic architecture, while legendary figures like Merzbow joined forces with Igor Cavalera and Eraldo Bernocchi for an incendiary trio.
Amnesia Scanner unveiled S.L.O.T.H. with hacker-artist Freeka.tet, fusing performance and digital disruption. Lord Spikeheart and NMR delivered REIGN, a searing audio-visual exploration of rebellion and catharsis rooted in Kenya’s colonial history. Emptyset’s dissever unfolded as a fully immersive environment, while Okkyung Lee and Mark Fell staged a volatile collision between improvisational cello and precision-programmed systems.
The breadth was staggering: from the hallucinogenic Escape Lounge of Heith and Bianca Peruzzi, to the socio-political critiques of Barcelona’s Jokkoo Collective, to Djrum’s beatless new exploration with custom-built machines. Each night reaffirmed Atonal’s role as a testing ground for new forms of listening.
Third Surface was the newest formal experiment from Berlin Atonal, following its successful Metabolic Rift and Universal Metabolism exhibitions. Embedded within Berlin Atonal 25, it functioned as a hybrid exhibition that drew on the spirit of late-night venues from Weimar Berlin, spaces where the trauma of war and the shadow of fascism collided with the desire to gather, speak, and stay awake. These historical antecedents found their contemporary echo in a darkly furnished installation: a field of small tables, clustered chairs, and a central stage. The setting foregrounded social interaction and improvisation, while a shifting programme of performance, sound, moving image, textiles, sculpture, and works on paper unfolded within it. The works acted less as definitive statements than as prompts, subtle cues shaping the murmur of voices and the tone of exchange. Ultimately, Third Surface operated as a speculative model: a controlled experiment in how nightlife might be reimagined, beyond Eurocentric templates, outside the logic of hedonism, and apart from the language of retreat.
Among its many works: Kristoffer Akselbo’s Barracuda, a surreal hydroponic tableau of glowing plants and private ritual; Joanna Rajkowska’s Emergency Light, a colossal beacon evoking catastrophe in slow motion; and Roberto Cuoghi’s mutable slogans, endlessly reinterpreted with irony and doubt. Together, these interventions invited reflection on nightlife not as pure hedonism, but as a speculative model for future sociality.
Parallel to the main stage, PAN curated a Listening Room inside Kraftwerk’s former control room with selections from ENTOPIA, their offshoot series dedicated to expanding the function and form of the soundtrack. Rather than treating sound as a secondary supplement to image, the series framed it as a central, structuring element. Conceived as a framework for musical works emerging from the fields of visual art, performance, film, and fashion, the series profiled world-conjuring compositions in-and-for-themselves.
The soundtrack to Cyprien Gaillard’s Retinal Rivalry unfolded as a disorienting sequence of auditory perspectives, shifting from organ recordings to flickering, time-manipulated layers that drifted between documentary residue and psychotropic abstraction. Jenna Sutela’s Pond Brain constructed a bioacoustic alien language, rearticulating an assembly code of microbial flow. Anne Imhof’s brooding and bodily WYWG distilled a palpable sense of pressure, dread, and distance. Mohamed Bourouissa’s poetic and labyrinthine LILA channeled social ritual, improvisation, and collective healing, with the voice of Le Diouck appearing as an interventive apparition. Finally, Jeremy Shaw’s Phase Shifting Index created a psychophysical feedback loop that induced an ecstatic vision of re-evolution.
Of course, no Atonal would be complete without the activation of Berlin’s iconic clubs. Tresor, OHM, and Globus pulsed each night with expansive DJ line-ups that stretched across genre and generation.
Boundary-pushing selectors like Lil Mofo, livwutang, STILL and TNTC push up against legendary scene-defining figures such as Rrose, Pinch and Calibre across five nights that map a vast sonic terrain. Special back-to-back sessions - Vlada with Skee Mask, re:ni with Mia Koden, Moritz von Oswald b2b Azu Tiwaline and a rare triple b2b from Anthony Linell, DJ Red and Neel - offer moments of collective propulsion, while sets from Baby Sy, Erik Jabari, Marylou, Nawaz, Significant Other, Daisy Ray, EMA, Emily Jeanne, Katatonic Silentio, Martyn, MBODJ, Gyrofield, Triš and NVST activate the dancefloors as a site's intensity and convergence.
