SKRILLEX REVEALS CONTRA WITH TWO-DAY KRAFTWERK BERLIN TAKEOVER

words by MAGDALENA ROE

Skrillex has revealed CONTRA, a new evolving platform positioned between a festival, club concept, and multidisciplinary cultural platform. CONTRA aims to create and explore new connections between experimental music, spatial design, and contemporary performance. Launching with a two-day takeover of Kraftwerk Berlin on 30–31 May in collaboration with Berlin Atonal, the project brings together more than 70 artists spanning globally influential names alongside a new wave of emerging and underground artists shaping the current electronic scene.

all images courtesy of CONTRA

Across Kraftwerk’s vast industrial spaces, including Tresor, Globus, and OHM, the programme moves between peak-time intensity and more exploratory forms, using the monumental architecture of the former power plant as an active part of the experience itself rather than simply a backdrop.

While the first line-up drop arrived last week, it has now been confirmed that Skrillex is the figure behind the project, working alongside an international curatorial and creative team. The project feels like a natural extension of Skrillex’s recent trajectory. Over the past few years, the producer has increasingly immersed himself in contemporary club culture through collaborations spanning rap, experimental electronics, ambient music, and bass-heavy electronic styles infused with Latin influences. CONTRA reflects that wider musical ecosystem, bringing together artists whose work exists between genres and communities rather than neatly within them.

Artists such as Blawan, Crystallmess, Malibu, and Bill Kouligas represent the more experimental and avant-garde edges of electronic music, while figures including Bladee, Ecco2K, BNYX, and Tohji x Mechatok move between pop, cloud rap, experimental electronics, and club music. Elsewhere, names like Nai Barghouti, Juliana Huxtable, TYGAPAW, and Isabella Lovestory bring elements of live performance, sound art, and multidisciplinary practice into the fold, making CONTRA feel less like a traditional festival line-up but rather like a snapshot of the current global underground.

Environmental design for CONTRA is led by Paris studio Matière Noire, known for its scenography work with Courrèges, MM6, Cartier, Chanel, Matières Fécales, and Y-3. For the project, the studio will reshape Kraftwerk’s monumental industrial scale into a series of more intimate atmospheres, using spatial intervention to dissolve distinctions between light, sound, and physical space.