Berlin Atonal started ‘DIY’ in a reaction to popular music of 1980s: a ‘hallucinatory sight program’, presenting pop, punk, new wave, it «was not meant to be digested in a gallery context»
Music festival Berlin Atonal returns to the Kraftwerk complex in September 2023 for its first full edition in over four years. The festival will combine music, visual arts, and immersive experiences, all characterized by an experimental approach.
From September 7 to 17, six concert nights and four exhibition days, Berlin Atonal will offer its public a series of new commissioned works, world premiere performances, artistic interventions and after-show programs.
Berlin Atonal, a home for experimental culture since 1982
Berlin Atonal was first created in 1982 by Dimitri Hegemann and «a group of individuals interested in presenting music, art, creation, and experimentalism in what was at the time a wall city. Actually, no one really had a reason to be there. In West Berlin there were just government buildings, a university and the only inhabitants were people already living there before the wall’s erection. Still, strangely in that period many people decided to move there to escape from life in West Germany, especially students and citizens seeking to get away from the ‘normality’ of society».
«This fact, in combination with the many artistic movements emerging at the time, created this sort of chemical reaction that was the festival. It started very DIY, it was an underground operation, very much rooted in a reaction to popular music at the time – pop, punk, new wave, this kind of sounds – and what they at the time called ‘hallucinatory sight program’, so it was not meant to be digested in a gallery context».
Between 1982 and 1990 Berlin Atonal took place across venues throughout the city, fusing emergent experimental music with Europe’s progressive art scene, thus helping to build the reputation of Berlin as ground-zero for advanced experimental culture.
Then the Nineties began and this whole universe was confronted with new music coming from America, especially techno, and the people beyond Atonal spread to start what is now the electronic music scene in Berlin.
The rebirth of Berlin Atonal at Kraftwerk under new direction
In 2013 Berlin Atonal was relaunched under new directorship and based in what became its new home, the Kraftwerk complex. Located in the center of Berlin, on the Köpenicker Straße, the Kraftwerk, former powerplant Mitte, was built approximately at the same time as the Berlin Wall during the years 1960-1964 to power the former East German regions of Berlin.
Afterwards, the complex remained abandoned for years until 2006, when Dimitri Hegemann restored it and reopened a part of it as a techno club, Tresor: «then, in 2013, he was ready to pass the idea he had in the Eighties and give it in new hands». Thus, in 2013 Berlin Atonal was reborn as a festival dedicated to the presentation of high concept A/V shows, site-specific installations, and world premiere commissions and collaborations in music, performance and video.
«We did not have a big vision at first, the idea was quite naïve: to find artists ready to work in a space that we were challenged and inspired by. But our vision changed a lot during the last ten years and now we have higher ambitions to explore». Kraftwerk is a three-story industrial complex: «The main space is a cavernous cathedral, a specimen of concrete architecture that cannot be even imagined from the outside».
Berlin Atonal producing and presenting musical performances in Berlin
The last festival edition took place in 2019, then Berlin Atonal organized other events, such as the transformational Metabolic Rift exhibition – an experiential and performative exhibition-tour through the Kraftwerk building – and the X100 festival, dedicated to the legacy of composer and musician lannis Xenakis. «Usually, the day after the end of a festival you already begin to think to the next edition. Instead, taking a break allowed us to experience new things, such as the exhibition format, how music and art find a place in people’s lives».
Now Berlin Atonal returns to its core mission of producing and presenting musical performances and artistic projects on a large scale. Moreover, the expanded format makes it possible to incorporate insights from its last projects and explore different modalities of engaging with artists, audiences, and the ways in which they can be brought together.
«Our goal is to accompany and facilitate the experiments of artists we admire and to present work that we consider inspiring and challenging. We try to find ways to do this by letting the artists work collectively or commissioning new work. Commission plays a key role in facilitating experimentation, but it also requires the ability to plan long-term. Some of the new projects we will present in this edition, for instance, we have been working on for years».
Berlin Atonal, going back to the festival format
When it comes to choose the artists to collaborate with at Berlin Atonal «we start by thinking about the space. How the audience may interact with it. Music is a moving entity, as well as art. And our formats are dynamic processes too. We want to give artists the possibility of expressing themselves freely».
The Outer team chose to develop in 2021 a hybrid format built on the idea of sequences. «We noticed that when a person goes to an exhibition it is alike entering a cinema when the film is already running, without knowing what and how much they missed. It creates a sense of frustration. There, an artist presents themselves to the audience. While the audience stops for a while, but then moves on and sees something else».
«Now that the pandemic is over, we wanted to the festival we used to do, where thousands of people come together to consume art. But at the same time we did not want to give up on the new format we developed, so we decided to extend the festival’s duration and blend the two formats together, with two weekends full of performances in a ‘festival way’ and an exhibition running during the week».
Courage and Universal Metabolism at Berlin Atonal 2023
Berlin Atonal’s 2023 edition will feature a variety of artists and projects, all united by «a sort of courageousness in their art».
Berlin Atonal 2023 new collaboration between Pavel Milyakov and Perila unfolds as an immersive extended performance/happening, which will take place on the ground floor of Kraftwerk. They will work on a live set that will explore the threshold between being outside and inside of an ongoing performance, softly shifting the gap between listeners and the sound-makers. The act will involve an improvised acoustic piece and sound installation, which will be inspired by the specific acoustics and architecture of the space.
In Rhizomes AV Aho Ssan and Sevi Iko Dømochevsky will draw on the concept of roots as something constantly in motion, expanding in all directions to reach out to connect with other roots. The artists will adapt this concept to explore the influence of sound materials on creation, the appropriation of a sound object and the collaborative nature of a composition that responds to modernity.
A collaborative performance by Caterina Barbieri and Space Afrika will combine transformative musical power with sonic investigation to explore transcendence through the inwardness of auditory experience.
In the site-specific Études For Church by Florentina Holzinger stunt effects will meet the world of music to create scores for bodies as instruments.
Exploration of religion and meditation at Berlin Atonal 2023
Honour will present THE BLOOD (2TEARS & A $UCKET), a sermon that pushes the boundaries of traditional religious oration and modern liturgical music to challenge the audience to confront their own perspectives on love, death, and memory.
Sam Shackleton and Wacław Zimpel will cooperate with Siddhartha Belmannu to perform In The Cell Of Dreams, a piece which is both a meditative exercise and an urge to transcendence whilst thematizing both the acceptance of our mortality and the celebration of living.
CORIN will present Lux Aeterna, a speculative fiction in the form of an audio-visual performance, in which the artist investigates the possibilities of a collective heightened consciousness in times of crisis.
As for the exhibition, it will be called ‘Universal Metabolism’: «The idea is that metabolism is the universe, how the world consumes and creates and how human beings digest things. Both the exhibition and the festival are rooted in human body, and in the extrabodily, that is the cycle of exchange, adaption and transformation that happen outside».
Berlin Atonal
Berlin Atonal is an experimental music festival based in Kraftwerk, a former industrial complex in center Berlin. From 7 to 17 September 2023 the festival will come back for its first full edition in over four years with six music nights over two weekends and an exhibition entitled ‘Universal Metabolism’. The festival is curated by Outer, a Berlin-based agency directed by Laurens von Oswald.
From 2025 and every two years thereafter, Berlin Atonal in its expanded version will become a biennale.
