CTM Festival 2027

What makes CTM Festival special

CTM Festival for Adventurous Music and Art has been Berlin’s reference point for experimental, electronic and contemporary music since the 1990s. What began as a small series is now a ten-day city marathon of concerts, club nights, discourse, labs and film screenings spread across Berlin. The 28th edition in 2027 runs under the theme Process…ing and asks how artistic and technological processes sound, feel and play out in society today.

CTM deliberately works with venues that have their own history: clubs, cultural centres, labs. You come here if you are not looking for a pop concert in the classic sense, but for crossings between noise and pop, doom and hyperpop, live electronics and a danceable floor. In between you meet the scene, curators, producers and the curious who are already in Berlin in January for Berlinale, Green Week or transmediale.

When and where it takes place in 2027

The festival runs from 22 to 31 January 2027. Confirmed venues according to CTM Festival include Radialsystem, Berghain, RSO.Berlin, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Morphine Raum and Haus der Visionäre. The programme is deliberately spread across the city rather than squeezed under one roof.

Key dates at a glance: Friday, 22 January opens with the Opening Concert and Opening Club Night. Saturday, 24 January brings In Listening and the Research Networking Day. From 25 to 31 January concerts, club nights, workshops and discourse continue. Saturday, 30 January hosts the RA x CTM Conference, Sunday, 31 January closes with Resynthesising the Traditional Finale and the Closing Concert.

CTM announces first acts, visual CI and early-bird festival passes for mid-September. Tickets and passes appear on ctm-festival.de once sales open. If you want to combine transmediale and CTM, keep an eye on the Connect Pass that has been offered together with transmediale in past years.

What awaits you in the programme

CTM mixes formats you rarely find on one map. Concerts, talks, labs and film by day, club nights in venues that made Berlin famous worldwide by night. Process…ing focuses on processes in flux: how music is made, how technology intervenes and how collectives shape something new together.

Radialsystem often delivers the concert heart with premieres and commissioned works. Berghain and RSO.Berlin stand for the night side, where bass, drone and experimental club culture meet. Volksbühne brings stage format and discourse to the centre. If you stay several days, you experience less a single event than a city that sounds different for ten days.

The 2027 lineup is not confirmed until mid-September. Artists from past editions already show you the direction. In 2026 Earth opened with drone metal at Radialsystem, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Kara-Lis Coverdale and Sarah Davachi stood for spatial, slow concert formats, Growlers Choir and Emiddio Vasquez’s Radio Lab project for commissions and premieres. Club nights mixed Blawan, Batu, Sote and Shapednoise with global voices like Guedra Guedra, Aunty Rayzor or Dengue Dengue Dengue. If you want to know what kind of artists CTM regularly invites, browse the archive of past programmes.

Is it for you?

You come to CTM if you want electronic music beyond the mainstream playlist. As a producer, DJ, curator or journalist already visiting Berlin in winter. Or if you want to go deeper into the scene after trade fair or festival days. It pays off especially if you take transmediale and CTM in one week, because both festivals run in parallel at the end of January and complement each other well.

How to plan your festival days

CTM spreads across Friedrichshain, Mitte and Treptow. Radialsystem, Berghain and RSO sit close together along the Spree and around Ostkreuz, Volksbühne is at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Mitte, Haus der Visionäre lies towards Treptower Park. Plan one focus per evening rather than three clubs in one day.

You can pair an afternoon concert at Radialsystem with a club night in Friedrichshain, or spread concert days and nights across different days. Talks, labs and film screenings are worth it by day, Berghain, RSO or Morphine Raum pull you in at night. You will need breaks in between, and in Berlin in January they are shorter than you think.

From Mitte you walk to Volksbühne. From Mitte to Friedrichshain you take the U5 or S-Bahn towards Ostkreuz, often in under twenty minutes. Late at night you are better off staying near your last venue than crossing the city again. If you want to combine transmediale and CTM on one day, plan Wedding or Hanseatenweg by day and Friedrichshain at night, two different corners of the city.

Stay for CTM Festival

CTM lives on shuttling between concert, discourse and club night, sometimes three times in one evening. If you keep a fixed base with short routes to Friedrichshain, Mitte or the Spree waterfront, you save the longest taxi rides in the middle of the night.

For night programmes in Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, the YARD Berlin is especially practical. If you shuttle between club and hotel several times in one evening, you often save the longest journeys from here. For Volksbühne and discourse in Mitte, CALMA Berlin Mitte fits well, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz is a few minutes on foot or a short U-Bahn ride away. You reach Radialsystem and the Spree-side concert programme from the fjord hotel berlin and LINDEMANN’S often in under twenty minutes by Uber. Anna 1908 sits a little further west and suits you if you want a quieter retreat after long nights.

If you are still looking for a room, we at little BIG hotels have five boutique houses in Berlin with personal service. With discount code LBH_CTM27 you save 5% on stays from 21 January to 1 February 2027. For five rooms or more, group bookings are available with us.

In short

CTM Festival 2027 is ten days of experimental music and art in Berlin, from 22 to 31 January, under the theme Process…ing. Mark the date, keep early-bird passes from mid-September on your radar and enjoy the city between concert, club and a quiet hotel.