CTM Festival 2026: Emma Ruth Rundle, Sam Slater w/ Lukas Feigelfeld & Theresa Baumgartner: »Lunng«

The CTM 2026 Closing Concert drifts between excavation and apparition, memory pulled apart and recomposed in real time, shadow and revelation revealing a passage of reflection.

Presenting the live premiere of the album and A/V show Lunng, Sam Slater’s heavy experimental electronics and layered sound design takes on new dimensions through Lukas Feigelfeld’s chilling cinematic visuals and Theresa Baumgartner’s monumental lighting display. Over Slater’s distorted and energetic compositions, Feigelfeld’s eerily processed dashcam footage merges seamlessly with Baumgartner’s immersive light theatrics, creating a dialogue between the identity-defining urgency of adolescent roadtrip listening and the uneasy bandwidth of the current moment. Memory and immediacy collapse into a disorienting, genre-bent reverie: one eye on the rearview and the other fixed on the unknown. This performance features special guest appearances by Maria Horn, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Hilary Jeffery and Cavid Dheng.

Emma Ruth Rundle remains a restless spirit at the edges of doom-folk and ambient existentialism, drawn into shadow and myth. Since the stark emotional exposure of her work Engine of Hell, her work has moved even further inward, embracing restraint and negative space as active forces. Guitar, piano and voice are her central tools, silence charged to carry as much weight as melody. Her music now unfolds less as narrative songwriting and more as emotional architecture, slow-burn structures honed by the sharp winds of grief and memory.

The concert is the second of two nights presented within CTM Festival 2026, which runs 23 January – 1 February 2026 across various Berlin venues. Under the theme dissonate < > resonate, CTM Festival’s 27th edition dives into the complex dance between dissonance and resonance, where spectral textures, melodies on the edge of tonal precipices, and frequencies oscillating between harmony, shrouds of distortion, and sharp ruptures sonically evoke existence in multiple, often extremely contradictory realities simultaneously.