CTM Festival 2026: Noémi Büchi, Daniel Brandt

Premiering her new A/V show Exuvie, composer Noémi Büchi deepens her exploration of the human form and transformation. A filmed collaboration with dancer Rebeka Mondovics, Büchi places the body at the center of the visual frame, its sharp and measured movements shaped by the shifting textures of her new album. Influenced by Francis Bacon’s fractured figures, moments of uneasy closeness and the quiet that follows transformation, she blends orchestral and electroacoustic layers with fragments of video-game, anime and hip-hop sensibilities. Working emphatically without AI, she grounds the work fully in human presence, building a clear, resonant structure of memory, with the idea of exuviae – the shed skin left after metamorphosis – acting as a reminder of what lingers between loss and renewal.

Presenting his new album Without Us with a live concert interwoven with his film of the same name, composer and percussionist Daniel Brandt pushes his exploration of collective dread and ecological unraveling into a speculative narrative driven by the slow violence of climate collapse and the possibilities and limits of individual agency. Directed together with Anthony Dickinson, the film mirrors the album’s molten textures: skittering percussion and melted-mellotron haze, throbbing with the restless churn of an »apocalyptic rave« born from Brandt’s field recordings, including the ambient hum of Europe’s largest mall. Charged with the uneasy pulse of a freefalling world, Brandt’s work is a human-scaled response to forces far larger than us.

The concert is the first 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.