Berlin Atonal 2018

48K

Founded in Glasgow in 2011 by DJs Rob Data, Stevie Elements, Stu Alcane, Konx-om-Pax and visualists YUVA, 48K is a community based hardcore rave collective playing exclusively quality vinyl from the '92 rave era. Far from a nostalgia party, they focus on finding amazing new vintage tunes from this era. They play as part of Konx-om-Pax's curated Contemporary Hardcore programme.

Live – World Premiere

Aasthma (Peder Mannerfelt + Pär Grindvik)

Aasthma is the new project of Swedish techno producers Peder Mannerfelt and Pär Grindvik. In this world premiere live performance, the raw potency of Mannerfelt's viscous noise is combined with Grindvik's freewheeling, heady abrasions. The live set at Atonal will be their premiere performance.

Live A/V

Actress

Actress is the enigmatic British producer Darren Cunningham. One of the most adventurous producers of these times, his ghostly electronics stutter and readily dissipate into unusual forms. Drawing on geometry, mythology and architecture, his deceptive sense of atmospherics provides a platform for heavy phantasmagorical contortions. His live performances symbolise his magnetic approach to the unusual: a performance of illusory forms and altered instrumentation.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Alessandro Adriani

Alessandro Adriani runs Mannequin Records, the crucial contemporary outlet for synth wave and industrial music. Sympathetic to unearthing forgotten obscurities as well as newly-emerging sounds, Adriani's vision is to place this musical experience singularly in the now. Alongside his label, he produces cranky, EBM-style techno and taints it with corrosive mechanics and abstract doom.

Live

Alpha 606

Born in Miami to Cuban immigrants, Alpha 606 is a multitalented multi instrumentalist. His innovation lies in blending the varied history of Electro, 20th Century Avant Garde and his native Cuban influences, ranging from the ritual music of Santeria to the Afro Cuban highs of 1930's Havana. With this patchwork of influences, he creates a dense and colourful sound, melding advanced electronics with intricately played live hand drums.

Anete K + LZE

Two of Neuköllns best kept secrets and party starters Anete K & LZE describe themselves in their own words; “we inhabit a dark universe of electro stimulation, a stream of fractured warmth, shards of city lights. This twisted funk we play is about hope, for another realm, It sounds like XXX and grime, our meeting place, the dancefloor.”

Live A/V – World Premiere

Astrid Sonne presents Ephemeral

Muted glass, white jade, brown rocks, yellow change. Looking at the ceiling in moments of excitement. Copenhagen-based Astrid Sonne reflects on perception of time and emotion through ’Ephemeral’, a new work for choir, viola and electronics. Balancing contrast is a reoccurring theme in Sonnes compositions, where alternation between repetition and renewal becomes a mean of expression. ’Ephemeral’ is premiered on the occasion of Berlin Atonal 2018 and will feature Andrea Novel (Ydegirl), Henriette Motzfeldt (0.5 of Smerz) and Xenia Xamanek.

Batu

Batu's Timedance label has developed over the last few years into one of the most innovative sources of UK club music, while his own concussive productions constantly nudge bass heavy and broken beat electronic sounds into new directions that evade quick classification. Celestial melodics osmose expansively over challenging rhythms, with structures that flip-flop and divulge the far-out intentions of a versatile talent.

Live

Beatrice Dillon

London’s Beatrice Dillon is a producer, artist and NTS DJ with acclaimed solo releases, remixes and collaborations across Hessle Audio, The Trilogy Tapes, PAN, Boomkat Editions, Timedance and Where To Now?. Recent performances include MUTEK Montreal, Dekmantel, Documenta Athens, Masåfåt Cairo, Moscow Save, Borealis Norway and Barbican Centre, London. She has collaborated with award-winning visual artists at ICA, Tate, Lisson Gallery, Southbank Centre, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Nasher Sculpture Dallas and Mona Tasmania amongst others. Dillon was the recipient of Wysing Arts Centre’s artist residency in 2016 and is a resident at Somerset House Studios, London.

Blue Hour

Under the guise, Blue Hour, British producer and DJ Luke Standing carves his unique imprint and distinctive sound. His releases showcase dense, monolithic grid-works whose intensity rarely lets up. A punishing techno with wildly dense atmospheres intimately driven by the spirit and energy of the 90s, Millsian futurism, and timeless Electronica.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Bridge soundtracked live by ENA

ENA, the Tokyo producer Yu Asaeda, presents at Berlin Atonal a live A/V performance. “Bridge” is an introspective soundtrack for a documentary also called Bridge which is about the Dejima bridge, a reconstructed symbol of the Dutch-Japanese trading history in Nagasaki, Japan. It is a hugely atmospheric work, with hypnotic repetition of sounds, strange audio design and a mixture of melancholic moods with more ruminative synths.

Live

British Murder Boys

British Murder Boys represents the infamous collaboration of UK techno figureheads Surgeon and Regis. Aimed at pushing the farthest boundaries of techno, they deliver a pummeling live show, featuring their trademark off-centre industrial sounds layered with cutting-edge rhythmic advancements. Berlin Atonal 2018 hosts their live performance in Germany for the first time in a decade.

Live

Bruta Non Calculant

“The raw stone is as beautiful as the diamond”. Named after this Latin expression, Bruta Non Calculant is a project from Alaxis Andreas G, of Le Syndicat Electronique, and his brother Victor-Yann, who makes music since the late 1970s as De Frontanel. The brothers' collaborative voice distinctively carries a sound of dischordant beauty, combining new wave elements that drip with folkloric allure. An overwhelmingly dark European atmosphere pervades with themes of death, lust and unrequited love at the heart of this thrilling work.

Caroline Lethô

Caroline Lethô is a crucial member of the underground Lisbon scene, an advocate of the distinct electronic mutations of the city. Lethô's DJ sets embrace her deep knowledge of all dance music, intuitively weaving through genre cross-pollinations with an adventurous nature that emulates the simultaneously dense and light atmospheres of her native Portugal.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Caterina Barbieri with Ruben Spini

Caterina Barbieri is a Berlin-based Italian composer who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism. Caterina explores the psycho-physical effects of repetition and pattern-based operations in music, by investigating the polyphonic and polyrhythmic potential of sequencers to draw severe, complex geometries in time and space. This occasion marks her debut visual show with Italian video artist Ruben Spini.

Changsie

Originally from Japan's east coast, Changsie comes highly recommended following her DJ set at New Codes in Tokyo. She has been pivotal in introducing the sounds of UK bass and black music to the local scene. A close affiliate with Lil Mofo, her Psycho Rhythmic events showcase a careful selection of dubstep, 2-step and techno, and have found her regularly supporting touring DJs from Europe and USA.

Live

Chevel

Chevel is the main pseudonym of Dario Tronchin, of Treviso, Italy and more recently in Berlin. His works range from glitchy, cerebral hypnosis to explorations in creating otherworldly sensations that strike at the heart of synthetic techno workouts. He explores the notion of weightlessness, with pointillist reduction and suspenseful emulated spaces, retaining a minimalistic core throughout his oeuvre.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Claude Speeed with Sasha Litvintseva + Beny Wagner

Berlin-based Scottish producer, Claude Speeed records hazy ambient drone drawing from classical and post-rock, with distorted memories of '90s rave and trance music figuring into the mix. His work reveals a distorted and tense minimalistic dreamscape, one that follows a dissonant bearing. His performance for Berlin Atonal is a collaboration with visual artists Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner.

Cloudo

First surfacing in 2003 on Glasgow community radio station Subcity, the lesser known twin brother of Shaun Murphy (LuckyMe) aka Cloudo has been confronting audiences in the underground club scene with an emotionally charged blend of all hardcore styles from early Scottish bouncy techno through to modern UK styles via every number of bonkers in between.

Courtesy

Former member of Apeiron Crew, Danish DJ Courtesy is known for her multi-faceted approach to club music - combining the often emotive melodics of the rave with unrelenting sonics of the Copenhagen underground she represents as label owner of Ectotherm. Unafraid to draw in inspirations from jungle and trance, her sound offers a riposte to staid mass-techno and releases the unexpected in thrilling approaches.

Live A/V – German Premiere

CURA MACHINES with Rainer Kohlberger

CURA MACHINES is the new pseudonym of composer, producer and sound designer Daniel Lea. Densely fluctuating synthesizers and heavily amplified textures form an immersive experience, intensely visual and filmic, rising to a narrative that firmly pushes contemporary music and new-classical boundaries. For the first time in Germany, CURA MACHINES will reveal at Berlin Atonal 2018 this live A/V collaboration with Austrian visual artist Rainer Kohlberger, whose algorithmic approach meddles digital aesthetics and noise to provoke visual incoherencies.

Live

David Morley

Ambient master David Morley arguably reached the high-water mark of the genre starting with the 1992 release of Evolution – the first record of R&S's famed ambient sub-label Apollo. A storied career in recording studios since the 1970s stands him in good stead for this hardware-heavy set.

DJ Marcelle/Another Nice Mess

DJ Marcelle's extra-ordinary approach is as idiosyncratic as it is thrilling. A DIY artist in its truest form, she sets out with a truly unique style which does not utilize beat matching and always makes use of three vinyl decks as she blends together a diverse array of genres and sounds. Her main radio show is called Another Nice Mess.

DJ Sports

DJ Sports is Milan Zaks, one of the figureheads of Aarhus' Regelbau crew – a fast rising collective with a distinctive sound. DJ Sports declares unadulterated rave aesthetics aplenty – a journey over a musical milieu of broke-beaten, ambient driven house and techno, melancholy junglist and dubwise downtempo. These vivid and inventive worlds come full of detailed percussion, mollifying chords and alluring scintillas of melody.

Djrum

Jazz musician Djrum concocts a late-night melting pot of dubstep, garage, techno and dub after his August 2018 album release on R&S Records.

ENA b2b Felix K

This is the collaboration of Yu Asaeda (ENA) and German composer Felix Krone, who runs Nullpunkt and Hidden Hawaii records. ENA has been working as a producer and DJ in Tokyo for over a decade and was an integral part of the city’s early adoption of U.K. sound-system style. Felix Krone is therefore a natural partner with his genre-defying sound that utilises just blurred inclinations of techno, ambient and drum and bass. Their combination bridges a foggy abyss, of semi-recognisable rhythm works and fluttering ambient technicalities.

Live

Eric Maltz

Eric Maltz is an upcoming producer from New York City and now based in Berlin. His sound purposely avoids easy pigeonholing, operating within the confines of house and dubbed-out techno with a sound that suggests everything but. Shades of ambient, new wave and rock reveal Maltz to be an accomplished instrumentalist, with an ear for the eclectic that reveals his past working in Halcyon Records.

Eris Drew

Eris Drew is a DJ, musician and trans mystic. As a resident at Chicago's Smart Bar, Eris is known for her ecstatic and intensely rhythmic sets which channel the Motherbeat, her concept of “a language of resonant pulsation” found in the “archaic impulse” of rave. This transcendent primordial healing energy and mathematics speaks through music and all things, from bird songs and locomotives to U.K. hardcore and krautrock.

Live – World Premiere

Esi + Octachoron present Fear Pollution

Esi + Octachoron present a live performance entitled Fear Pollution at Berlin Atonal. Both of these Georgian acts played at the Atonal curated stage at this year's edition of 4GB festival. Esi is the techno producer Irakli Shonia, co-founder of record label De Re which released Octachoron's debut LP 'Land Of Meta' this year, a shimmering excursion combining Classical Minimalism & vintage Berlin School arpeggiations.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Gábor Lázár presents Unfold

Gábor Lázár presents his signature flux of zinging mentasms and affective rhythms with a cyber-mongrel gnash, drawing upon his new album Unfold for The Death Of Rave for a world premiere live A/V performance. With a knowing glance to various revered scenes of techno culture, this celebrated Hungarian artist unleashes his singular forte in syncopation and razor sharp production. This new album represents the elevation of his idiosyncratic syntax of gestural hyper-focus and unexpected emotive relief, firmly establishing Gábor Lázár as one of the more gripping producers of contemporary music.

Live

Giant Swan

An explosion of punk at the pulsing heart of techno, duo Giant Swan are a maelstrom of potential energy, bleeding between several sonic movements that both obliterate and invigorate. A manifestation of the rich musical core of Bristol, their live shows are much-revered, exposing a modern retaliation to passivity. Building on a foundation of rhythmic tension and frenzied improvisation, no two performances are the same as the duo re-build and destroy their twisted vision of techno-not-techno.

Golden Medusa

Golden Medusa is a Berlin-based DJ and Leisure System label newcomer. Her sets are usually vinyl-only and an eclectic mix of genres, including classic US-House, Detroit Electro & Techno, Breakbeat, Experimental and Ambient, combining new and lesser known productions with old classics. She has a soft spot for epically melancholic melodies, old school rave sounds and high-energy beats, a combination she describes as „peak time ecstasy” which will also be a driving theme for her 90s-inspired "Contemporary Hardcore” set.

Live A/V – German Premiere

group A with Dead Slow Ahead

Japanese duo group A marry droning violin, abstract noise and throbbing repetitions to severe performance art. Their excursions induce a synaptic hyperactivity, through metallic dance constructs and psychotomimetic waves. This performance on the main stage of Berlin Atonal sees them collaborating with mind-bending video producers Dead Slow Ahead to create an A/V performance that demands attention.

Helena Hauff

Helena Hauff represents a soundworld intense, electrified and futuristic. A former resident at Hamburg's Golden Pudel club, her DJ sets are ever uncompromising, indicating a sense of unpredictability, developed chaos in acid-tinged brute electro. Her soulful machine music has found Hauff a natural home on James Dean Brown's notorious proto-tribal techno Hynobeat project which she has joined since 2013, alongside her solo productions for the likes of PAN, Ninja Tune and Panzerkreuz.

Live – World Premiere

Hiro Kone presents Pure Expenditure

No stranger to manipulating macabre disorientations into enchanting new shapes, Hiro Kone is the New York City musician Nicky Mao, here at Berlin Atonal 2018 presenting her new album “Pure Expenditure” for the first time. A long-time collaborator of Drew McDowell, her music exposes the unsettling and sublime. Her cascades of twisted field recordings find an inherent partner in the effervescent current of synthesis and forge new terrains that respond to the precariousness of humanity.

HVL

HVL is Georgian DJ and producer Gigi Jikia, who holds a residency at the crucial Bassiani club in Tbilisi. His work plays out a proud representation of his scene, a space where dim lights and mysterious corners provide a playground for wild ideas to dart around in the dark. The overall atmosphere may appear subdued, but it acts as merely a cover for the fiery spirit lurking underneath.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Iona Fortune presents Chaotic Profusion

above K'AN THE ABYSMAL, WATER below CHêN THE AROUSING, THUNDER The 3rd hexagram of the I-Ching relays how heaven and earth bring forth individual beings, with difficulty present in the beginning as a form of chaotic profusion. Iona Fortune is a composer from Glasgow embarking on an investigation of Eastern philosophy, building an 8-part series of releases exploring the hexagrams of the I-Ching. Using the Guzheng, Gamelan and EMS Synthi AKS to submit the audience to her extraordinary atmospheres and rattling rhythms, she represents the new cadre of artists linked with Jon Hassell's “Fourth World” concept.

ishi vu

Gotenberg producer ishi vu dwells on mortality and the spirit in conjuring his poly-sensual universe. His trance-inspired works flicker with the bass-heavy palette of rave, a surrealist digital sheen. A snatch of nostalgia and a soulful irreverence induces a pared-down, hard-hitting sound that testifies to hazy disjunct and abstract logic.

Live

Jay Glass Dubs

Jay Glass Dubs is an exercise of style focusing on a counter-factual historical approach of dub music, stripped down to its basic drum/bass/vox/effects form. With a clear understanding of the mystic leanings to this style, the Athens-based producer Dimitris Papadatos has emerged as one of the most exciting producers in the ever-buoyant dub-dancehall scene. His chimerical sound-world of dank, mesmerizing rhythms formed the base of a crucial collaboration with Leslie Winer and was included in the riddim fuego of Duppy Gun's recent Miro Tape released on the closely affiliated Bokeh Versions.

Live

June

Berlin-based Greek producer June creates synth and drum machine jams indebted to punk, acid, Belgian new beat and the sound of The Hague. His vision exhibits the alienating sounds of the once sleazy streets of gentrifying Europe, shot through with the acrid electric melancholy of a future turning sour. He co-runs June Records, a hub for the claustrophobic spaces of bulbous analogue electro.

Live – World Premiere

Kassel Jaeger + Stephen O’Malley

Kassel Jaeger is Franco-Swiss artist François Bonnet, based in Paris and currently artistic director of the inestimable INA-GRM. His work is ominous but romantic, and vast in scale yet microscopically grained. He performs at Berlin Atonal with Sunn O)))'s Steven O'Malley, whose durational meditations absorb and consume, transcending rock, avant-garde and minimalism to awaken dormant senses not usually experienced with other musics or concise temporality.

Killer-Oma

Killer-Oma is the avant-garde duo of gangster-rapper Killer-Bong and the “Jazz Godfather”, bassist Isao Suzuki. Suzuki's long and revered career leaves him as an essential piece of the jazz canon, Japan and beyond, having been a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in the early 1970s. Killer-Bong's destructive dubs and animalistic ad-libs embody a smoky hip-hop world. These masters of improvisation invite an uncontrollably deep psychedelia.

Live A/V

Klara Lewis

Swedish artist Klara Lewis is a master of organically built momentum, drawing on field recordings that twist and smear into discordant squeals and backdrop rhythms. This style ekes out dubbed rhythms built from noise, solemn melodies from former environments. These coarse, abstracted realities seemingly exist in the in-between, slowly edging out into vast expanses.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Kolorit (Lowtec & Kassem Mosse)

Kolorit is a collaborative project between Workshop records stalwarts Lowtec & Kassem Mosse that sees them engage in live dialogue somewhere beyond the frayed edges of techno music. As producers they are known for their mesmerising abstractions tugging at the confines of house and techno, a textured rhythmic identity rarely unearthed. Their debut double EP will be released by Workshop records in 2018 while Berlin Atonal hosts the world premiere live outing of the project.

Konx-om-Pax

Glaswegian Tom Scholefield, also known as Konx-om-Pax, is one of the most vital designers in electronic music culture, with a decade of work defining the visual identities of the very forefront labels and artists of this era. Strands of neurological pathways, neon slabs and early modernist cues are recurrent themes in a vivid aesthetic that's instantly recognisable. These digital tones crossover into his musical output, swirling and euphoric, a bottomless mesh of jubilant rave. For this years edition of Berlin Atonal, Konx-om-Pax curates a selected programme that reinforces this distinct digital aesthetic.

Live A/V – World Premiere

LABOUR presents next time, die consciously (بیگانگی)

LABOUR is a new collaborative project which seeks to contribute towards a space of nonconforming social practices and identities, and recasts the nature of work as a potentially transformative activity. This performance for Berlin Atonal marks the launch of the project. Their sonic intents locate themselves on multiple temporalities— from microsounds and stochastic synthesis to rhythmic cycles to acknowledging that which propels beyond. LABOUR disregards notions of regulated time via processes of disruption. Meshing instability within drums, electronic signals and customized lights, the output is a sound both hybrid and hardcore.

Live A/V

Lanark Artefax

Lanark Artefax is Scottish producer Calum MacRae whose pared down sonic palette continues to be broken off into new fractures. His live A/V show configures semiotics and linguistics in the visual realm, forming a cross-pollination with his coarsely stuttering choral samples and sculptural techno rhythms. Often cinematic and unceasingly intense, MacRae deploys a deeper thinking that persuades of an all-encompassing approach to the art form.

Live

Layne

American synthesist and composer Rachel Aiello welds field recordings and felt-like auditory textures with concrète churns, creating a dredging hypnosis and spirited undertones. Her vast soundscapes find her a natural home on Regis' Downwards label and her spatial atmospheres offer a glimpse into her work as assistant to electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani.

Live

Le Syndicat Electronique

Alaxis Andreas G's Le Syndicat Electronique is one of the most radical known projects for electronic music in France. This martial electro is a ménage of violent rhythms, knee-jerk minimal wave synthesizers and clipped chants delivered raw and sexualised. Fiercely independent and anonymised through use of a balaclava, this is the stand-out project of his many aliases whose origins emerge from the Invasion Planète Recordings label, founded in 1998 from the insurance proceeds of a car crash.

Lena Willikens

Longtime figurehead of the Cómeme and Salon Des Amateurs families, Lena Willikens' sets are built around her relentlessly eclectic taste and ongoing attraction to unusual sounds. Her dedicated approach to the craft of DJing ensures her esteemed sets are site-specific occasions in themselves, and perfectly suited to the investigative ears of Atonal regulars.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Leslie Winer presents ©ont. with Gazelle Misst’inkiette + Maeve Rose

Leslie Winer's seminal cult classic 1990 album 'Witch' precisely dissected sexual politics over primal, cut-up beats in frank, uncompromising fashion. This world premiere A/V show at Berlin Atonal finds her performing with French percussionist Gazelle Misst'inkiette and Copenhagen-based vocalist Maeve Rose. Featuring found, appropriated and archival video manipulated, mixed, and given the old Burroughsian one-two by Winer herself.

Lil Mofo

The unpredictable selections of Lil Mofo have gained her reverence far beyond her native Japan and London, where she formerly resided. Her radio mixes have illustrated this deep knowledge of the outlier sounds of dub, crisp excursions in techno and the ever-burning flame of vocal pitch-correction in contemporary dancehall.

LNS

LNS is Vancouver DJ and artist Laura Sparrow, a producer of atmospheric electro and retro-futuristic techno. As a DJ she is known for her pounding sets encompassing electro bass, bleep and jungle. Mind bending club constructions played at furious speeds.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Lucrecia Dalt presents Synclines

Berlin-based Colombian musician Lucrecia Dalt draws on a vast range of influences to provoke her essential, telluric sounds. Synclines is a site-specific live work designed to complement her recent Anticlines release. Anticlines is a volume of bodily and geological substrates within poetic theory and sound. It is a place where skins and minerals dissolve and commingle, where gaseous subterranean leaks inflate lungs, where brain cavities echo interplanetary waves bent from passing through atmospheres.

Live

Lutto Lento

Lutto Lento is Lubomir Grzelak, sound artist, producer and DJ, co-founder of DUNNO Recordings, based in Warsaw, Poland. His music exhibits a strange swirl of samples, from Enya to dissonant instrumentation to the field recordings that lurk in the shadows, a primordial soup of tactile, cut-and-paste wanderings. He is inspired equally by avant-garde and surreal sounds from the bygone eras as well as raw house and techno music of today. Alongside this, Grzelak also writes music for theatre and film.

Live

Machine Woman

Russian sound artist Anastasia Vtorova's Machine Woman moniker effortlessly reveals an ingrained humour with reverberations of the ruder ends of UK club music. Her spontaneous and prolific music making is reflected in her track titling, of whimsical inspirations from the daily environment. This music speaks to a piercing and vibrant physicality, with snipped voices, synths reduced to their emotional core and house beats that propel into heart-racing territory.

Live

Martina Lussi

Martina Lussi works at the intersection of sound art, composition, installation and live performance. Orbiting around a musical solar system that includes electroacoustic tropes as well as deconstructed techniques and ideas from more recent electronic music traditions, Lussi has a characteristically decentred approach to musical exploration.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi + Fis

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi started playing tombak, a traditional Persian wood drum, at the age of six. Since then he has revolutionized the instrument's playing technique, and today he is recognized as one of the leading tombak players in the world. A virtuoso in rhythm and spirituality, Mortazavi teams up with Fis, a New Zealander whose electronic music focuses on the perspective of working with sound and energy.

Moopie

Moopie is the head of Australian label A Colorful Storm, whose limited but diverse catalogue reveals a seasoned listener in charge – from holy grail indie-pop reissues to contemporary soundsystem deconstructions. A mixtape for Blackest Ever Black exhibits a similarly varied range, harsh schizophrenic dnb futurism that precedes a descent into electro-acoustic dreamtime and uncanny, (un)pop minimalism.

Live

MUN SING

MUN SING is the solo project of Bristolian producer Harry Wright, whose raucous improv techno duo Giant Swan also appears at Berlin Atonal. For this project, he turns his focus to primitive club sounds. It is a cold, militaristic nod to dissident drum workouts, with synthetic tribalisms and feral dirges that raise a gritty, cyber-inflected grime.

Nemo + Castro

Nemo is the owner of Sound Metaphors record store in Kreuzberg, Berlin established in 2015. The in-house label has reissued music from Detroit Techno legend Instinct, alongside more recently the '90s Berlin group Global Electronic Network. With Castro he runs an event series in Berlin entitled Have A Nice Day.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Neon Chambers (Kangding Ray + Sigha)

Kangding Ray & Sigha present a live set under their new moniker, Neon Chambers. There are very few musicians who manage to explore the convergence between techno and unorthodox music as tirelessly as Kangding Ray, whose complex, boundary-provoking sound will mix with Sigha’s bold techno, immersive sound design and masterful enquiries in modular synthesis.

Nika J

Nika J is a crucial member of the Georgian electronic music scene. Co-director of the influential 4GB festival, now based outside Tbilisi in Saguramo, and accomplished DJ in his own right, Nika J comes to Berlin Atonal to play his first major set in the German capital.

Live

Nikakoi

Nikakoi is the nom de plume of Nika Machaidze. He is one of the most well known and respected Georgian electronic musicians - active since the 1990s - and has become a widely regarded composer for film and television music. Atonal hosts a rare foreign show for this underrecognised master of IDM, broken, Sheffield-via-Tbilisi electronic music.

Live

object blue

Originally from Beijing and Tokyo but now living in London, object blue concentrates on the combination of experimental sounds with techno, focusing deeply on their performative potential. Zippy hi-hats shape-shift, urgent spoken-word and TR-808 bass frequencies smear, as propulsive beats slide through wonky spaces reflecting the leftfield terrains of contemporary club music.

Objekt

Objekt has built up a reputation as not only a technically skilled but also regularly surprising and dynamic DJ. His sets, while broadly focused on techno, frequently duck and dive between the hypnotic and engrossing, incorporating off-kilter broken beats, breakneck electro, acid, dubstep, house, EBM and anything else necessary to illustrate his version of events, sometimes taking large jumps in tempo and drawing fully from the last 30 years of recorded electronic music.

Optimo

Optimo is the DJ duo JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, whose legendary club night of the same name established them as underground dance music legends. Founded from an aversion to mainstream machinations and the predictability of 4x4 techno sets, these Sunday night sessions developed a reputation as the duo ranged through all kinds of unconventional music. Such selections delivered a clubbing experience that struck into territories far beyond the accepted boundaries of dance music .

Live – German Premiere

Ora Iso

Ora Iso is the duo Kathleen Malay and Jason Kudo, formed in New York City but now based in Indonesia and New Hampshire respectively. Their ever-present rhythmic dirge from mechanical drums is met by sombre rituals of distortion and Stoic apocalypses. Newly released on Regis' label Downwards their album “Image Certifies” navigates the ruptured fringes of acerbic abstraction and provides a distinct annihilation for which their world is designed.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Outer Space presents Organic Dial

Outer Space is the project of John Elliot and Andrew Veres. Their arpeggiated tones and analogue strings are reminiscent of kosmiche pioneers such as Laurie Spiegel and Tangerine Dream, a coiling mass of vintage synth-electronica and relentless polyrhythmic workouts. The duo exploit a modern techno essence for accumulating tension towards an eventual release that uncontrollably spirals into the tripped-out distance. Organic Dial is a world premiere presentation of the next chapter in their musical story.

Live

Paradox

Paradox, the pseudonym of British producer Dev Pandya, is one of the most longstanding contributors to drum and bass. A certified breakbeat addict, he is one of the most dynamic producers of the canon, championing a new sub-genre known as drumfunk, which pivots on transforming breakbeats into constantly shifting drum patterns, noticeably different from their traditional sound and placement.

Pariah presents Here From Where We Are

Arthur Cayzer is the London-based producer Pariah whose recent debut LP 'Here From Where We Are' redefines his work. Loping, multi-layered tracks extend processed instrumentation and wild digital environments into a heady mix of sound collage, unsettled imaginations and futuristic capacities. With just the slightest innuendo to the rave-rich spaces his earlier works offered up, his set at Berlin Atonal will be as absorbing as it is anticipated.

Live

Patricia

Max Ravitz is a composer of murky, melodic electronic music designed to elicit movement in the body. For several years Ravitz has been a fixture in New York’s world of do-it-yourself house and techno, performing under his own name or in duos Inhalants, Masks, or Pulpo, but most frequently as Patricia. At times abstract, overlapping melodies exist over rasping beats, irregular sounds floating in wobbly transience.

Live

Phantom Love

Phantom Love is the project of Italian experimental artist Valentina Fanigliulo, whose Mushy project is regarded as one of Italy's most vital contributors to the cold-wave sound. Phantom Love represents a shift towards cosmic music for dancing, with electronic drums brought more to the forefront. Against an arcane melodic canvas, tribal and shape-shifting drums structures fight and discipline the liquid interplay and superimposition of cymbals and cowbells delays.

Photonz

Photonz is the main musical alias of Marco Rodrigues - a Portuguese DJ, producer and driving force for Lisbon's underground scene. For over a decade now he's been crafting his own personal style of eerie yet potent machine funk. As a DJ, Photonz has developed a reputation for intensely euphoric sets and in 2017 co-founded the famed Mina parties, a sex-positive, queer and intersectional-feminist techno party aimed at using the dissociative potential of intense raving to create a temporary space of suspension away from patriarchal expectations.

PLO Man

PLO Man is one of the Acting Press label, whose approach towards club-enlightened music stands them out as one of the most singular collectives currently operating. This sound features dense nuages of sibilant ambience, IDM-recalling fluctuations and booming lateral rhythms. PLO Man broadcasts a long-running show on Berlin Community Radio.

Possible Futures

Possible Futures source their inspiration from the many shades of colour that co-exist between black and white. It is through the open and eclectic selections of inspired and devoted luminaries that Possible Futures have found their manifold sound. Devoted to the nocturnal jungle, through their own record label Possible Futures share their therapeutic musical compounds.

Powder

Powder is DJ and producer Moko Shibata, whose varied sets have become much anticipated far beyond her native Tokyo. Her distinctive sound - those rolling drums and dubby textures, and acid-inflected chugs - provides an unique charm - with much of her appeal stemming from an ability to weave together sparse rhythmic elements into textural atmospheres, creating deeply instinctive dance floor euphorias.

Live A/V

Prequel Tapes with nomoreless & Valentin Tszin

Prequel Tapes is a work of deep synthesis. A haunting excavation of UK rave culture and traces of nostalgia that seep into the recorded output and live shows. Layered on minimalist rhythms, explorations in post-punk and Sheffield-based electronica are overwhelmed by drones and filtered webs of reverb and fuzz. A hazy soundscape in which its difficult to tell where old sounds end and new ones begin.

Live

PTU

PTU is the duo of Alina Izolenta and Kamil Ea, whose Soviet Union upbringing informs their acronym name. PTUs were Professional Technical Schools, that inadvertently became a refuge for freedom before military service or getting married - ideas and values imposed by the state machine. Their brazen sound is a disassembled joint of IDM, techno and house performed live with a clear improvisational understanding.

Regis

Regis is the co-founder of hugely influential techno label Downwards and one of the most highly regarded creative impulses in the British electronic scene. From degenerate inspirations, Regis forges a surging, chaotic sound that aggressively bridges the gap between techno and post-punk. Through his various guises, be it his solo work, collaborations as British Murder Boys, Sandwell District or with his label, his provocative influence on electronic music may not be understated.

Resom

Resom has credentials not only as one of Berlin's most respected and active DJs, but also as one of the major voices advocating for the (re)establishment of progressive politics in the wider club scene. Resident of ://about blank since the first days, she is also the curator of The Amplified Kitchen event series and a long-standing fixture at cult Welsh festival Freerotation. She has been working with Berlin Atonal in many capacities over the last years.

Live

Rezzett

Quasi-mysterious project Rezzett warps grimy techno inflections until a distorted husk scrapes into form. With a series of releases including the new self-titled album on The Trilogy Tapes, their reliable lo-fidelity and sunken percussions reflect a dubwise leaning with their label, while distant, harmonically wavering synths place tar-stained clouds forefront. This corroded jungle of fleeting vocals, Amen breaks and bit-crushed whatever sounds like nobody else, raw and off-kilter.

Liver Laser – German Premiere

Robin Fox presents Single Origin

Leading Australian audiovisual artist Robin Fox returns to Berlin Atonal to show the next installment in his trilogy for virtuosic laser. Described as a concerto for a single laser beam, this is the first showing in Germany after its debut at last year's Unsound festival.

Samuel Kerridge

Samuel Kerridge is known for his powerful waves of explosive noise layered over disfigured stop-start rhythms. His DJ set promises to be provocative and retaliatory, pushing the audience in uncompromising revolutions. This aggressive physicality is mirrored in his productions, a recoiling, shivering and screaming approach to noise-techno. Vexed monotony brings forth mirage-like overtones and agitating melodies.

Live A/V – World Premiere

Shifted / Broken English Club / Ilpo Väisänen

Shifted, Broken English Club and Ilpo Väisänen come together for a crucial new collaboration commissioned by Berlin Atonal. Shifted is Guy Brewer, a producer of fluttering, hissing techno. Oliver Ho's Broken English Club focuses his body of work on the dark friction emerging as a byproduct from the collision of human and machine. Finnish experimental producer Ilpo Väisänen, formerly half of the legendary duo Pan Sonic, scratches a textured maelstrom through noise and sunken pads.

Sigha

Sigha’s sound has evolved into a deep, dark, introspective take on Techno. Fascinated by the parallels between communal worship and the club experience, what sets him apart is his sensitivity to location, space and the shifting gravitational centre that binds together a room and an audience.

Simo Cell b2b Low Jack

Simo Cell is a regular guest, having established himself as a festival favourite after various performances over the years. His effective combinations of UK forms with his French electronic sensibilities create a synthesis of the danceable and listenable in equal parts. For Berlin Atonal 2018, he goes back to back with Low Jack, who runs Editions Gravats. Of Honduran background, Philippe Hallais is celebrated for his distinct club deconstructions, fluidly stepping between dancehall, sound art and techno territories.

Sissel Wincent b2b Anastasia Kristensen

Sissel Wincent and Anastasia Kristensen are two of the most exciting young forces of nature in mesmeric techno. Together, a whirlwind of emboldened intensity, the two DJ/producers combine for a hypnotic and all-encompassing rare back-to-back set.

Skee Mask

Skee Mask echoes the relationship between music and our technologies, a near-cinematic investigation of advancements and organic emotionality. Steering breakbeats away from navel-gazing nostalgia and into fresh terrain for the Munich-based label Ilian Tape, Skee Mask excites the additive particles of raw youth. His new album “Compro” embeds him as a standout producer of modern electronica with an array of precisely unravelling ambient techno and forward-leaning sample manipulation.

Solid Blake

Originally from Glasgow, Emma ‘Solid’ Blake is a DJ and producer who now plays a prominent role in the bustling electronic music scene emerging from Copenhagen. As part of the renowned collective Apeiron Crew, she has been a keen proponent of the underground techno community of her city. Her style is of austere, uncompromising techno and authentic electro, often interspersed with grittier, more industrial style tracks.

Live

Sophia Loizou

Bristol-based sound artist and producer Sophia Loizou's practice exposes the importance of human intimacy in the face of large scale technological advancements. Ghostly remnants of hardcore and early jungle percolate throughout while fragments of radio transmissions seep in and out through tape-based processes and spectral processing, leaving the listener in a hauntingly beautiful landscape filled with both solidity and disintegration.

Live

SW. / SVN

SW. / SVN are producers and DJs Sven Rieger and Stefan Wust, who run the label SUED together. This much beloved label releases leftfield tracks inspired by - but not always sounding like - Detroit techno and Chicago house. Their idiosyncratic atmospheres reflect their withdrawn nature behind a music that blurs broken beat, deep house and worn-out analogue textures into their very own dancefloor deviations.

Sybil Jason

Sybil Jason is a Haitian-American multi-disciplinary artist from New York. In 2006 she set up a blog called FARCED, which has survived through the years as an mp3 blog and home to her various mixes. Her style is hard to pin down but over the years it has encompassed 80s synth, coldwave and noise, incorporating energetic strands of house and techno, while maintaining a golden thread that links back to music of her Haitian heritage.

Live

The Transcendence Orchestra

Transcendence Orchestra is a collaboration between Anthony Child (Surgeon) and Daniel Bean, a member of the collective running Bleep43 events in London. This project explores the combination of synthesis with a panoply of esoteric acoustic instruments, exploring the effect of tone and improvisation on consciousness. The result is a potent weight of recondite and wrangled sounds that guide the mind into less-chartered forays.

Tutu

The sessions of Tutu are odes to life, between pure adrenaline and the most genuine curiosity. More than just a possible classification of styles - that range from bass house to cosmic trance, abstract grime, schizophrenic tribalism, acid techno and various experiments – Tutu on the decks can go from underground dance to the most unexpected of sounds.

Veronica Vasicka

Veronica Vasicka can almost be considered an institution unto herself judging by her contribution to electronic music. Founder of Minimal Wave Records, she is one of a small group of true specialists to have re-introduced underground 80s machine music with a new focus. Her influence can be felt as new productions reflect the thumping EBM, darkwave and techno beats that she has been promoting for more than a decade.

Yousuke Yukimatsu

Hailing from Osaka, Yousuke Yukimatsu’s profile in Japan has been quickly rising on account of his powerful and experimental DJ sets that seem to take on a rangy, surprising life of their own. He was one of the highlights at the 2017 edition of Berlin Atonal on his European debut.

Live

YPY

YPY is the solo alias of Koshiro Hino, guitarist and sonic architect of the Osaka-based band goat. His solo work focuses on minimalistic gestures on experimental percussion and mechanical rhythms, performed with a pair of multitrack cassette recorders. His pulsating compositions are marked by frequent use of unruly sounds and overtones that operate outside standard chromatic scales and reveal a heightened sense of humour in his craft.