Today's discourse programme starts out with a panel discussion led by writer Mollie Zhang with four artists helping to nurture an exciting underground music scene in China. Afterwards, also in Studio 1, composer and 4D sound director John Connell will give a lecture on the value of listening, and The Quietus's Tristan Bath will speak with Drew McDowall. Downstairs in the Projektraum, the SHAPE platform will host discussions between Crack Magazine's Emma Robertson and two different SHAPE-supported artists in the festival: JASSS and Swan Meat. 

As we approach the weekend, our evening and nighttime programmes are quickly getting busier. At HAU1, in an "Antidote" to the turmoil, highly original songwriter and sound-explorer Colleen will perform the music from her last, all-electronic album, A Flame My Love, A Frequency, which was written in reflection upon the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. Local heroine Lucrecia Dalt presents material from her upcoming LP Anticlines, which is concerned with edges, boundaries, porosity, liminality, and tellurics, merging hand-crafted instrumentals with spoken word. At Berghain Säule, ambient techno mainstay Recondite delivers an AV show for the second evening in a row.

To continue HAU2's festival-long focus on the crossroads of sound and dance, a special event with shows by Rashaad Newsome and Roderick George/Lotic will be presented once tonight and twice tomorrow evening. In "FIVE,"multidisciplinary American artist Newsome will investigate African, European, and North-American roots in the NYC underground dance tradition of vogueing. The show involves five local musicians, five dancers, and MC, an opera singer, and live drawing by Newsome. Beforehand, dancer and choreographer Roderick George joins forces with musician Lotic to present "Embryogenesis" a show that likewise blurs boundaries between "high" and "popular" culture.

Tonight and tomorrow night, CTM will take over Panorama Bar in addition to the Berghain downstairs. "On Edge," the party on the main floor, features a diverse roster of young artists working at the forefront of experimental club music: Zoya Bassi, Swan Meat, VIOLENCE, BLISS SIGNAL, Schwefelgelb, and Olivia. Upstairs, "Phasing" showcases Perera Elsewhere, Jason Hou, Jana Rush, Champion & MC Serious, and Hyph11E.

The discourse programme continues today with three AI- focused talks upstairs in Studio 1 and a panel discussion downstairs in the Projektraum. Upstairs, Marco Donnarumma discusses AI and body politics; Guy Ben-Ary shares his knowledge of bio-engineering, and Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst speak with coder Jules LaPlace about experiments with AI and sound. Meanwhile, the Projektraum will host special roundtable presentations related to the topic of overseeing community spaces. Participants are Coral Foxworth, Lauren Goshinski, Luz Diaz, Rene Bosch, Smiley Baldwin, Stella Plazonja, and the moderator is Christine Kakaire.

American experimental music innovators George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell will perform with Lewis's interactive computer system Voyager, which was one of the earliest strides in the development of a real-time relationship between a music-making machine intelligence and human musicians. Both Lewis and Mitchell are long-term activists for the visibility of African-American composers and have left their indelible marks through visionary work with ‘non-musical’ noise and computers. On the same programme, Marcus Schmickler and Julian Rohrhuber will explore the Mind Reader, an invention that helped lay the foundation for machine learning in the midst of the Cold War.

James Ferraro's new stage performance runs tonight and tomorrow night at HKW. “Plague,” which including live visuals and scenographic elements by Nate Boyce and features Berlin new music choir Phønix16, is a multidisciplinary work built around speculations on a future society in which an AI is simulating reality through the manipulation of living humans with the goal of creating the ultimate consumer product. 

Tonight's stacked Berghain lineup visits older and newer traditions of gabber and hardcore. Downstairs features PCP founder Marc Acardipane, Rotterdam gabber legends DJ Panic and The Darkraver, the Polish collective WIXAPOL S.A., and hi-octane kids Kilbourne, KABLAM, HAJ300, and HDMIRROR. In Panorama Bar the tempos will fluctuate some. Laurel Halo will deliver one of her broad-ranging DJ sets; Bampa Pana & Makaveli of Nyege Nyege's excellent Sounds of Sisso compliation present Tanzania's version of bassless happy hardcore; Luz, Perel, Lakuti, and Batu all add individual flavour to a kaleidoscopic programme.