CTM is proud to present a Berlin Current showcase at First We Take Berlin (FWTB), featuring six artists from the initiative's ever-growing roster. The new sound of the city - Berlin Current presents young, unconventional, and experimental pop music from Berlin. A two-day showcase presented by and within the Berlin Music Week, FWTB has invited different promoters and agencies to present their newest up-and-coming talent within diverse showcases within its programme.

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Berlin's reputation as a world music capital is undisputed. Creative minds from around the world have long flocked to the city in search of advantageous conditions for their work, radically expanding Berlin’s musical diversity. But what truly adventurous sounds and musics are currently arising from the city’s maelstrom of simultaneously sounding musical styles and cultures? With Berlin Current, CTM Festival puts an ear to the scene and presents new, future-oriented musical ideas from Berlin together with Berghain, Boiler Room Berlin, BLN.FM, No Fear of Pop, ICAS, and the Musicboard Berlin.

The programme at FWTB highlights the city’s ever-diverging sounds, starting with Sarah Farina, whose guerilla DJ sets mixing jungle, juke, hip hop, and UK garage and funky, driven by futuristic breakbeats and formidable basslines, have supported prominent future bass musicians such as Hyperdub label head Kode9, Cooly G, DJ Rashad, Scratcha DVA and more.

Various mutations of post-techno and post-industrial musics are explored through live sets by Moon Wheel and Ketev, and a DJ set by Opium Hum. While Moon Wheel’s live improvisation and dubby groove deconstructions create uncanny ghost-in-the-machine moods and psychedelic hazes, Ketev phases patterns from reel-to-reel tape loops that are manipulated by 4-track cassette decks, digging into slower tempos and murkier territory than many of his contemporaries. Opium Hum brings his wide tastes to the decks to create fantastical soundscapes permeated by deep and shifting rhythms of sombre, blurry drones.

Lief Hall, and artist who has developped her practice in audiovisual performance art and vocal composition and that has toured with Grimes, brings her experimental layered vocals to a live performance that also incorporates her own video work. Hall appears in support of a forthcoming full-lenght album in September. Phoebe Kiddo brings her own take to audiovisual explorations through her love of syncopated rhythms, diaphanous synths, and copious sub-bass. Her haunting vocals and post-post-post dubstep production strike a balance between avant guarde and dancefloor friendly.

→ www.firstwetakeberlin.de
→ www.berlin-music-week.de
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