CTM Festival’s 15th edition attempts to explore and map fragments of an alternative or neglected history of electronic and experimental music that still waits to be fully written. Under the title Dis Continuity, the festival will highlight select trajectories of past artistic experimentation, protagonists, and movements offside well-beaten paths, and explore how their ideas have evolved throughout different generations of artists, into the present – or how, when arising in an unreceptive or even antagonistic environment, their ideas were ignored, suppressed, sometimes even purposely destroyed, and eventually forgotten.

Common narratives of music’s radical evolution over the past century usually favour a few exceptional individuals whose achievements are undisputed, and whose stories are used to exemplify music´s major revolutions and transitions in bold strokes.

Dinos Chapman is a transgressive visual artist who recently released two collections of experimental music.

Chapman studied at the Ravensbourne College of Art and is best known for his collaborations with his brother, Jake Chapman, as the Chapman Brothers.

In 2013, Chapman made his music production debut with Luftbobler (Norwegian for “air bubbles”). A site-specific audio-visual installation of Luftbobler was staged The Vinyl Factory in Soho, London to accompany the release in February 2013. The release is part of a series of fine artist collaborations mounted by The Vinyl Factory, including recent editions by Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Gavin Turk, and Tim Noble & Sue Webster. Six months following, Chapman struck again with a new EP, Luv2h8, which included a remix of “Luftbobler” by producer Trevor Jackson. The release exhibited a stylistic progression for the artist, and was described by The Wire as combining “horror and melancholy potently.

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Self-described techno shaman James Holden has emerged as a leading force in the field of exploratory, unbound electronic music.

Holden burst onto the UK scene in 1999 with the exuberant teenage trance hit, “Horizons”, produced on a basic home computer setup while studying for a degree in Maths at Oxford University. “Horizons” was followed by a spate of singles and remixes that cut closer to popular music than the experimental or avant-garde.

However, it was 2013’s The Inheritors that firmly established Holden as an important and inspired contemporary producer. Named after the novel by Nobel prize winning author William Golding, The Inheritors is a sprawling, occasionally cacophonous divination of hidden, primordial, and wild places counterposed against a techno schema and suggesting the influences of ceilidh music and krautrock, psychedelia and pentatonic folk scales, pastoral minimalism and pagan rituals. The Inheritors was named 2013’s Album of the Year by Resident Advisor, among numerous other critical honors.

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The work of Thomas Ankersmit ranges from performances on rare analogue synthesizers to microtonal improvisation on alto saxophone and explorations of anechoic chambers, abandoned radar domes, and otoacoustic emissions.

Initially an improvising saxophonist, Ankersmit established himself as an explorer of the timbral extremes of the instrument, pushing it into uncharted territories far removed from the tropes of jazz or improv. More recently, Ankersmit’s interests have expanded into improvised electronics. Using a computer and synthesizers, he constructs electronic hives of micro-sounds and signals with an acute sense of detail and intensity, combining the delicate instability of analogue synthesizers with the precision of computer editing and multi tracking.

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Under the moniker Lichens, multi-instrumentalist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe explores the use of voice in the realm of spontaneous music.

The Brooklyn-based artist’s inaugural solo album, The Psychic Nature of Being, was released on Kranky in 2005, and he has registered a number of other works for Holy Mountain and HOSS Records. His recent limited-edition full length, Lítiõ Fólk (Morc Records, 2012), features artwork by the artist himself and develops around a worldless vernacular of deconstructed and a cappella folk-inspired melodic lines.
Lowe’s composition for Last Kind Words received the prize for Best Original Score at the Brooklyn Film Festival in 2012, and he has also begun integrating visual projections into his live performance via collaboration with artist Patrick Smith, such as the vector-driven animation piece, “Clouds”.

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Mary Ocher aka Mariya Ocheretianskaya is “possibly possessed by demons, perhaps by ghosts of deceased prophets”. Born in Moscow in 1986 raised in Tel Aviv, Israel, she has become a prominent performance personality in Europe over the past six years, creating garage-influenced avant-pop and participating in a freewheeling sweep of creative initiatives.

At age 14, Ocher recorded her first song, produced by Israeli musician Idan Raichel. Upon moving to Berlin several years later, her band Mary and The Baby Cheeses produced a handful of DIY releases, including Analog music for a digital generation, followed by a 2008 solo release, War Songs, a compilation of “acoustic and apocalyptic” politicized folk songs. Her 7” Man Of 1000 Faces was produced by Canadian rock & roll guru King Khan of Black Lips and released via Haute Areal in 2011. Her second album, EDEN, was released via Buback in 2013 and named an Album of the Year by Intro Magazine.

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More here: http://www.ctm-festival.de/news/

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