Text by CLOT Magazine
The London Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) once again will become a vessel for CTM Festival’s exploratory ethos from 4 to 6 September 2025. For their third collaboration, CTM x ICA have staged three nights that traverse fractured rhythms, spectral folk, and disjointed narratives, drawing together artists who stretch the limits of performance, sound, and ritual. As ever, the partnership underscores both organisations’ dedication to dialogues that spill beyond disciplinary boundaries, binding experimental sound to visual and embodied practices.
The opening evening plunges audiences into raw sonics and vertiginous atmospheres. Rhythm here is not a backdrop but an architecture—one that unsettles and reshapes bodies in space. KAVARI, the English-born, Scotland-based producer, brings her blistering, genre-agnostic live set: a turbulent amalgam of industrial abrasion, dubstep density, and deconstructed club ferocity. Her shows, often infused with the cinematic eeriness of found-footage horror and video game surrealism, are charged with both unrelenting propulsion and fragile emotional interludes.
The evening continues with emptyset, whose latest project, Dissever, repositions early studio methodologies and improvisatory approaches within the context of 21st-century experimental electronics. First presented at Tate Modern’s Electric Dreams, the work draws sonic trajectories between cosmic rock, minimalism, and nascent electronic music, accompanied by a striking visual environment designed by long-term collaborator MFO. With James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas continuing their broader investigations—from Purgas’ archival research into South Asian experimental music histories to Ginzburg’s ensemble projects—the performance resonates with both historical excavation and future speculation.
If the first night carves out a brutalist sound architecture, the second evening opens a more porous, ritualistic portal. Here, the voice becomes both instrument and invocation. Lyra Pramuk returns with Hymnal, a new album and performance cycle that reframes pre-industrial folk traditions through her distinctive “futurist folk” lens. Hymnal also weaves in poetry (Nadia Marcus), string arrangements (Sonar Quartett), and Lucy Beech’s visuals to articulate anti-exploitative, ecologically attuned cosmologies. Alongside Pramuk, Catalan duo Tarta Relena reimagine Mediterranean folk idioms, their voices oscillating between luminous clarity and opaque incantation. Their 2021 release És pregunta explored mysticism and continuity, bridging ancestral lineages with contemporary electronics.
The final night spirals into visceral extremes—an audiovisual labyrinth where confession, feral noise, and dancefloor catharsis collide. aya, whose work has long embraced both intimacy and rupture, presents a new iteration of her practice in collaboration with MFO. Drawing from her Hyperdub release hexed!, aya interlaces autobiographical text with jagged rhythmic structures, while Lucy Beech’s visual interventions and Marcus’ poetry expand the performance into a confessional environment at once vulnerable and volatile.
Closing the triptych is the uncompromising Violent Magic Orchestra (VMO). Their live shows are infamous collisions of black metal fury, techno kinetics, and theatrical overload. With their latest work DEATH RAVE (Never Sleep), VMO summon a sensory assault of guttural screams, frantic synths, and hardcore propulsion, embodying what could be described as rave’s most apocalyptic incarnation. If Pramuk and Tarta Relena evoke ritual as collective care, VMO distort it into ecstatic obliteration—a catharsis both terrifying and magnetic.
Across its three-night arc, CTM x ICA 2025 reminds us of the potency of sound as a site of transformation: as architecture, as invocation, as confessional purge. Each evening proposes different pathways—through primal bass, through spectral harmony, through abyssal dance—yet all converge on the shared urgency of creating spaces where performance unsettles, reconnects, and reimagines. Supported by the Goethe-Institut London, this year’s programme continues CTM and ICA’s ongoing commitment to fostering experimental dialogues across music, visual art, and performance—a commitment that insists on sound’s capacity not just to move, but to reconfigure.
CTM x ICA 2025 takes place from 4 to 6 September. Find tickets here.
