Berlin Atonal (Berlin, Germany) 2027

Berlin Atonal returns to Kraftwerk Berlin from 25 to 29 August 2027, staging five days of experimental electronic music and audiovisual work inside a disused power station in Mitte. Kraftwerk is a vast concrete shell built in the 1960s to supply East Berlin, with a main hall tall enough that sound behaves differently in it, and the festival has used that acoustic as a compositional element rather than a problem to be solved.

Atonal’s history runs back to 1982, when it began as a festival of industrial and experimental music in West Berlin before stopping in 1990 and returning in 2013. The programme is built around commissioned work, premieres and collaborations rather than touring sets, pairing musicians with visual artists to produce pieces that exist for the festival and often nowhere else. Shapednoise and Pedro Maia’s Aesthesis is one example documented on the festival’s own channel.

Tickets are sold through the official site, usually as full festival passes with a limited number of day tickets, and the programme is published in stages through the spring. Kraftwerk sits on Koepenicker Strasse between Heinrich-Heine-Strasse and Ostbahnhof, walking distance from the Spree and well served by U-Bahn and S-Bahn. For audiovisual work at scale, it is the European music festival with the most singular identity.