RESONANT FUTURES, a night of electronic music and audiovisual performances conceived for Vorspiel 2026 in Berlin. Sound, light, bodies, and technology become artistic instruments in pursuit of the collective imagination of a future worth inhabiting. Inspired by Berlin club culture, Japanese aesthetics, and post-human thought, the event treats technology not as a functional layer but as creative material, a poetic medium through which possible worlds become briefly audible and visible.
Three cultural worlds meet in this event, each carries its own history of experimentation, resistance, and transformation through sound. Together, they form the conceptual and aesthetic foundation of the night. Berlin became, in the second half of the twentieth century, a city of sonic invention — post-industrial, scarred, restless, producing music that sounded like infrastructure dreaming. Japan developed an equally profound engagement with machines, robotics, and synthesis, treating technology not as a threat to the human but as an extension of it. Electronic music itself is the sound of this negotiation: algorithms, sensors, and data transformed into rhythm and texture, the future rendered audible in the present tense. Minimalism runs through all three as both philosophy and practice. Berlin techno stripped music to its structural core, repetition, reduction, the hypnotic power of the almost-identical. Japanese aesthetics found beauty in restraint, in the unfinished, in the deliberate removal of the unnecessary. Electronic music, at its most rigorous, works the same way: micro-variations, reduced patterns, the discipline of saying less in order to mean more. This formal rigour is not coldness — it is a form of attention, a way of listening more carefully to what remains.
This is also a tribute to Kraftwerk and to the band’s foundational proposition that the machine could be the protagonist of music, that the human-machine relationship could be aestheticised rather than feared. The electronic performer and the instrument become, in this tradition, genuinely difficult to separate. The performance itself becomes a technological ritual in a space outside ordinary time, where transformation is possible precisely because the usual rules are suspended. Japanese ritual culture understands repetition and discipline as a path toward presence. The live and DJ set, extended over hours, works on a similar principle: a collective altered state arrived at gradually, through sustained attention to sound and time. The dancefloor becomes a living system, low frequencies its shared heartbeat, an exercise in temporary community and collective resonance.
VORSPIEL 2026 supported by Transmediale and CTM festival
Makoto Inoue (JP)
Francesco Mancori(IT/DE)
Makoto Sakamoto (JP)
JiuQ (JP) & Chuuu (JP)
21.01.2026 at Studio db
Uferstrasse 8-11. Tor A. Studio A14 13357 Berlin