January 13^th – 17^th, 2026
Kampnagel, Hamburg

Line-up 2026

Performers

Afrorack, Frauke Aulbert, Ernst Bechert, Moxi Beidenegl, Sarah Davachi, Dirk Dullmaier, Robert Engelbrecht, Jan Feddersen, Karen Fritz, Katharina Hamp, Jonas Hinnerkort, Jan Jelinek, Juha Koskinen, Hanno Leichtmann, Luka Lenzin, Andrew Pekler, Tam Thi Pham, Johann Popp, Lennart Thiem, Jana de Troyer, Jan Wegmann, (tbc)…

Ensembles

Quatuor Bozzini, Bunte Luft Trio, Decoder Ensemble, General Magic ∞ Tina Frank,
Groupshow, META, Nelly Boyd, Sutsche, TWISK, (tbc)…

Compositions / Improvisations by

Afrorack, Sarah Davachi, Morton Feldman, Jonas Hinnerkort, Jan Jelinek, Juha Koskinen, Hanno Leichtmann, Luka Lenzin, Andrew Pekler, Tam Thi Pham, Alexander Schubert, Lennart Thiem, Jana de Troyer, Jan Wegmann, (tbc)…

Films / Visuals / Installations by

Tina Frank, Groupshow, META, Billy Roisz, (tbc)…

Program klubkatarakt²⁰

klubkatarakt is turning 20. A major focus of the festival was and still is spatial music. Since the fourth edition in 2009, the festival resides on invitation of Amelie Deuflhard at Kampnagel. The three interconnected halls available to the festival, P1, KMH, and K4, invite you to move fluidly through the sounds.

We have played with this spatial situation in many different ways during the past 16 years, especially at the opening concerts. No opening is like the other.

We have invited many Hamburg musicians, composers, and performers for 2026, with whom we want to develop a new form collectively. Quatuor Bozzini from Canada as well as the improvisation collective META from Darmstadt / Cologne will also take part.

To mark this anniversary, we are extending the festival to five days. The opening will therefore take place on Tuesday evening instead of Wednesday as usual.

The second day begins with a lecture by Sarah Davachi, talking about her work. The composer and performer, born in Canada in 1987, is concerned with the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space, utilizing extended durations and considered harmonic structures that emphasize gradual variations in texture, overtone complexity, psychoacoustic phenomena, and tuning and intonation. Her music is also informed by early music concepts of form and harmony, as well as experimental production practices of the studio environment. Davachi’s sound is an intimate and patient experience that lessens perceptions of the familiar and the distant.

Following her lecture, Davachi will play a solo concert on electric organ.

In the night concert, we are looking back on one of the most important composers of the 20th century, Morton Feldman (USA), who would turn 100 on 12 January 2026. From his late work we are presenting For John Cage (1982) for violin and piano, performed by Darragh Morgan and Mary Dullea from London. Feldman himself decribed the 80 minutes work ironically: “It’s a little piece for violin and piano but it doesn’t quit.”
It exists as a plateau of existential sound, pianissimo with almost entirely still gestures throughout. Darragh Morgan uses a baroque bow for his praised interpretation, enabling him to produce an especially soft sound.

The German premiere of Eternal Dawn by Hamburg composer Alexander Schubert takes place as part of the festival and opens the third day. The work is a full-length music theatre project on the subject of transhumanism, in collaboration with Decoder Ensemble and a wide interdisciplinary artistic and scientific team.

In a futuristic setting, performers act as a group of individual cyborgs with the help of technical body extensions, bio-modifications and sensors. These actions and interactions determine both the theatrical content of the piece and the musical form of the work.

The project aims to make the discourse on transhumanism tangible and depict its ambiguity. The technological starting point opens up questions about humanity, control, agency, self and body images.

Further performances are taking place on Friday and Saturday at 19:30.

Afterwards, klubkatarakt presents Ugandan musician Afrorack (Brian Bamanya). Bamanya is a multidisciplinary artist, engineer, and musician who has pioneered Africa’s first DIY modular synthesizer and constructed it using locally sourced components. In his music, Bamanya merges polyrhythmic structures inherent in African music with elements of acid, techno, and ambient sounds.

Afrorack’s innovative work has inspired a new generation of musicians and technologists, bridging the gap between traditional African music and contemporary electronic soundscapes.

Brian Bamanya will give a lecture about his work and music at 6:00 pm.

Sarah Davachi’s Long Gradus is a long-form composition in four movements that was developed as an iteration of an ongoing preoccupation with chordal suspension and cadential structure. In this context, horizontal shifts in pitch material and texture occur on a very gradual scale, allowing the listener’s perceptions to settle on the spatial experience of harmony.
A “gradus” is a sort of handbook that is meant to aid in learning a difficult practice; in this case, Long Gradus is designed to considerably slow the cognitive movements of both listener and player, and to focus their attention on the relationships between moments.

This version was written for the Canadian Quatuor Bozzini. The quartet played the premiere of the third part of the composition as part of klubkatarakt¹⁸. Now the Bozzinis will return to Hamburg to perform the complete cycle.

Groupshow sessions – be it rehearsal, concert, or recording – are always improvised. The interplay of the various sound sources, converging from the directions of “electronics”, “percussion”, and “guitar”, does not follow the Krautrock wave logic of crescendo and morendo. The trio, consisting of Jan Jelinek, Hanno Leichtmann and Andrew Pekler, has established a method of transparent density in which links and breaks are not concealed but remain audible. The music works through attraction and repulsion, with a loosely organized structure that always leaves enough room for the next intervention.

The principle here, repeated even in the smallest units, is that of duration. Groupshow think of their music in terms of an installation: no starting point, no dramaturgy, and ideally no end. Concerts take place in the centre of the room surrounded by the audience, who only enter the space once the musical interaction is already underway.

The Long Night did not grow out of the festival alone, but from a concert form developed by the composers’ collective katarakt back in the 1990s. The concept is simple, but holds new surprises every year, as the festival primarily presents first and world premieres by the local scene and international guests, alternating with experimental short films.

Special guests in 2026 are General Magic ∞ Tina Frank. A live performance by the Austrian trio is an experimental exploration into the convergence of audio and visual domains.
General Magic’s self-built interfaces, facilitating surreal and playful interactions with their generated sounds, are interconnected with Tina Frank’s video synthesizers. The show is poised to manifest as an extraordinary fusion where experimental electronic music and visuals interact, merge and degenerate into collages of scratchy and illuminating layers of shapes and sounds.

The festival also presents Hamburg band TWISK. Luka Lenzin, Lennart Thiem and Jonas Hinnerkort submit an alternative concept of the “song” idea. Their music oscillates between refusal pop in the spirit of Deerhoof and virtuosic minimal rock of the Young Marble Giants school.

klubkatarakt will continue the collaboration with the Shortfilm Agency Hamburg in 2026 and show experimental films as part of the programme.

DJ collective Sutsche, consisting of akaak and Martin Moritz, is invited for the party. Since 2008 they are spinning their techno and house singles too slow, at 33 rather than 45 rpm.