CTM Festival

Today was a day off for the students when they were free to do their own thing, which meant I got to do my own thing too. After breakfast I nipped down to the area near KaDeWe to do some present shopping for Roz and Maddy, tehn over to Kreuzberg to check out some of the CTM stuff.

CTM is the music festival part and not as related to what the students are doing but certainly of interest to me. I really wanted to catch the Q&A with Jennifer Lucy Allan (on the left) the online editor for the Wire magazine, interviewing electronic composer and musician Holly Herndon (on the right).

I'm really glad I went, there was some fascinating stuff about her time doing postgad studies on the electronic music program at Mills in the states, the PHD composition programme at Stanford, collaborative projects including one with Reza Nagarestani, an Iranian philosopher and the fact that she had taken a long time to come to terms with her laptop being her musical instrument, only this morning she had been on skype with her partner back home not something every musician can do on their instrument.

Most of all what I thought was great about it was the amount of times she mentioned how much fun she had doing what she did. I'm really looking forward to hearing her live set at Berghain tonight now.

After that I checked out the CTM exhibition which I think I'll go back and investigate further on my next day off.