The Infinite Now: Thirty Hours Inside Kraftwerk Berlin

APRIL 20, 2026 → WORDS ADRIÁN GOMIS EXPÓSITO

There are festivals you go to, and then there is The Infinite Now. Presented jointly by Berlin Atonal and Unsound, this 30-hour continuous ambient experiment occupies Kraftwerk Berlin from the evening of 16 May until the early hours of 18 May, and it does not ask you to stand. Beds, hammocks, and rest areas are distributed throughout the industrial monument; sleep is not the enemy of listening here, but its condition. The programme moves through phases named for light: dusk, night, dawn, day, second dusk, as Kraftwerk’s vast architecture contracts and expands around whoever remains. Time becomes diffuse. You don't attend. You inhabit.

The musical architecture is considered the concept. Caterina Barbieri premieres a new fifty-minute work for electronics, vocal ensemble, and brass, a psychoacoustic investigation through modular synthesis. Adam Wiltzie offers three hours reworking Stars of the Lid’s catalogue for an audience waking blearily into day two. Kali Malone holds four hours of mostly unreleased installation works for the quietest stretch of night. Keiji Haino performs twice, once for voice and once for guitar. Terrence Dixon celebrates the world premiere of a cosmic display of beauty. Marginal Consort convene for three hours of entirely unplanned improvisation in a rare European appearance. Across the building, Lois Patiño and Xabier Erkizia guide a recumbent audience through a two-hour collective dream; Romeo Castellucci and Scott Gibbons stage ritual actions at midnight and midday; a thousand-year film project by Fabien Giraud and Anne Stern documents autonomous cameras learning to see on a hillside in rural France. 

These are only some of the voices, over twenty artists in total move through the space across the full thirty hours, each assigned to a different register of the night. The world, apparently, can wait.

The Infinite Now runs 16–18 May at Kraftwerk Berlin, preceded by three prelude concerts on 10, 12, and 14 May, opening with Gavin Bryars making his long-overdue Berlin debut alongside Sinfonietta Cracovia.