With “The Infinite Now”, Berlin Atonal, in collaboration with Unsound, restructured the festival experience around duration rather than sequence, inviting sustained listening across a 30-hour continuous program (May 16–17) inside Kraftwerk Berlin. Moving through dusk, night, dawn, day, and dusk again, this year’s edition invited audiences into a sustained atmosphere of focused listening and restfulness. Hundreds of beds filled the vast main concert hall, and soft, pillowed seating was spread across the screening rooms, encouraging the audience to rest, sleep, read, or hold conversations as the listening continued around them.
In the format of a correspondence, Chiara Pagano and Federica Nicastro reflect on how “The Infinite Now” turned time into attention itself—whether slowing down, listening fully or halfway, or falling asleep at a festival can function as a quiet refusal of the constant performativity and hypervisibility demanded elsewhere, and what does the body retain once sound has passed through it.
C.
Dear F.,
A few days have passed since the festival nights. My memories are now blurred, yet if I close my eyes, I can still recall the feelings in my body, whose memory works better than my mind's. The vibrations I experienced still linger there: my chest trembling with frequencies, my stomach pulsing with sound, my legs stretching as night comes, my eyes resting as I lie down. I find myself there again, inside the former power plant cathedral that, once more, welcomed me into its belly. This year’s 30-hour continuous program, proposed by Antonal’s curators Adriano Rosselli, Laurens von Oswald, and Harry Glass, sounds unusual, though it reads as an invitation to inhabit time and space differently—to tune into a prolonged rhythm while the earth outside keeps turning.
Lately, I find it hard to pause. As much as I try to resist it, my head keeps acting as a dictator, rushing my days, my gestures, my hands, my steps, my relationships. It tells me I would waste time, miss the loop, or lose track of the bombs being dropped across the world. Pausing is a privilege in times of death and destruction. And yet, some form of pause might still be a strategy to persist. Maybe certain breaks are a way to challenge the politics of time by reaching for new, expanded rhythms. Beats and tempos that allow for the creation of alternative times and spaces where we can exist on the same continuum. Breathing with those who are absent, syncing with those who are still present.
It seems that images can no longer stir us. But the more we witness their failure in moving us beyond the surface level of our skin, the more I become convinced of the moving quality of sound. There’s a line from the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection (2007) I always love to recall, on how revolutionary movements spread not by contamination, but by resonance, taking on the shape of a music whose focal points, though scattered across time and space, succeed in propagating the rhythm of their own vibration. I like to think of what Atonal and Unsound proposed not just as a program, but as an atmospheric condition for a plurality—an acoustic space that allows everyone to preserve their difference while meeting the other. One can rest while someone else is dancing.
7038634357, “The Infinite Now” ©️ Joanna Chwilkowska @asidron.
F.
Dear C.,
I think about the convergence of different temporalities—the festival's tempo, our individual tempos, the tempos of those who accompany us. A continuous, sustained program like this one confronts us with pressing themes concerning prolonged attention, capacity, care work, and exhaustion. These same questions, I think, are interpersonal, tied to our contexts, backgrounds, and privilege, too, as you mentioned.
In a city where clubbing dictates the rhythm of sleep-deprived weekends, “The Infinite Now” adopts that same logic of continuity, but tries to re-adapt it to what the body needs to listen to, in its social, biological, and affective drives, reclaiming space for different rhythms and intervals. Conversations around individual boundaries, around preserving one’s peace, and prioritizing oneself feel very present in our day-to-day conversations, almost typical of late-stage capitalism, where most of our relationships are becoming maintenance labor. So, this time, I find myself caught in this tension, trying to locate the collective experience of a shared temporality with others. A festival is a window in time, but what makes “The Infinite Now” different from the sequence-based structure of a festival is the sustained environment it creates for attention.
This atmospheric condition clearly unfolded for me on the first day. 7038634357 opens my night with rarefied densities and thundering interludes; I find myself immersed in memories of crepuscular nights, thin fog, an intermittent, dim light—a lonely star. The music is already an invitation toward rest. Throughout the night, drawn-out rhythms, expansive and meditative sounds, the tolling of bells, ethereal chants: the nocturnal atmosphere builds into a narrative that, for many, inevitably leads to reclaiming sleep.
7038634357, “The Infinite Now” © Camille Blake.
C.
My nights have been haunted by so many ghosts these last three years. Maybe I have lost the ability to rest amid a relentless pursuit of presence and performativity. Thank you for offering me the idea of reclaiming sleep. We’ve spoken a lot about insomnia lately, but far less about the conditions that might ease us into sleep. On certain evenings, I dim the lights until they hold my eyes in a restful atmosphere, place lavender on my pillow, and let music of expansive, lingering frequencies fill the room. It is, in the end, a matter of carefully staging the conditions that might allow sleep to arrive—which is, I think, precisely what “The Infinite Now” attempted to do. Here, the curatorial gesture became visible not merely through the music program’s selection, but in the design of the affective and temporal conditions that made certain forms of attention, intimacy, withdrawal, and rest possible. I found its dramaturgy less concerned with directing experience than with sustaining a field for it to spontaneously emerge.
I remember one such moment. At some point in the evening, I lost track of time entirely. It was when Caterina Barbieri appeared on stage, performing new works. I was lying on a bed when the electronic sounds typical of her compositions carried my body into an altered perception. Cello, tuba, trombone, and trumpet joined the composition one after another; then Kali Malone walked in and reached the front of the platform. At that point, everything melted into a dream-like landscape, where the modular synthesizer made room for a voice to emerge and sing what sounded like the sweetest lullaby. Lying there, eyes closed, I wasn't so different from someone drifting at the room's edges—both of us held by sound without quite choosing to be.
Caterina Barbieri and Kali Malone, “The Infinite Now” © George Nebieridze.
In this sense, thinking of the festival as a window in time, as you suggest, the experience at the edge becomes its own form of attention. Sound leans against you when you least expect it: while whispering in a friend’s ear as you wait for a drink, resting in bed close beside your partner, or drifting through the building alone with nowhere particular to be. It arrives sideways—not as something you walk toward, but as something that finds you mid-gesture, mid-conversation, mid-thought. This is perhaps the format’s quiet provocation: that listening doesn’t require positioning yourself correctly, only being receptive to the frequencies that keep moving around you, even when you’re not deep listening.
This window in time opened onto sight as well as sound. On the first floor of the Kraftwerk, Seeing Field—a space curated by Adriano Rosselli and Felice Moramarco—held a wide mattress with a screen suspended above it, conceived to emulate that particular comfort felt just before falling asleep, or just after waking up. Its long and continuous program didn’t ask for sustained viewing any more than the music asked for sustained listening: you’d catch a few minutes of a piece on your way elsewhere, return hours later, and find the work had moved on without you, shaped now by a different hour, a different hand. The screening became a second clock running alongside the festival’s own, one you could step into and out of without ever losing your place in it—like glimpsing the world reflected in someone’s pupil, a partial, shifting, slightly distorted trace of what they are seeing. In this sense, it became both an eye and a window: a surface of projection and a point of perception, looking outward and inward at once, holding its audience in a quiet exchange between being seen and seeing.
Seeing Field, “The Infinite Now” ©️ Joanna Chwilkowska @asidron.
F.
On the second day, during the over three-hour-long durational act of Marginal Consort, the cult Japanese collective improvisational group founded in 1997, convening only on a few special occasions [since], I enter and exit the performance hall numerous times, meandering for an interval I cannot quantify to enter another, more speculative realm in the other screening room. I sit to look for comfort and sensorial rest, for a brief moment. The Feral (Epoch I, by Fabien Giraud) was playing, looping—a film that lasts one thousand years, entirely created by a learning machine. While I am here, it is hard not to listen to Marginal Consort’s sonic improvisation in the background, so my peripheral attention drifts with it, inside and outside of this screening room.
This same performance is also one in which attention drifts from one pole to another. Organized into four stations, each with a different set of instruments, and led by one of the group’s members, the sound has multiple gathering points, and the audience moves within and around them, choosing to chase one or another, deciding how long to invest before moving away, or conveying all these sounds at the center, its focal point, where some others are sitting.
As this specific performance turns out to be quite hard to contain, sounds travel across the several spaces of Kraftwerk, making it challenging to find a neutral, stimuli-free zone. Sound becomes invasive, superseding sight as the primary sense. It’s claiming its space, infiltrating the ears, creeping into cornered rooms. Annoyed at first, feeling slightly subtracted from my own agency, a consideration sneaks in while the music does the same, apprehensive of its pervasive, unsolicited quality.
The night before, while trying to catch some sleep on one of the beds scattered around in the first floor, in the company of a beloved one, music crept into my drowsiness. In our conversations, we often speak of what the body retains, of somatics, usually concerning the (affective and political) relationships we build with our personal past and historical present. And I wonder now, after meeting here on this occasion, what we retain when we experience sound and space while looking for rest, pauses, conversation, bonds, even touch—alone, or with others. Once out of here, will we hold questions to rethink how to subvert time’s logics and hierarchies? Will we put that into practice or leave it suspended within this lived time frame?
On the closing night, on my way out, I leave with vivid impressions of the contemplative, poetic reminiscences of the seductive live performance of a new project by 2K88 + Lauren Duffus + Rainy Miller + Bianca Scout. This collaboration emerged from a back and forth of sonic influences, conjured images and memories, a sort of incarnation that blends the margins of individual experience. While carrying the weight of a weekend overpowered by sensing sonically, I think of what sound leaves in, transpassing infrastructures, concrete, inhabiting space through temporality, dissipating and leaving a gentle imprint or mark on the skin, absorbed, lastly, by the body, becoming experience, becoming a practice. In this way, through its bouncing and resonating, it might solicit something more than just a trace, but that keeps lingering.
2K88 + Lauren Duffus + Rainy Miller + Bianca Scout, “The Infinite Now” © Camille Blake.
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