Berlin Atonal and Unsound co-programmed thirty uninterrupted hours of music. The ticket included a bed. A wristband for unlimited re-entry, a small placard with your name to reserve your spot, and a tiny bedside lamp. The beds lined the sides of the stage; one corridor was given over to hammocks, the most contested spots. The program asked for surrender.

I got there around nine at night. I saw people walking in with suitcases, inflatable mattresses, and their own pillows, ready to live there for thirty hours. The place was already packed and finding a free bed wasn’t easy. Some had people curled up in duvets. I dropped my bag, a placard and a lamp on a bed facing the stage and went up front for Caterina Barbieri’s new show. She came on accompanied by Kali Malone on cello and, later, by a brass band. In an ornate, heavy-sleeved top, Barbieri looked like a gladiator. Her lyric vocals, which I hadn’t expected, dissolved into the sound textures while the lighting by MFO and Ruben Spini turned the whole space ambient, so much so that I watched half the show from behind the stage just to see the light her from every side.

From there on, the night worked to lower the BPM. Scottish musician Brìghde Chaimbeul’s smallpipes released atmospheric drones that went straight into a body already asking for rest. Paul Jebanasam, playing “mātr”, went deeper: slow, deep drones offering a cosmic trip you could take lying down. The curators were running the night down toward sleep.

It was almost three in the morning when Lois Patiño and Xabier Erkizia’s film came onto the screen. A low blue light lit up the corridors, now empty. I dragged myself to the bed. Kraftwerk was freezing. On the bed next to mine, my husband was already deep asleep, wrapped in blankets. Around me, hundreds of people sleeping among strangers. Voices from the film cut through the silence, but it didn’t take long to give in to the hard camping bed. The sound still passed through the body.

I woke up properly in the morning. Kali Malone had played while I slept. I heard something far off, a few notes, and went back under. I thought it was inside the dream. People were still lying down. Adam Wiltzie came on close to 9am, revisiting the Stars of the Lid catalog with a piece ironically titled “A Tired Reworking of Stars of the Lid For the Sleep Deprived”.

I brushed my teeth, put on sunglasses and stepped out of all that darkness. Outside, the sun was blinding. I showered at home, had lunch, crossed the city to go back into the dark. That was the strangest gesture of the weekend: leaving a sunny day in Berlin, rare enough to justify enduring the whole winter, to return to a windowless hall. However, something was happening in there that the sun couldn’t offer.

I went down to the ground floor for Marginal Consort, a Japanese experimental project started in the early ‘90s that has performed only once a year since 1997. The group spread across four stages, one in each corner of the room. It took me a while to realize it had already started. One of them was walking through the crowd playing a flute. Another tapped at small objects scattered across a table. Three hours with four older Japanese gentlemen with white hair, pulling sound from improbable places: flute, cardstock, water, violins built in unusual ways, wires, metals. They’re not making music out of objects. They’re looking for sound at its most intimate place. At some point, lying on a beanbag, I cried, maybe from everything that had piled up over the last twenty hours.

Walking between the four points of the stage, I noticed something else that the format allowed. A girl was drawing furiously in a notebook, sitting on the floor in front of one of the musicians. Out beyond the stage area, another was reading a book lying on a mattress. The night before, I had passed a guy writing pages into a notebook. A lot of people weren’t “at the show” in the face-the-stage sense. They were inside the sound doing something else: drawing, reading, writing, lying down with their eyes closed. In other corners, the opposite: a lot of people filming and photographing nonstop. The program was visually intense enough (the beautiful lighting, the scale of the space, the bodies spread across the floor, the Kraftwerk) to break the usual Berlin restraint with cameras.

The bed allowed line-up you could experience differently, not just watch. The acoustics did the rest. The music reached you with the same density from any point in the building, standing in front of the stage or wrapped in a blanket far from it.

Joy Guidry came on next and gave the strongest performance of Sunday. Sitting in front of the computer, holding the bassoon, sweating and blowing with her eyes closed, almost in a trance. At some point, a speech about freedom moved through Kraftwerk. Partly jazz, gospel, electronic.

And then Keiji Haino. Seventy-five years old, straight white hair down to his waist, fringe cut straight across the forehead, wearing all black, and enormous glasses. Self-taught, active since the early 1970s, with over 80 instruments in his repertoire, he’s considered the poet of noise. He did two shows: the first, a half-hour guitar-only show. It was one of the loudest shows I’ve ever heard, loud enough to chase part of the crowd away from the front. Deafening and fascinating. Around me, Japanese fans with their eyes shut, one young guy hugging the speaker and headbanging. I have tinnitus, so I had to pull back and listen from the bar on the mezzanine. But the people who stayed walked out drenched in sound.

If Marginal Consort stretched time across three hours with no destination, Haino compressed it: half an hour to test what the body can take. Two Japanese answers to the same question, on the same day. One asked for surrender, the other for resistance.

I went back to stretch out on the bed and wait for Actress. He makes things easy for no one: the techno comes out angular, abstract. Far from a party experience, Actress produces a sound that disorients and rearranges how you listen. Just when you think it’s about to land and your shoulders start to roll, he breaks it and it becomes something else. A circular light seemed to pull us into a spiral. I came out unraveled.

I left before the thirty-hour closing with Terrence Dixon. The energy was already draining and I needed to keep something in reserve just to walk out of there.

The Infinite Now didn’t invent the sleep concert. Max Richter has done it; deep listening is its own long tradition. But the partnership between Atonal and Unsound, in 2026, in a windowless hall, proposing thirty hours with a bed included, takes a position worth reading. It pushes back on the attention economy and the camera-ready set. Going to a festival here wasn’t about holding out. It was the opposite: surrender.

I walked out feeling I had been through something that doesn’t fit in a review. Thirty hours to find out that what stayed with me most was the smallest moment: waking up to Kali Malone playing and realizing I was exactly where she wanted me to be. Sleeping.

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My top 5 from this year try to reflect exactly that range:

1. Meredith Monk / Katie Geissinger / Allison Sniffin

Meredith Monk’s concert was one of the clearest reminders of why her work still feels foundational rather than merely canonical. The programme moved across decades, from Wa-lie-oh and Gotham Lullaby to Cellular Songs and Simple Sorrow, not as a retrospective in the museum sense, but as a living demonstration of how large her vocal universe remains.

What emerged so strongly in performance was Monk’s “dancing voice / singing body” poetics: voice not as carrier of text, but as motion, relation, rhythm, breath, theatricality, and presence. Seeing that, alongside longtime collaborators Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffin, also made clear that Monk’s practice is not only about exploration, but about continuity, trust, and collective intelligence built over decades. The audience reaction said the rest: amazement first, then gratitude, then a long ovation for an artist who still shows why she remains the original “GirlChild”.

2. Georg Friedrich Haas — 11.000 Saiten

Few festival openings made their curatorial argument so immediately. Haas’s 11.000 Saiten placed the audience inside a circular field of 50 pianos, each tuned two cents apart from its neighbour, with Klangforum Wien extending that field into something at once massive, unstable, and strangely lucid. In MaHalla, the piece became more than a feat of scale: it was a concrete lesson in how microtonality can operate not as abstraction but as sensorial architecture. Haas’s mature handling of tuning, sound masses, and slow internal friction gave the work both rigor and sensuality, while the festival’s production logistics were part of the achievement itself. This was one of the clearest examples in the programme of listening as immersion without spectacle for its own sake.

3. Ellen Fullman + JACK Quartet — Energy Archive 4

For over four decades, Ellen Fullman has been dissolving borders between sound installation, composition, and performance through the Long String Instrument, tuned in just intonation and activated through body, movement, and spatial intuition. At MaerzMusik, that research met the JACK Quartet in a world premiere that made harmonics feel less like technical byproducts than like an entire mode of being.

What mattered especially here was the location: St. Elisabeth Church did not simply host the piece; it completed it. The long strings, the quartet, the architecture, and the audience entered into one shared acoustic ecology, where feedback, partials, and hovering resonances gradually conducted the room toward a deeper listening state. Fullman’s work often reveals the physics of vibration with unusual clarity; here, it also reveals how effectively a space can become an active musical partner.

4. Louis Chude-Sokei + Jan St. Werner — Music for Commons Sensed: No Nation Left But the Imagination

This was one of the festival’s strongest examples of how thought can become sonic form without collapsing into illustration. Officially framed as a radical audio essay built from composed and improvised parts, the performance examined race, migration, thresholds, and space through the electronic transformation of Chude-Sokei’s voice. In practice, it felt like a concentrated hybrid of spoken word, lecture, live electronics, and voice study – intense as sound, but equally sharp as an intellectual proposition.

What made it especially compelling was that all the sonic material remained tied to the voice: fractured, processed, displaced, alienated, returned. The piece situated itself beautifully within a longer lineage linking theory, Black technopoetics, speech performance, and experimental electronics, while asking the audience to witness listening itself as a political and cultural act.

5. I AM ALL EARS Chapter II — immersive concert installation

As a finale, I AM ALL EARS showed the festival at its most ambitious in curatorial and logistical terms. It asked how institutional architecture, space perception, movement, and sound might unsettle normative concert habits, turning Haus der Berliner Festspiele into what the festival materials explicitly call a “listening body” or even a “house of sound.” Rather than sitting before a single stage picture, the audience moved through multiple zones.

The printed programme map laid out five numbered spaces connected by arrows, with pieces running in loops and listeners were instructed to move slowly, avoid speaking, and treat the whole event as a sound walk. That mattered. If Haas’s opening work placed the audience in an inescapable circle of sound, the festival’s last major gesture inverted the relation: here listening became mobile, dispersed, exploratory, even if, at times, coercive.

The use of the theatre’s side spaces, backstage logics, somatic stations, vibrating objects, live musicians, and multidirectional listening sessions made the building itself part of the composition. More than a closing event, it was a statement about concert form, and about the level of production intelligence required to make such a statement feel precise rather than chaotic.

MaerzMusik 2026 was at its best when it treated listening not as passive reception, but as a way of organising bodies, spaces, histories, and relations differently. These five choices stayed with me because each one proposed a distinct answer to that question.