Resynthesising the Traditional Finale
CTM Festival 2026
Performance Panel
Bint Mbareh © Alfi Moss-White
Ticket Prices
14 Euros reduced to 9 Euros
Tickets are sold via the CTM Festival ticketing platform:
www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2026/tickets
Founded by composer Pierre-Luc Senécal in 2016, Growlers Choir brings together extreme vocalists who use guttural techniques as a collective instrument, turning deep growls, throat resonance, distorted overtones, shrieks, whispers, and breath into dense harmonic structures. The 10-headed ensemble treats the voice as a physical force, shaping raw breath, vibration, and pressure into tightly coordinated textures that move between drone, rhythm, and percussive impact. Working with composers, sound designers, and experimental musicians, the choir pushes extreme vocal practice into new territory, expanding it from metal-adjacent technique into a broader experimental framework. In live settings, the group foregrounds the physical act of vocal production, creating performances that are as much about energy and endurance as they are about sound. At CTM 2026, they will premiere their brand new work, "Voices of the Void".
Joining Senécal on stage at CTM will be Estelle Martinez, Jeffrey Mac Dermott, Laurent Bellemare, Marie-Claude Fleury, Maude Théberge, Mikaïl Standjofski-Figols, Pascal Germain-Berardi, Patrick Goyette, and Samuel Arseneau-Roy.
Visitor Information
Cast
With
Khalil Epi
Anuar Duisenbinov
Bint Mbareh
Dorothy Carlos
Maarja Nuut
Marina Tantanozi
Miłosz Kędra
Sabah Alizadeh
Hosted by
Yara Mekawei
Stas Shärifullá
Cast
With
Khalil Epi
Anuar Duisenbinov
Bint Mbareh
Dorothy Carlos
Maarja Nuut
Marina Tantanozi
Miłosz Kędra
Sabah Alizadeh
Hosted by
Yara Mekawei
Stas Shärifullá
Biographies
Stas Shärifullá was raised in East Siberia, Russia, with Yılan (Elan clan) Bashqort roots. Stas draws on the duality of this heritage and approaches music as a site of tension, sifting through lived experience and inherited memory. This approach is bilateral: on one hand, studying how instrumental music, spoken literature, improvisation, and other communal traditions survived colonisation and genocide; on the other, meditating on how to resynthesise these practices and find ways to move beyond the exotic, essentialist, and nationalist frameworks they are often pushed into.
Yara Mekawei grew up in Cairo, where she studied art education, later teached, and then moved into practices that draw from social history, Arabic and African philosophy, Sufi poetry, textual myths and the lived rhythms of cities. Her methods often involve translating Arabic letters, poems or philosophical texts (especially from the Sufi tradition) into numeric or coded forms that become the score for her compositions.
Biographies
Stas Shärifullá was raised in East Siberia, Russia, with Yılan (Elan clan) Bashqort roots. Stas draws on the duality of this heritage and approaches music as a site of tension, sifting through lived experience and inherited memory. This approach is bilateral: on one hand, studying how instrumental music, spoken literature, improvisation, and other communal traditions survived colonisation and genocide; on the other, meditating on how to resynthesise these practices and find ways to move beyond the exotic, essentialist, and nationalist frameworks they are often pushed into.
Yara Mekawei grew up in Cairo, where she studied art education, later teached, and then moved into practices that draw from social history, Arabic and African philosophy, Sufi poetry, textual myths and the lived rhythms of cities. Her methods often involve translating Arabic letters, poems or philosophical texts (especially from the Sufi tradition) into numeric or coded forms that become the score for her compositions.
Visitor Information
Credits
‘Aïchoucha’ by Khalil Epi is presented in collaboration with AL Berlin.
CTM Festival: Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. Supported by the Goethe-Institut, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, ORF Österreichischer Rundfunk, tekhné, the European Union, the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and KOFICE as part of Kore·A·Round Culture 2025, and the Office of the Government of Québec in Berlin. In collaboration with ∄ and WeSA.
Media partnerships CTM: Deutschlandfunk Kultur, radioeins, Refuge Worldwide, The Wire.
Media partnerships Radialsystem: The Berliner, Rausgegangen, tip Berlin, taz. die tageszeitung.
Credits
‘Aïchoucha’ by Khalil Epi is presented in collaboration with AL Berlin.
CTM Festival: Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. Supported by the Goethe-Institut, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, ORF Österreichischer Rundfunk, tekhné, the European Union, the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and KOFICE as part of Kore·A·Round Culture 2025, and the Office of the Government of Québec in Berlin. In collaboration with ∄ and WeSA.
Media partnerships CTM: Deutschlandfunk Kultur, radioeins, Refuge Worldwide, The Wire.
Media partnerships Radialsystem: The Berliner, Rausgegangen, tip Berlin, taz. die tageszeitung.
Founded by composer Pierre-Luc Senécal in 2016, Growlers Choir brings together extreme vocalists who use guttural techniques as a collective instrument, turning deep growls, throat resonance, distorted overtones, shrieks, whispers, and breath into dense harmonic structures. The 10-headed ensemble treats the voice as a physical force, shaping raw breath, vibration, and pressure into tightly coordinated textures that move between drone, rhythm, and percussive impact. Working with composers, sound designers, and experimental musicians, the choir pushes extreme vocal practice into new territory, expanding it from metal-adjacent technique into a broader experimental framework. In live settings, the group foregrounds the physical act of vocal production, creating performances that are as much about energy and endurance as they are about sound. At CTM 2026, they will premiere their brand new work, "Voices of the Void".
Joining Senécal on stage at CTM will be Estelle Martinez, Jeffrey Mac Dermott, Laurent Bellemare, Marie-Claude Fleury, Maude Théberge, Mikaïl Standjofski-Figols, Pascal Germain-Berardi, Patrick Goyette, and Samuel Arseneau-Roy.
Cast
With
Khalil Epi
Anuar Duisenbinov
Bint Mbareh
Dorothy Carlos
Maarja Nuut
Marina Tantanozi
Miłosz Kędra
Sabah Alizadeh
Hosted by
Yara Mekawei
Stas Shärifullá
Biographies
Stas Shärifullá was raised in East Siberia, Russia, with Yılan (Elan clan) Bashqort roots. Stas draws on the duality of this heritage and approaches music as a site of tension, sifting through lived experience and inherited memory. This approach is bilateral: on one hand, studying how instrumental music, spoken literature, improvisation, and other communal traditions survived colonisation and genocide; on the other, meditating on how to resynthesise these practices and find ways to move beyond the exotic, essentialist, and nationalist frameworks they are often pushed into.
Yara Mekawei grew up in Cairo, where she studied art education, later teached, and then moved into practices that draw from social history, Arabic and African philosophy, Sufi poetry, textual myths and the lived rhythms of cities. Her methods often involve translating Arabic letters, poems or philosophical texts (especially from the Sufi tradition) into numeric or coded forms that become the score for her compositions.
