Berlin Atonal returned to the towering Kraftwerk complex from August 27–31, 2025, with five nights of premieres, commissions, installations, and late-night club sets. Now in its 12th edition, the festival has cemented itself as a global platform for experimental sound and interdisciplinary art, mobilising artistic risk to initiate “new modes of listening, gathering, and sense-making.” This year’s edition arrived at a moment of social and political change in Berlin, making Atonal’s role in nurturing the underground feel more vital than ever. The organisers frame it as more than a music event: a laboratory for cultural resistance and innovation, blending sound, visual arts, and critical discourse within the iconic industrial temple of Kraftwerk.

The scope was as daunting as it was exciting. Spread across five packed nights, Atonal presented an almost unfathomable abundance of music, art, and performance. To cover it all - let alone experience it fully - was impossible. What emerged instead was a dense weave of encounters: moments of transcendence, confrontation, or confusion, depending on where you drifted in its network of halls, mezzanines, and hidden rooms. The range of sound was staggering, from glacial ambient and contemporary composition to punishing industrial, mutant club rhythms, and noise experiments. There was something for most tastes, but far more designed to unsettle or challenge - true to Atonal’s ethos of pushing its audience beyond the familiar.

Lee Ranaldo, Peder Mannerfelt, and Yonatan Gat, with Leah Singer

A key development was Third Surface, a semi-enclosed space running alongside the main stage and club floors. Furnished with lamp-lit clusters of chairs and small tables around a compact stage, it evoked Berlin’s improvised cabarets of the past while reimagining nightlife beyond pure hedonism. The aim was to make room for conversation, reflection, and odd little experiments without losing Atonal’s bite. Each night, Third Surface hosted its own sequence of performances and micro-interventions, transforming one corner of Kraftwerk into an intimate test site.

The true headliner of Berlin Atonal is Kraftwerk itself, the hulking former power plant that houses the festival. This decommissioned 1960s Mitte station looms over Köpenicker Straße like a concrete spacecraft dropped into the city centre. Inside, a labyrinth unfolds: staircases and balconies lead into the vast turbine hall, a single room encompassing 70,000 cubic metres. The turbines are long gone, but a charge still vibrates in the air, as if the walls remember their electric past.

It’s hard not to speak of Kraftwerk in spiritual terms - a church or temple for sound, for those drawn to the challenging and extreme. With its soaring ceilings, reverberating concrete chambers, and haze of smoke, lasers, and strobes, the venue imposes reverence. The crowd, hundreds strong, often stands in near darkness facing the source of the sound as if at an altar. Low frequencies roll through the space like the drone of a cosmic organ, inducing trance-like states of altered perception.

In those moments, the building itself feels alive: a cocoon that holds the crowd within. People speak in hushed tones, moving through the fog with wide eyes; time becomes elastic. Strangers drift together, transfixed by unfamiliar sounds, undergoing a journey that’s physical, emotional, even spiritual - a collective sensory experience in Berlin’s post-industrial underworld.

Night I - Wednesday

Berlin Atonal 2025 opened on Wednesday with an eclectic program that immediately threw down the gauntlet. On the Main Stage, the evening unfolded as a carefully paced journey - from dub-tinged atmospherics to choral ritual, improvised noise rock, and meditative electro-acoustic experiments - anchored by a diversity of sound and an experimental edge that promised fresh revelations even for the most seasoned listeners.

The night began with Norwegian-Mexican artist Carmen Villain, presenting a world-premiere live show of mostly new material. Joined by flautist Johanna Orellana and trumpeter Eivind Lønning, she explored the space between dub rhythms and cosmic atmosphere, weaving pulses and textures into a hypnotic tapestry. The set moved with plodding, dubbed-out percussion, each beat heavy yet spacious, like machinery stirring into motion or a mechanical organism unfolding. Beneath the rhythms, a drone-like undercurrent hummed persistently, teasing the audience toward another state of consciousness. The warmth of woodwinds lent a tactile intimacy against the turbine hall’s brutalist scale, drawing the crowd gently inward and hinting at the evolving directions of her forthcoming work.

Next, London’s vocal ensemble NYX transformed the hall into a haunting choral chamber. A choir of voices, unaccompanied or only lightly touched by electronics, rose in harmony and dissonance, swelling to fill the turbine hall’s massive interior. The way their voices reverberated in the space felt primeval and elemental, as if tapping into something ancient, yet the stark precision of their delivery made it fiercely contemporary. NYX’s work explores the voice “as an instrument of expanded emotional range”, and in this setting it felt truly elemental, echoing ancient forms of singing while remaining boldly contemporary

As I listened to those voices ripple through the vast concrete chamber, I was reminded of Neolithic sites like the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum in Malta (3300 - 3000 BC) - a subterranean complex carved into rock, its architecture designed to turn the human voice into a resonant, body-shaking force. In its central chamber, the chants of priests would reverberate through the passageways, inducing trance-like states and merging pure sound with mind, body and spirit. The parallels were hard to ignore: every atom in my body seemed to vibrate with NYX’s frequencies, a resonance that seemed to draw the entire crowd and the architecture itself into alignment with pure human emotion. It felt as though the ensemble were tuning the air around us into something liminal, suspending us between the physical and the spiritual worlds.

From this trance-like suspension, the atmosphere fractured into something more jagged and unpredictable with one of the night’s most anticipated collaborations: Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), Peder Mannerfelt, and Yonatan Gat, with Leah Singer’s visuals swirling across the walls. Their improvised jam was cacophonous yet strangely cohesive - overlapping waves of feedback, droning electronics, and spontaneous percussion colliding in real time. It felt like an emergent phenomenon: three distinct approaches converging into something unrepeatable.

Closing the main stage at midnight, Bendik Giske and Sam Barker unveiled the live debut of a collaboration three years in the making. Giske’s breath-driven saxophone loops - fragile, rhythmic, and textural - met Barker’s patient, immersive electronics in a suite of contemplative pieces. Performed in near-darkness, with light catching Giske’s athletic silhouette as he moved with his sax, the set unfolded as a series of “quiet epics” that gradually blurred the line between acoustic and electronic. Barker, co-founder of Berghain’s Ostgut Ton label, sculpted pulsing synth pads and subtle basslines with a patience that encouraged deep listening.

The result was sculptural and intimate - a meditative journey that provided a reflective comedown after the intensity of earlier acts, while affirming Atonal’s commitment to cross-genre experimentation. Giske’s physicality gave the performance a striking visual charge. Barker, by contrast, was still, methodical, absorbed in sculpting the electronic space around him. Together, they created a performance that felt less like a conventional set than a shared meditation on resonance.

Beyond the Main Stage, smaller happenings filled Tresor, Globus, and OHM. At OHM, Berlin-based industrial noise artist Lamb K305 delivered a visceral, challenging set that few will forget. Enclosed by the club’s tiled walls, she led the audience through a “collective ecstatic exorcism” of drumbeats, bursts of noise, and harrowing screams. At the climax, she sliced a cymbal with a chainsaw, sparks flying as half the crowd recoiled in astonishment -an extreme embodiment of Atonal’s confrontational spirit.

As the Main Stage transitioned into late-night mode, the program scattered across OHM, Globus, and Tresor, with back-to-back sets from Jookoo Collective’s Baba Sy and Opoku at OHM and DJ Pete paired with Calibre at Globus. Significant Other also stepped in with a solo set, widening the night’s spectrum. Chose to pace myself for the next four days, I slipped away before these unfolded, but they promised their own charged intensity. Even so, the opening stretch - with its daring contrasts and textural turbulence - had already made Atonal’s ethos unmistakable: demanding, divergent, and defiantly alive.

Night II - Thursday

Thursday night came on heavy, both sonically and conceptually. Billed as “a night of bass weight, spatial experiment and sound at the edge of perception,” the program set out to test the limits of Kraftwerk’s acoustics - and our eardrums.

French ambient composer Malibu opened the Main Stage with an immersive, slow-bloom set that felt like dipping into a dream. Her music of shimmering synthetic strings and soft-focus vocals floated like weightless ambient pop. In Kraftwerk’s vast darkness, the sound hung in the air like a delicate fog—a moment to close our eyes and drift. Her melodies recalled a vapor trail of late-’90s Ibiza trance dissolved into thin air, haunting our collective nostalgia.

The tone shifted dramatically with Ziúr, joined by multimedia artist Sandi, who unveiled Home - a world premiere live show and preview of her forthcoming album. Expectations were high, but she exceeded them on every level. In a bold evolution, Ziúr stepped forward as a vocalist, flanked by a live band with cellist Martina Bertoni and singer Sara Persico. Together they built an intense, immersive journey that felt deeply personal.

Home explored the meaning of belonging - both for Ziúr and within the queer, international community she inhabits. On stage, she reflected on her fraught relationship to Germany and the wider sense of exclusion many feel: “I’m not part of the vision of these people… so many people I know also are not. And we fucking belong.”

That honesty translated into music that was unusually direct. Jagged club beats and deconstructed textures - the hallmarks of her earlier work - gave way to melancholic melodies and refrains sung live in a raw, impassioned voice. It felt like an artist shedding an old skin and being reborn on stage. Ziúr, known primarily for experimental electronics, had transformed into something of an alt-pop auteur right before our eyes, and the crowd responded accordingly. There was a sense of warmth and unity in the hall that cut through the usual Berlin cool.

Next, Carrier (aka Shifted) presented Rhythm Immortal, another world premiere and a masterclass in tension and rhythmic minimalism. Where many Atonal sets aim for sensory overload, Carrier was almost ascetic: stripping club music to skeletal drums and bass, then using those bare elements to pummel the audience into trance. Under strobing lights and a stark stage, he unleashed slow, rolling percussion with long silences in between. Each beat landed like a body blow, echoing through the chamber. Ghostly echoes lingered at the edges but never detracted from the central rhythm. It felt like being inside a giant engine, each tick an earth-shaking thud.

By midnight, Emptyset took over the Main Stage with the premiere of Dissever. Known for sculpting sound on an architectural scale, the duo bent frequencies into structures that tested the room itself. With visual and lighting designer Marcel Weber, Kraftwerk became a sensory assault course: thunderous blasts of noise, subsonic pressure, blinding strobes, sudden blackouts. The sound was so dense it was often felt more than heard - a vibrating pressure, a crackle in the air.

Yet within the barrage, patterns emerged: distorted kick drums pulsed like martial rhythms, waves of static rose and fell like some colossal breathing entity. It was difficult, even punishing, but also profound. Dissever felt like an exorcism of the building itself - perhaps the purest expression yet of Kraftwerk as instrument.

Elsewhere, the Third Surface and side rooms offered parallel journeys. Moin (featuring both members of Raime with drummer Valentina Magaletti) cut through the night with live guitars, bass, and drums - gritty, post-rock energy that edged into shoegaze. After hours submerged in electronics, hearing Magaletti’s drumming slice through the mix felt like a shock of cold water to the face.

Night III - Friday

By Friday, the festival had reached its mid-point, and the programming seemed to double down on confrontation and catharsis. This was, in many ways, the most sonically abrasive evening so far - pushing the audience into the red and seeing who came out the other side. After a gentler start courtesy of ambient artist Bela and a barrage of highly textured sound by Rashad Becker, the Main Stage was taken over by two back-to-back world premieres that embodied Atonal’s hardcore experimental spirit.

First up was GRIEND, a new collaboration between Danish noise icon Puce Mary and UK producer/vocalist Rainy Miller. Shrouded in near-total darkness with only occasional strobes illuminating their figures, Puce Mary and Miller conjured an atmosphere thick with dread and abrasion. The music of GRIEND was hard to pin down: scorching layers of hissing noise and feedback cloaked Miller’s voice, which shifted between auto-tuned melodies, raw shouts, and fragmented spoken lines. His delivery was raw and confrontational, a mix of lament and fury that cut through like shards of a broken narrative. Yet the words themselves were difficult to discern, their intent obscured so that much of the lyrical content was lost in the haze like an occult incantation.

Much of the set’s force came from Puce Mary’s sonic barrage, formidable in its density and scale. Against this backdrop, Miller’s performance carried something unmistakably northern and working-class - a greyscale, rain-soaked grit, a voice steeped in suffering and pressed close to emotional breakdown, yet refusing to surrender, battling on with raw intensity. At times it came in torrents, a downpour of sound and emotion that drenched the room in bleak intensity, the tension never fully resolved and the dark clouds never broke.

For all its density, the set rarely built toward a peak, instead settling into a sustained atmosphere that was deliberately challenging, giving little in the way of entry points. The sheer weight of sound was undeniable, yet it seemed to push the audience away no matter how much they tried to lean in, searching for meaning or something to grasp onto. Compared with previous years - when Miller roamed multiple stages and strode through the audience, inviting mass migrations across the expanse of Kraftwerk - this collaboration felt more contained. Extreme in tone, it carried power, but Miller’s role here was markedly different: more closed and obscured than the anarchic confrontational energy that once animated his presence.

By contrast, Kenyan artist Lord Spikeheart grabbed us by the throat, figuratively if not literally, and pulled us straight into his world. His audio-visual show REIGN (with visual artist NMR) was one of the night’s most anticipated sets - thanks both to its powerful thematic inspiration and to Spikeheart’s commanding presence. In the lead-up, Atonal’s materials described REIGN as exploring “narratives of abuse, displacement, betrayal and loss… but also resistance, reclamation and renewal” in the face of colonial violence. Lofty and important themes. Yet in the live context, any connection to that narrative was difficult to discern explicitly.

The vocalist appeared alone in a column of light, looking every bit the modern-day rock star turned heavy-metal demon. He launched into ferocious, screamed vocals over a backing track of industrial beats and grinding metal riffs. In a space as vast as Kraftwerk, however, the reliance on a pre-recorded track left the performance missing some of the force a fuller live setup might have delivered. For those further back, the solitary figure on stage could sometimes feel engulfed by the venue’s enormous scale. The vocals were undeniably intense, but the music beneath never quite packed a hard enough punch, with the mix leaving the screams sitting awkwardly on top rather than locked into the sound. Guitarist Leo Luchini’s brief cameo felt more theatrical than an authentic musical exchange, though it hinted at the impact a fuller lineup might have brought.

And yet Spikeheart’s sheer presence kept the show alive. His voice cut through even when the music faltered, a raw intensity that refused collapse. He looked every bit the part: dreadlocks flailing, fists clenched around the mic, clad in a custom armoured vest by Berlin accessory label Innerraum as harrowing images flickered behind him. At its peak, REIGN conjured a full-blown apocalyps - red strobes, billowing smoke, and that unmistakable howl tearing through the hall.

The crowd fed on his charisma: moshing and headbanging at the front, phones raised further back to capture the spectacle. It was likely the most Instagrammed set of the festival - and I don’t mean that disparagingly - a testament to Spikeheart’s power and ability to captivate.

Both sets might have hit harder in a smaller space like Tresor, or an underground punk venue with low ceilings, where sheer physicality and proximity intensify the effect. In the vastness of Kraftwerk, however, that same charge demands a more deliberate and dynamic approach. Here, neither performance offered much that felt evolved from previous Atonal appearances, and the absence of progression dulled their force. When artists return to Atonal year after year, there’s an intrinsic expectation that artists will refine or expand their approach. These sets didn’t quite clear that bar - powerful in the moment, but ultimately treading familiar ground.

Still, the festival’s multi-layered format meant there was always another angle waiting to be discovered. After the intensity of the main stage, it felt like time for a shift in register and scenery - and over in Third Surface, the New York-based quartet YHWH Nailgun provided exactly the kind of jolt nobody realised they needed.

I wandered into Third Surface to catch YHWH Nailgun’s set and was immediately hit with a wall of frenetic, genre-smashing sound. YHWH (the sacred four-letter Hebrew name for God, pronounced Yahweh) Nailgun are a band that collides math-rock complexity with art punk intensity, drums flailing, synths and guitars ringing out odd time signatures, and animalistic vocalist Zack Borzone yelping and howling infront of them all. It was musically whiplash-inducing in the best way. In fact, it reminded me of the gleeful anarchic spirit of early 2000s bands like Deerhoof, Battles, and Don Caballero or the more recent Still Houseplants. In the context of Atonal, their raw chaos and human energy equalled any machine-driven set for sheer intensity.

Not long after, a beloved figure of the leftfield music scene took the Third Surface decks: DJ Marcelle, hailing from the Netherlands, whose eclectic sets are the stuff of legend. Also known as Another Nice Mess, Marcelle has been a cult figure in underground music for decades, DJing since the late 1970s and only more recently gaining wider recognition with her own wild productions.

True to form, she bounced through genre after genre with mischievous glee, yet her Atonal set felt even more experimental than her usual boundary-pushing fare. At an age when many of her peers have long since mellowed out, Marcelle radiated youthful, loving energy while unleashing some of the festival’s hardest, darkest sounds. The juxtaposition of her greying punk aura and the ferocious music had the crowd initially astonished, but to their surprise quickly gave way to rapturous enthusiasm as they fed off her fearless vibe.

One highlight was a track of her own that wove in audio from Nan Goldin’s recent speech at the opening of This Will Not End Well - the renowned photographer’s retrospective at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. In that recording, Goldin lambasted the German state’s unconditional support for Israel and the silence of cultural institutions amid the suffering in Palestine. Hearing her impassioned words ring out across the cavernous hall gave Marcelle’s set an unexpected emotional weight, turning the dance floor into a moment of reflection before she kicked the energy back up. It was a jaw-dropping climax that the crowd greeted with roaring approval - a powerful end to this chapter of the night, courtesy of a DJ who clearly has no intention of slowing down.

Night IV - Saturday

Saturday night at Atonal unfolded as a study in extremes, shifting from moments of hushed introspection to abrasive abstraction and, finally, ecstatic release. It was a journey that stretched late into the morning, demanding stamina but rewarding those who stayed the course.

Sofii (Sophie Koella) set the evening’s tone with a gentle world premiere live set that felt like stepping into her private dreamscape. The newcomer brought an ethereal, fog-laden sound built from classical piano lines, grainy electronics, and ghostly vocal loops. Her music, “a meditation on memory, emotion and imagined futures,” came across as intimate and unhurried. In the vast dark hall of Kraftwerk, Sofii’s delicate melodies and whispered fragments floated like mist, inviting the crowd to slow down and listen closely.

After a brief reset, 11 pm brought one of the festival’s standout performances: Ego Death, the new collaboration between composer Aho Ssan and cellist Resina. This project explores “radical modes of co-authorship and emotional abstraction,” and their debut album (also titled Ego Death) was born from remote improvisations that grew into deep trust and intuition between the artists. On stage, those concepts manifested as a piece of stunning emotional weight. Resina’s cello was processed and bent into otherworldly shapes - sometimes a mournful melody floating just out of reach, resisting full perception like a seraphic vision, other times a grinding, textured drone that merged seamlessly with Aho Ssan’s electronic layers. The sound reverberated through the entire building, enveloping the audience.

What lingered most was how the cello haunted Kraftwerk’s vast architecture. Its notes seemed to inhabit every corner - equally enchanting whether you wandered into one of the hall’s dark, uncrowded recesses or stood front and centre among the transfixed crowd. The music’s intensity never pressed down on you; it expanded outward, drawing the audience into a shared state of immersion and suspension. For a time, the entire cavernous space felt like a single resonating body.

Ego Death was a high point of profundity. What came next brought us crashing back to earth - or perhaps hurtling into a cartoon nightmare. Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet’s world-premiere show S.L.O.T.H. was one of the night’s most anticipated sets, and it proved to be its most divisive. Billed as “a dense, hyper-sensory world of serrated beats, fractured glossolalia, slippery polyrhythms, and mangled vocal textures,” the performance certainly delivered sensory chaos. Yet following the gravity of Ego Death, S.L.O.T.H. felt jarring, cynical, and at times disappointingly hollow.

Together with French visual artist and hacker Freeka Tet, Amnesia Scanner stitched together sharp contrasts: screeching synth blitzes and metallic crashes gave way to nu-metal riffs that dissolved into hyperpop-gabber meltdowns punctuated by their trademark manipulated gremlin voices. The collage was deliberately disorienting, a vortex of mutant sound and internet-age junk culture, but the sound never took hold of the room with the force it seemed to demand. The visuals, marketed as twisted and sardonic, were surprisingly minimal and failed to conjure the “dense world” we’d been promised.

Some in the crowd embraced the absurdity, grinning at each lurching shift and enjoying the provocation. But others - myself included - found it hard to shake the sense that Amnesia Scanner’s shtick, once groundbreaking, now feels like a tired in-joke at the audience’s expense. They remain undeniably skilled sound designers, but the show’s substance came across less as bold experimentation than as provocation for its own sake. S.L.O.T.H. was never meant to be soothing. It spoke in a tongue only Amnesia Scanner could command - anarchic, confrontational, chaotic - whether you found it thrilling or alienating.

After the main hall closed, we descended into the depths for our now-nightly ritual: a Third Surface cleanse, like an ice bath for the brain. Tonight’s late-night shock therapy was Hyperverbena, a new live/DJ hybrid show by Uruguay’s Lechuga Zafiro and Colombia’s Verraco. Officially, Hyperverbena is pitched as a “hybrid concert” that reclaims the slur “sudaca” and embraces visceral, undisciplined club culture. In practice, it was one of the most exhilarating DJ sets I’ve experienced in a long time. The setup was essentially the two artists at the decks, going back-to-back in a frenzy with live FX and drumming augmented into the mix. From the first minutes, they unleashed a rapid-fire collage of Latin club rhythms and hardcore electronics that had the packed room instantly moving. Mutant jungle and breakcore morphed into dembow and reggaeton, then into Brazilian batucada drums layered over club beats and swerving into cumbia-techno hybrids. Zafiro and Verraco were tightly in sync, often using extreme mixer tricks and aggressive EQ cuts to deconstruct tracks on the fly. They weren’t afraid to push things into the red, but it felt joyous, not abrasive. After the heady seriousness of the Main Stage, this was a party.

Next up was Chuquimamani-Condori, the Pakajaqueño Aymara (Andean indigenous) artist better known as DJ E. Their sets are known for collapsing distinctions between tradition and futurity, chaos and communion, weaving ceremonial percussion, warped folk melodies, dense noise, and vivid synths into something at once disorienting and deeply affective. At Atonal, the edges softened: the noise and radio fragments, the reversed samples and stacked layers were still there, but reframed in a way that felt more tender, even romantic. The result was a set that radiated vulnerability without losing its intensity. In almost any other context, this strange collage of sounds might have registered as incoherent, but Chuquimamani-Condori carried it with conviction, creating a narrative that was as magnetic as it was elusive.

Taken together with the shock therapy of Hyperverbena, it felt like the night had traced a wide arc - from ritualistic resonance in the Main Hall to chaotic liberation and finally to something fragile, searching, and strangely intimate. By the time we left the depths of Kraftwerk, it was hard to tell whether the body felt more refreshed or overwhelmed, only that it had been fully re-tuned.

Night V - Sunday

The final evening of Atonal offered one last chance to experience the festival’s architectural interventions in full. Each night had opened with a performance on Limbus, a custom multi-channel speaker array developed by Bill Kouligas (PAN) and architect Niklas Bildstein Zaar with Berlin studio sub. Conceived as a spatial intervention, Limbus reimagined recorded sound as a visceral, transducer-based environment. A nightly immersion that shaped the mood of the building before the main program began.

On Sunday, vocalist/composer Niecy Blues had the honour of closing this series. Hailing from South Carolina (by way of Oklahoma), her songwriting draws from simmering jazz ballads, ghostly R&B, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations. For Atonal, she delivered a hypnotic live set that wove delicate strands of voice, electronics, and improvisation, pulling the audience into a state of reverie and “luminous disorientation.” Her ethereal performance - intimate yet otherworldly - felt like a quiet benediction for the festival’s final night, her voice a spectre floating in the hall as the speaker array carried it through the space.

Jokkoo Collective took over the main stage with their ambitious multimedia piece Organic Intelligence. Jokkoo, a six-member collective, is devoted to amplifying forward-looking electronic sounds from the African continent and its diaspora. In Organic Intelligence, the group channeled this mission into a futurist audiovisual journey through sonic ecology and resistance - described by the festival as a work “of ecological, technological, and cultural resistance.”

The show unfolded with layers of ominous field recordings of rainfall and subsonic bass rumbles like a distant storm on the horizon, while distorted horns and synthesiser drones rose like lamentations from the underworld. The collective stacked devastating, clockwork polyrhythmic dub percussion against monolithic noise and a heavy, unrelenting pressure, evoking projects like early Demdike Stare or Prurient’s Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement alter ego. At one point, the sound of pouring rain became sheets of white noise - simultaneously ominous and comforting - as if the audience was being sonically cleansed.

On the massive screen, Jokkoo’s visuals of flowing mangrove waters intercut with urban city traffic, merged with fluid AI pixel motion effects, reinforced the theme of nature and technology entwined. As the piece progressed, the visuals shifted to flickering flames, suggesting a purifying fire that strips away the old skin so something new can be born. Crucially, Jokkoo seemed to understand that in the gargantuan main hall of Kraftwerk, maximal impact didn’t come from an immediate drop into blistering intensity, but from building tension with patience. The slow accumulation of force proved far more devastating - and ultimately more rewarding - than any sudden surge could have been.

By the end, Organic Intelligence reached a thunderous climax of deep, thick sound pressure and frantic rhythmic energy: a perfect balance of punishing noise and uplifting catharsis. Dark and ominous yet profoundly energising, for many in the crowd it stood out as one of the true highlights of the entire festival.

As the clock neared midnight, the main stage was engulfed by one of the most anticipated collaborations of the festival: the world premiere of a trio uniting Japanese noise legend Merzbow, Brazilian metal icon Iggor Cavalera, and Italian experimentalist Eraldo Bernocchi.

From the very first moment, their set erupted as an all-out sonic onslaught - a dense, improvised wall of sound that seemed to tear the air apart. Sheets of feedback and electronic distortion, wrung from tables packed with devices, fused into a single mass. For most of the performance, Iggor stayed behind the desk, only stepping forward in the final section to unleash his live drumming. Towering above them, a 30-meter screen looped images of thick Amazonian jungle, an eerie and fitting metaphor for the sound.

As the performance intensified, it was like being lost deep in a nightmarish rainforest: hordes of cicada-like electronic chirps and serrated frequencies swarmed around us. Distortions whipped our nerves like thorny branches clawing at the skin. The layers upon layers of sonic texture became a physical experience - not just heard, but felt in the body as the powerful sound system made every atom vibrate.

About halfway through, surrender became the only option. The usual reference points (melody, rhythm, structure) dissolved into a relentless torrent of noise that somehow felt cleansing and meditative in its extremity. Eyes closed, it was easy to lose track of one’s physical self; the overwhelming sound had a trance-like, out-of-body effect. For many, this set became a kind of baptism by noise - an experience of destruction and renewal. When the trio finally concluded their intense improvisation, there was a moment of stunned silence before the crowd erupted in cheers.

The night’s annihilating noise spectacle gave way to a different kind of intensity: the deep physical weight of low-frequency sound. Taking over the Third Surface stage, dubstep pioneer Mala delivered a late-night DJ set for the ages. As one half of Digital Mystikz, co-founder of the seminal DMZ label and clubnight, and founder of Deep Medi Musik, Mala is among the key architects of dubstep - a figure without whom the genre’s deep, dark, meditative strain would scarcely exist. His influence on bass music is immeasurable, built on decades of championing earth-shaking sub-bass and “speaker-obliterating” productions.

Mala absolutely rose to the challenge. As soon as he took control, waves of chest-rattling bass rolled out across the concrete expanses of Kraftwerk’s lower level. The Third Surface dancefloor, already primed by hours of experimental music, now became a dystopian temple of bass. Mala’s selections drew from the deep well of dubstep and sound system culture: heavy-weight 140-BPM rhythms, throbbing reggae sub-basslines, and skittering percussions that got the crowd bouncing in unison. The sound system in Third Surface seemed to have endless headroom, delivering the kind of intense sub-bass pressure that Berlin’s highly calibrated techno rigs seldom hit. One could truly meditate on bass weight here, feeling each wobble and kick drum resonate in the ribcage.

Crucially, Mala maintained the raw energy level that the noise trio had escalated. He didn’t shy away from grit or darkness, instantly drawing for the heaviest levels of intensity with his raw selection. The cumulative effect of five days of Atonal seemed to peak on that dancefloor. All the tension, inspiration, and sonic exploration of the week distilled into this final rave. This was the ultimate send-off: the festival’s experimental journey ending not in quiet contemplation, but in a joyous eruption of sound system bass culture.

As the main stage program wound down, many die-hards weren’t ready to leave Kraftwerk’s embrace. The intimate OHM club provided a final afterparty to carry us through the early hours. From 3:00 am, Colombian DJ Verraco returned for his second festival appearance, followed by London’s Shy One on closing duties from 5:00 am - a one-two punch of forward-thinking club music that squeezed out the last reserves of the crowd's energy. Verraco’s set, steeped in Latin-infused techno and IDM sensibilities, propelled dancers forward with seamless blends of percussive rhythms, futuristic bass, and breaks. By the time Shy One stepped up, dawn was near, but her eclectic mix gave the crowd a second wind. Those final hours in OHM felt almost surreal: a small room of tireless festival survivors, dancing on aching feet yet unwilling to let the experience end.

When the lights finally came on and the last echoes faded, Berlin Atonal 2025’s Sunday night had delivered everything one could hope for - and more. As we filtered out into the pale Monday morning light, many of us felt fundamentally changed by what we had experienced. If the mark of a great festival is to leave you inspired and a little awestruck, then Berlin Atonal’s final night achieved that in spades. What a journey.