Giga-Hertz Festival 2025
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Pressemitteilung
Giga-Hertz Festival 2025: Experience Experimental Music Scenes at ZKM | Karlsruhe
Concerts, listening sessions, and DJ sets – from November 20 to 22, 2025, the Giga-Hertz Festival at ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, showcases the full spectrum of contemporary electronic music and sound art. Internationally renowned artists and up-and-coming talents present new perspectives from the experimental music scene. Highlights include the Giga-Hertz Award ceremonies and concerts featuring premiere performances from the award winners. Visitors can also perform their own sound experiments and take their first steps in electronic composition in hands-on workshops.
The detailed festival program is available here.
Giga-Hertz Award 2025
This year’s winner of the Grand Prize awarded for lifetime achievement is French sound artist Laetitia Sonami (born 1957, Paris), a pioneer of sensor-driven musical performance and experimental electronic composition. Since the 1980s, Sonami has explored the boundaries between sound, technology, and body. With unique instruments such as the “Lady’s Glove,” the “Lady’s Ball,” or the “Spring Spyre,” her gestural sound theater lets audiences encounter electronic music as an embodied experience.
The jury praises Sonami for “transcending the conventional boundaries between performer, composer, and instrument builder and redefining virtuosity in the field of electronic music.” Her concert takes place on Saturday evening at 7 pm.
Premiere Concerts With the 2023/2022 Award Winners
On Thursday (7 pm), the festival opens with a concert by previous Giga-Hertz production award winners Lea Bertucci, Jessica Ekomane, and Peter Gahn.
- Lea Bertucci (born 1984, USA) won the 2023 production award for “The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity.” Her immersive composition for multi-channel speakers, electronics and historic flutes unfolds a crystalline, minimalistic and dissonant sound.
- Jessica Ekomane (born 1989, France) received an award for “Manifolds” – a piece that explores rhythm perception and collective dynamics and revisits analog synthesizers in a contemporary setting.
- Peter Gahn (born 1970, Germany) was awarded in 2022 for “De-escalating Skies I+III.” This composition for alto saxophone and live electronics translates the sounds of subterranean pipelines into socio-political sound spaces.
2025 Production Awards
More than 400 entries were submitted for the Giga-Hertz production awards and the Giga-Hertz PopExperimental award, which was issued as a production award as well for the very first time. The 2025 recipients will present their works on Friday (7 pm).
- Davor Vincze was awarded a production prize for “Let the System Guide,” a project combining performative participation with a critical approach to power structures.
- The duo consisting of Jug Marković and Thea Soti were selected for “Thrashold” – an experimental music theater piece characterized by electronic improvisation and choreographic sensibility.
- British Turntablist Nicole Raymond (NikNak) will receive the Giga-Hertz PopExperimental production award for her innovative sound practices that combine Afrofuturism, turntablism, and audiovisual performance.
A selection of artists from this year’s shortlist can be heard on the Sounding Future platform alongside playlists curated for the Giga-Hertz Festival.
About the Giga-Hertz Award
Since 2007, the ZKM | Hertzlab and SWR Experimental Studio have been presenting the Giga-Hertz Award – one of the world’s foremost awards for electronic music, attracting submissions from more than 40 countries. Named after physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894), the award is endowed with a total of € 25,000: € 10,000 for the Grand Prize and € 5,000 for each of the two production awards and the PopExperimental Advancement Award endowed by the Fördergesellschaft ZKM / HfG e.V. The award aims to promote innovative electronic music which is created and performed as part of residency programs at the ZKM.
