In need of a sound night’s sleep? Curl up at Berlin’s 30-hour immersive music event

I’ve been to my fair share of subterranean gatherings in repurposed industrial spaces. In Berlin, it’s something of a cultural pre-requisite akin to trying Club-Mate. After all, the city’s reputation as a place to spend long hours dancing to electronic music was in part facilitated through structures that were abandoned after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). But, last weekend, as I headed into the Kraftwerk Berlin building – a giant former power plant on the Spree and home to the long-running techno institution Tresor – dancing, for once, is not the priority.

The Infinite Now is a collaboration between experimental music and arts festivals Berlin Atonal and Unsound. It has been described as a social experiment: a 30-hour-long programme of performances spread over three floors of windowless brutalist architecture. The line-up features unique sets by renowned experimental artists such as Jim O’Rourke and Kali Malone, alongside art installations, living areas, an internet café, a gift shop and a canteen area where you can buy coffee, artisanal pie and mash or the Chinese snack douhua.

So far, it is all par for the course for the urban festivalgoer. But as I head towards the music, I notice beds. Lots of beds. About 500 of them, neatly placed around the factory’s giant turbine hall, where most of the live performances take place. Snoozing isn’t usually what music promoters encourage their audience to do but here it’s all part of what feels like entering the world’s largest and most avant garde sleepover. As the flyers put it, the audience are encouraged to “sleep, rest, eat, listen, watch, withdraw, talk and pay attention”.

The Kraftwerk building is famous for its acoustics – artists know how good they’ll sound here. Much of the programme is beatless, texture-based music, often performed by musicians standing behind banks of electronic and modular equipment. The Infinite Now seems to have solved one of the enduring problems of attending this kind of music event: the lack of physical spectacle. Here, who cares if the performer barely moves and there’s no groove to latch onto? The sound is so immense that you can just lie in a hammock and soak it all in.

That’s not to say the visual spectacle isn’t there. Dry ice and lasers fire around the turbine. The Italian composer Caterina Barbieri delivers a set that reaches operatic heights – appearing with a metal spiky arm and a giant flower attached to her costume (pictured, above right). Elsewhere, the Japanese improvisation quartet Marginal Consort, who have been performing since 1997, arrange themselves around the audience (at one point a member shouts through a giant rolled-up sheet of paper). The sight is a whole planet away from the weekend’s other big music summit: Eurovision. 

“Doing something really private in public, such as sleeping, creates interesting dynamics,” says Harry Glass, one of the organisers who, along with Laurens von Oswald, has been running Atonal since 2013. The pair of genial Australians are a little frazzled, as you’d expect, but enthusiastic when I meet them on the Sunday afternoon. Glass explains: “People create their own way of experiencing this thing but somehow cohere in this group dynamic.”

Over the weekend, everyone adapts to their own reality. Not all spectators stay the full 30 hours but out of an audience that peaks at more than 1,000 attendees, almost half sleep over. Apart from the odd crowded toilet cubicle, this felt less like a party and more like a retreat. But was the programme a success? In a climate where attention spans are shrinking into bite-sized viral moments, spaces created for the act of listening feel strangely rebellious. Being here reminded me of how powerful even the most ambient music can be when given the time and space to appreciate it. And the best way to round it off? A sound night’s sleep.