At 2 p.m., we will open the festival in the Grüner Salon with a performance that seems custom-tailored to this year’s festival theme. Thinking About Tomorrow and How to Build It, the latest work by the Ja, Panik ringleader, was developed in a two-month residency in Tehran, Iran. The central themes of the album are utopia, fear, and future—all results of free sounds, associations, and thoughts formulated in a place that, at least to us, feels far away. These narratives, which Spechtl delivers through sound collages of traditional Persian percussion and string instruments, end up in the familiar territory of fluid electronic music and recall groups like Can or early Kraftwerk. But back to the future: “In Tehran, people aren’t afraid of the future. They know that things can only get better. Until then, they celebrate and are creative behind closed doors. And Andreas Spechtl followed suit,” wrote Max Dax in an analysis of the work for the extensive album leaflet. “For a land in which many things are forbidden, the future is full of possibilities […] Thinking About Tomorrow, and How to Build It tells of this via a big, opulent field recording in ten musical diary entries.” We’re excited to hear the live version.