CTM 2026 Opening Concert: Earth & Nataša Grujović and Steve Moore

Opening our 2026 edition, Earth embodies the very friction and harmony at the core of dissonate <> resonate.

Once-inexorable riffs splintered across distortion, Dylan Carlson’s Earth have stretched outward over the decades to encompass minimalist doom, ambient country, avantgarde folk and psychedelic rock into their time-warpage, a flagrant dismissal of genre that keeps Carlson’s brooding guitar at the center. Embracing improvisation, each performance from the legendary rock innovators is a mirage-map, songs blossoming to collapse inward before reconstituting into heaving new shapes. Recent works have found Carlson paring back effects to focus on repetition, space, and texture rather than volume alone: savage calms and luminous drifts here dominate. These changes manifest live as meditative expanses broken by bursts of excoriated power, suspended in a dust-flavored aspic of desert twilight.

For this opening concert, the band will be performing their 2005 album Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method in full.

Nataša Grujović and Steve Moore wield accordion, analogue synthetics and trombone to shape resonant fields that breathe within the rooms they inhabit: waves of tone that move between ritualised drone, spiritual jazz, and the echoes of Western classical forms in which resonance reigns suspended between the tangible and the transcendental. Serbian-born artist Grujović has long explored the physical presence of sound through performance and composition, tracing its material shimmer across Europe’s experimental stages - from Venice Biennale’s Luxembourg Pavilion to Donaueschingen’s Off-Festival and Belgrade’s Ring Ring. Moore, a Seattle-born trombonist, pianist, and composer, brings decades of harmonic inquiry from his work with Sufjan Stevens, Neko Case, and Bill Frisell to his enduring roles in EARTH and sunnO))).