There is a moment in Tomoko Sauvage's practice where she drops heated water into porcelain bowls fitted with underwater microphones, and the resulting sound — fragile, unpredictable, shaped by gravity and surface tension — becomes a composition that no score could fully prescribe. Music authored by physics, curated by attention. This is the kind of work that sits at the centre of Heroines of Sound 2026, the latest edition of a festival that has spent twelve years making the case that the most radical electronic music has always had women at its source, even when the histories said otherwise.

The festival runs 10–12 July at Radialsystem, the pumping station on Holzmarktstraße originally built in 1881 and expanded in 1905 by architect Richard Tettenborn in the redbrick Gothic idiom of Brandenburg's municipal architecture — large windows designed to show off gleaming machinery, a Victorian conviction that infrastructure should be beautiful. The building pumped sewage for over a century before its conversion into one of Berlin's most distinctive stages for experimental performance. Bettina Wackernagel founded Heroines of Sound in 2014 with a specific and somewhat archival impulse: to surface the women who shaped electronic music's first decades — Laurie Spiegel, Else Marie Pade, Delia Derbyshire — and place them in conversation with living artists pushing the form forward. Over 150 female and non-binary artists have been presented across the festival's editions That number alone tells a story about how much work was waiting to be platformed.

This year, the festival's thematic centre has shifted. Japanese composer Midori Hirano, who has lived in Berlin since 2006 and whose work moves between piano-based ambient composition and granular electronic processing, serves as guest curator. Her involvement anchors a broader focus on the Asian diaspora — specifically the Japanese community working across Europe — that gives this edition a distinct gravity. The confirmed lineup gathers artists who are widely respected in contemporary music circuits but rarely share a single German stage: Nina Fukuoka; Kyoka, the Raster-Noton artist whose abrasive, percussive electronics feel like they are trying to escape the speaker; Miki Yui, whose installations often operate at the threshold of audibility, where sound becomes more felt than heard; and Yoko Konishi, whose interest in spatial composition maps well onto Radialsystem's cavernous hall, where industrial architecture has always made sound feel architectural. The festival's framing of these artists as "rarely seen particularly at German festivals" is a claim worth sitting with

There is something pointed about this gathering. Berlin's experimental music scene often congratulates itself on its internationalism, and in many respects it earns that reputation. But the Japanese diaspora's contribution to the city's sonic landscape — from Midori Hirano's quiet, layered electronics to Kyoka's confrontational glitch — has been more ambient presence than celebrated fact. This edition of Heroines of Sound makes that contribution visible and structural, not incidental.

Konishi's programming offers a useful window into what the festival is doing curatorially. She premieres Motus Umbra on Thursday evening, performed by Spółdzielnia Muzyczna Contemporary Ensemble, and follows it on Friday with Fluctuating Beings, an electronic live performance. Two works in two days, one acoustic and one electronic — the kind of double exposure that lets an audience see how a composer thinks across media rather than in a single register. Radialsystem's high ceilings and hard surfaces, engineered for machinery rather than music, give spatial work room to behave unpredictably. Sound bounces here in ways that concert halls are designed to prevent.

The programme unfolds across concerts, immersive installations, panel discussions, workshops, and what the festival calls a "Sound- and Filmbar" — the latter open for free alongside exhibitions and panels. Day tickets are listed at around 22 euros, with a three-day pass at 54 The structure is deliberately porous: you can buy your way into the concerts or simply arrive and inhabit the edges, encountering sound art and discourse without a ticket barrier. This matters more than it might seem. A festival that leaves gaps in its fencing invites a different kind of attention — slower, less transactional, more willing to be surprised.

What makes this edition of Heroines of Sound worth attention beyond its programming is its implicit argument. The festival has always refused the framing that women in electronic music are an exception or a corrective — the premise, from the start, was that they were constitutive, central, foundational. Twelve years in, that argument has largely been won in critical discourse, if not always in festival booking practices. So the question becomes: what does a festival built on visibility do when visibility alone is no longer enough? The answer this year seems to be: go deeper. Rather than surveying broadly, Heroines of Sound 2026 traces a specific diaspora, follows its networks, commissions new work, and asks what happens when a community of practice that has been dispersed across European institutions is, for three days, given a shared stage. The result is less a showcase than a mapping exercise — connecting nodes that were always there, making the lines between them audible