There is a long history of unwanted sounds finding their people. ACT UP's slogan "SILENCE = DEATH" understood something fundamental about volume: that to make noise is to take space sonically, bodily, politically. Nearly four decades later, in a former sewage pumping station on the Spree, a set of snare drums will attempt to prove the inverse — that noise, in the right hands, is not just disruption but a form of life.

Noise Is a Queer Space is the creation of Luxa M. Schüttler, a composer working at the intersection of installation, composition, and what might best be described as social choreography. The piece appears as part of MaerzMusik 2026, the Berliner Festspiele's annual festival for time-based art, and it arrives at Radialsystem on 28 March with a cast that signals the breadth of contemporary music's queer and experimental networks. Jennifer Torrence, Wojtek Blecharz, Chaya Czernowin, Jennifer Walshe, Neo Hülcker, Ricardo Eizirik — the roster assembles roughly twenty composers and performers whose practices span noise, new music, club culture, and sound installation. The scale alone signals ambition. This is not a concert. It is an environment.

Schüttler's central conceit is deceptively simple: snare drums. Not the full orchestral percussion arsenal, not electronics as the default contemporary-music signifier, but the snare — an instrument associated with marching bands, with military precision, with rhythm sections that keep time for other people's melodies. In this context, the drums become both material and metaphor: a surface for striking, a membrane that vibrates sympathetically, a site where the individual gesture produces collective resonance. The heterogeneous soundscapes that emerge are meant to carry pop-cultural memories — traces of songs, beats, textures that have shaped queer listening. Ricardo Eizirik, the Brazilian composer and DJ who operates between contemporary music and club culture, contributes beats rooted in Brazilian funk. Sébastien Vaillancourt handles electronics and programming. The result, Schüttler has suggested, aims to be something like "a queer group selfie in the Darmstadt concert programme" — a phrase that does real work, stitching together the institutional gravity of new music's most hallowed summer course with the throwaway intimacy of a phone camera pointed at a group of friends.

The theoretical ground beneath this project is richer than its playful framing might suggest. Sound studies and queer theory have been circling each other for years. The academic literature on queer noise identifies a precise structural parallel: queer as unwanted desire, noise as unwanted sound. Both are nonreproductive — noise refuses to resolve into music's functional harmonies the way queerness refuses the biological utility of reproduction. Both are unintelligible by design, operating outside the frameworks that would make them legible, useful, recoverable. This theoretical connection between noise and queerness draws on work in queer sound studies that frames both as forms of foreclosure from intelligibility. Glory holes as graves. Public bathrooms as queer spaces. Quarantine procedures as ideological production. The specificity of these concerns — HIV/AIDS history, the political acoustics of bodies deemed excessive — runs counter to the vague inclusivity that "queer" can sometimes flatten into when it enters institutional programming. Noise Is a Queer Space, by invoking around fifty guests from the LGBTQIA+ community as participants, explicitly aims to undermine singular authorship. The question is whether it can hold both theoretical sharpness and the hedonistic openness of a group selfie without one dissolving the other.

Radialsystem is an interesting vessel for this experiment. Built in the nineteenth century as a pumping station for Berlin's sewer system — part of the grand municipal project of channelling what the city wanted to flush away — it has operated as a cultural venue since 2006. The listed industrial building, its old masonry now married to a modern glass addition, sits directly on the Spree in Friedrichshain. A building that once existed to manage the city's waste carries an obvious, almost too-neat resonance with a project about noise and queerness as forms of the "unwanted" — a resonance I am reading into the pairing, not one Schüttler has made explicit. The Saal, where the piece will be presented at 22:45 on a Saturday night, is the kind of room that rewards spatial thinking — and Schüttler's parcours format, which invites the audience to move through the installation rather than sit before it, seems designed to activate the architecture.

What the audience will encounter is deliberately fluid and provisional. There is a composed framework — Schüttler is credited as the architect of the parcours — but the contributions of twenty-odd performers and fifty-odd community participants suggest something closer to structured improvisation. The question is not whether the individual artists can be experimental — Walshe, Czernowin, Hiendl, Danzeisen, Saviet need no permission for that — but whether the social framework can generate something none of them would produce alone. That is a harder thing to compose than any score.

Contemporary music — the institutional variety, the kind programmed at Darmstadt and Donaueschingen and MaerzMusik — has spent years questioning its own normativities in essays and panel discussions. Schüttler's project takes the question into the room. By placing the snare drum — that most militaristic, most rhythmically disciplined of instruments — at the centre of a queer, collective, hedonistic soundscape, the inversion is deliberate and specific. The instrument of keeping time becomes the instrument of losing it.

There is a risk. "Queer group selfie" is a phrase that could describe something genuinely radical or something that looks great on an Instagram story and dissipates the moment the room empties. Coverage of this specific work is almost entirely limited to the MaerzMusik programme description and one LGBTQIA+ event listing; there are no critical reviews or in-depth interviews about the piece's development. The project has not, as far as I can determine, been staged before. Its success will depend on whether the social architecture — the invitations, the trust, the willingness of fifty-odd community members to make noise alongside established composers — holds under the weight of a festival context.

But the premise is sound, in every sense. Noise has always been queer — not because queer people are inherently noisy, but because both noise and queerness occupy the space of the unwanted, the unintelligible, the thing that refuses to resolve into the expected harmony. Radialsystem, a building that once existed to pump away what the city could not use, seems ready to hold something the city might actually need.