Friday afternoon, in front of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), the first drumbeat: the Sonic Pluriverse Festival begins—not indoors, but in motion. The opening parade winds its way through the Tiergarten park and back to HKW—not a ceremonial procession but the first audible manifestation of what will be explored over the next four weekends: Gnawa, not as a fixed tradition, but as a resonating geographical axis. The parade is led by Maalem Hicham Bilali & Black Koyo from Brussels, one of Europe’s best-known Gnawa groups—their guembris, their tbel, and their call-and-response singing give the procession its pulse, its line, its spiritual core. Around them gather other voices that will perform separately over the course of the festival, heard here together for the first time: from Afro-Cuba, Régis Molina & BataSax with the saxophone sound of Havanna, and the drums of the Batá tradition; from Brazil Inã Mejí with Aduni Guedes, whose Afoxé is the publicly danceable voice of Candomblé as brought to the streets of Recife and Bahia for generations; from the Berlin Gnawa scene the group Gnawa Berlin who guard tradition in the city itself; and the world of flamenco Laura la Risa y compañía, whose dancing and compás rhythms keep Andalusian-Moorish memory alive. What we experience in motion here is thus nothing less than a map being walked through, with each group standing for one of the lines along which Gnawa branched out across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Sahara. When the parade gets back to the HKW, Maalem Hicham Bilali & Black Koyo give a welcoming concert at the entrance. At the end of this performance, all of the voices taking part join for a ‘confluence of cultures’—a compact musical encounter in which, for a few minutes, the individual languages become one, before separating out again for their own concerts over the coming weekends. Free of charge. You are warmly invited to join the procession!