Chengdu’s underground scene unfolds as a fragile, persistent ecology of queer performance and DIY culture, shaped by clubs, closures and informal networks. Through YiHao’s trajectory, interviewed by curator Sara Sassanelli, it appears as a space where myth, memory and experimentation converge, producing temporary communities and practices that drift between exhaustion, care and reinvention.

In Ilulissat, the third-largest town in Greenland, ice is not a background but a force of light, movement, and sound. The Ice Music Festival is both an event and a situated practice that engages directly with the frozen landscape. Instruments are carved from glacial blocks, and performance depends on shifting temperatures and wind. Between collapse and improvisation, as Emile Holba writes, the festival turns ice into both a creative and symbolic material, holding together art, climate, and community at the edge of the world, where climate change strikes with greater force.

From Seoul to San Juan, hyperlocal sounds are rewriting the rules of global pop, proving that the more rooted the music, the wider it can travel. Yet, singeli, Tanzania’s blistering, homegrown electronic rush, remains largely confined to East Africa and niche European dance floors. In an age that supposedly rewards authenticity and locality, why hasn’t one of the continent’s most radical genres crossed over?