A Manila office worker arrives in Masbate expecting a provincial rodeo. Instead, he enters a world where cattle still organise the rhythms of life, where spectacle and labour blur under the island sun. In this literary fiction, Glenn Diaz moves through cowboy rituals, uneasy conversations and nocturnal pastures to explore what modern urban life has lost contact with, and what still survives at the edge of disappearance.

Ambient music isn’t properly a genre, but a way of listening shaped by the instability of contemporary life. In this conversation, David Toop, a leading figure in the study of contemporary music and sound cultures, and Luigi Monteanni revisit the history of ambient, moving from ritual and free improvisation to algorithmic culture, tracing how sound can reconfigure perception and reopen a relation with the world beyond productivity and digital saturation.

Moving through his childhood memory, nightclub architecture and metaphysical theories of light, Vitaly Weber reflects on the dancefloor as a space where perception is reorganised. Centred on Milan’s A.R.X. gatherings, the personal essay follows how light and sound cease to merely illuminate bodies, becoming forces that orient attention, and transform collective experience into an almost ritual condition.