Magazine

One of the most acclaimed voices in contemporary Thai literature, Duanwad Pimwana tells the story of Manop, an ageing man haunted by a love he never confessed. When a vivid dream brings back memories of Chaiyapon, the childhood friend he secretly loved, decades of silence begin to resurface. Moving between adolescence and old age, the story follows a life shaped by desire and compromise, tracing the quiet negotiations through which a kathoey identity was concealed and ultimately reclaimed. At the centre of this journey is the “chong kraben”, a genderless garment that becomes both a memory of first love and a late gesture of self-recognition.

Vinyl records are often understood as containers of sound. Fabio Acca proposes the opposite: they are performative devices that produce experiences. Positioning the record within the field of Live Arts, the text explores listening as an embodied practice through which bodies, desires and identities take shape. Drawing on personal memories, performance theory and the history of artist records in Itlay, Acca argues that a record does not merely document an event, but reactivates it. From domestic turntables to experimental sound art, listening emerges as a live act where sound, imagination and presence continuously unfold.

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.

In this work of speculative fiction, the character 377O73-QÂF—hypostasis of this musical and ambient interregnum—recounts the Ambient Rave eXperience as an hallucinatory sonic ecosystem populated by a promiscuity of dancing bodies. Moving through T.A.Z. and altered states of perception, 377O73-QÂF invokes how sound ceases to be mere communication and becomes a force that slowly reshapes bodies, communities, and imaginaries. Blending rave culture, psychoacoustics, collective ritual, and speculative philosophy, 377O73-QÂF reflects on ambient music as a threshold between memory and anticipation, and between presence and transcendence; as a practice of drift, metamorphosis, and collective becoming.

In São Paulo’s contested centro, the underGRANDE scene transformed nightlife into a form of cultural guerrilla. Through parties like Mamba Negra, abandoned factories and occupied buildings became spaces of queer autonomy, collective survival and political confrontation. Tracing fifteen years of independent electronic culture, Laura Diaz maps a movement where celebration operates as resistance, memory and refusal against gentrification, repression and neoliberal capture.

Drone music stretches from medieval cathedrals and folk instruments to contemporary experimental sound, carrying a lineage of ritual, dissonance and altered perception. Moving through bagpipes, hurdy-gurdies and modular synthesis, Hannah Pezzack traces drone as both sacred resonance and sonic disruption: a communal form that dissolves authorship, bends time and turns listening into embodied experience.

Before Polish hip-hop had a name, Ursynów was already producing the frequencies that would transform Warsaw’s concrete outskirts into an incubator for a distinctly local urban imagination. In the grey, hollow metropolis of late socialism, post-punk experiments, children’s futurism and proto-rap broadcasts collided inside the tower blocks. Through three critical snapshots, Filip Kalinowski uncovers the underground circuitry that turned urban alienation into the foundations of a new cultural language.

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?

On a full-moon night in Jamaica, Nyabinghi, one of the most ancient Rastafari ceremonial practices, unfolds as a living ritual in which drums, chants, and fire gather bodies into a shared field of clarity. “Tonight we a chant,” a young Rasta tells German Iraki, author of the book ‘Get Nuff Nuff Data’. “We a do the opposite of what the evil man a do. We use the moon for prosperity and to fight evil spells.” Nyabinghi uses rhythm to cleanse; it is a kind of spiritual technology, transforming communal presence into a practice of grounding, healing, and collective awareness.

Beginning with a theatre piece about a man in love with a silicone sex doll, Simon(e) van Saarloos, author of Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto (SPBH, 2025), explores attachment without reciprocity and the material conditions of care and projection. Turning to animegao kigurumi, and through a dialogue with Oshiruko Chan, a forever seventeen-year-old fictional character with large blue eyes and blonde hair, Simon(e) explores how masks and garments shape behaviour rather than express identity, positioning age as a structuring fiction and the self as an architectural phenomenon.

From the sweat-drenched chill-out rooms of early-90s Brixton to the algorithmic sprawl of contemporary ambient rave: how a music born to hold bodies through altered states became a survival grammar for the dissociative drift of digital capitalism in a world that never quite comes down.

In Chengdu, queer communities navigate tightening control and fading digital openness, reshaping where and how connection can exist in China. Public celebration recedes, nightlife moderates itself, and intimacy slips into coded networks and overlooked daytime spaces. Through Xinke Lee’s returning gaze, nightlife, public encounters, and cruising grounds reveal a fundamental reckoning: an ongoing meditation on adaptation and loss, and a community that survives through floating identities.

Dimes Square resists definition, operating as a feedback loop of images, discourse and affect. Through Honor Levy’s account, in dialogue with Nell Whittaker, it emerges as a collective rehearsal where irony hardens into structure and the internet becomes lived form, raising questions of authorship, innocence and the desire to exist as a vessel within history.

Masbate, one of the largest islands in the Philippine archipelago, revolves around cattle. Bulls, cows and pasture define its culture; ranches span the land, and labour has shaped a landscape marked by centuries of hoofprints. Lassoing, cattle wrestling and horse breaking are not just survival skills, but the basis of a singular public ritual: Southeast Asia’s largest rodeo.

At the intersection of cosplay and concealment, animegao kigurumi reveals how identity shifts through embodiment. By fully erasing the visible self, the practice creates space for behavioral freedom and altered social dynamics. Confidence, gentleness, and play emerge through the mask, showing how identity is shaped in interaction rather than anchored to personal history.

Hyperlocal presents a short film directed by Alain Parroni, an intimate story created inside the Rebibbia Penitentiary Complex.

Through digital explorations of Rome’s suburban geography and the direct experiences and words of the inmates who collaborated with Hyperlocal, the film explores how this hidden neighborhood, its inhabitants, and their lives are perceived from within its walls. It is a story about those who are unseen, living in a world with different rules.