Magazine

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.

“Caesar Must Die” is a 2012 movie by Taviani Brothers, inspired by the Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The directors had seen the Rebibbia ensemble at work and were convinced of its cinematic potential but needed a story with universal resonance. Conspiracy, betrayal, guilt, leadership, and the corruption of power—all central themes in Shakespeare’s tragedy—echoed the actors’ own lives and the paths that had led them to prison.

The prison is a crucial passage for those who end up inside it. Fuori, the film by Mario Martone, shot in prison and based on Goliarda Sapienza’s novel The University of Rebibbia, portrays the spaces of Rebibbia as a labyrinth where fragmented space and disoriented senses contribute to “regressing you to childhood,” as Goliarda writes, and which can suddenly become a kind of home, strangely similar to the outside world.

Among gardens and walls unfolds the tragic story of Germana Stefanini, a guard executed by three self-styled revolutionaries during a so-called “proletarian trial,” whose name was later given to the Female Section of Rebibbia prison.