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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“Camera Oscura” was a photographic project by Tano D’Amico occurred in Rebibbia. One of the few that let the detainee shoot their own photos. It was a way to overturn photography’s usual role from an instrument of control and transform it into a space of shared freedom, and above all, a way to bridge, or at least narrow, the distance from the outside. As some participants wrote years later: “Since we do not wish anyone to have to come and visit us here, we prefer to reach you ourselves through our images.”

How does a wedding happen in prison? Isabella De Silvestro tells the story of Tiziana, a woman who attended two weddings, one as a guest and the other as the bride, during the 1980s, when they were all political prisoners in Rebibbia.

In early ’90s Rebibbia, three lives crossed: Princesa (Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque), a trans woman from Brazil; Giovanni, a Sardinian lifer; and Maurizio, ex-Brigate Rosse. Their secret letters became the novel Princesa, an act of liberation that lingers on her experiences of desire, sex, and self, while suggesting a historical passing from political struggle to identity struggle.

In the early 1990s, as Poland emerged from Soviet influence and rebuilt after the fall of communism, a new subculture began to take shape in the urban blocks of working-class neighbourhoods. Known as blokersi or “kids from the block,” these youth, often from economically marginalised families, embraced hip-hop culture as a means to express their post-communist identity. They used graffiti, skateboarding, and rap music to critique the disillusionment of the era, with southern Warsaw districts like Mokotów and Ursynów becoming the epicentres of this cultural movement. It was here that Polish hip-hop was born, giving rise to influential crews like ZIP Skład, Molesta, and Hemp Gru, marking the start of a unique social and musical revolution in the country.

Bandung’s underground music scene isn’t just about the music—it’s a living, breathing culture built on community, resistance, and shared memory. The ritual of nongkrong is its lifeblood, a sacred space where history is passed down, alliances are forged, and creativity thrives against all odds.

Libertad Fest is an annual punk music festival organised by the Bandung-based Pyrate Punx collective, coming to life every year through the assemblage of itinerant locations and various other collectives from around and outside the Indonesian archipelago.

Réak is a trance ritual which originated in Bandung, a subregional variant of horse trance dances, a group of pan-Indonesian performances known under various names such as jaranan and jathilan.

Dembow is a diasporic process that merges the foreign with the familiar, inventing shared dance grounds: an ever-changing rhythmic mantra that re-routes, re-roots, and fruits worldwide among the Dominican communities.

Exploring the Dominican sound system culture, known as “kitipó” or “chipeo,” and tracing its journey throughout the diaspora—from its roots in the island’s musicology to its rebirth across the diaspora, including Italy, ultimately transforming culture.

Exploring the scene’s eclectic aesthetic evolution: from Lagos’s cult horror films and the social critique of Yung Nollywood to gaming visual culture and world-building through Cruel Santino’s Subaru Boys project—and beyond.