Biennale Musica 2025: the new projects and artists in the programme

RAFAEL TORAL - Traveling Light World premiere
A world premiere on the opening night of the Biennale Musica is Traveling Light by Rafael Toral,  a new work that deepens his study of jazz harmonies through the expressive possibilities of the guitar in dialogue with acoustic soloists. Performed alongside clarinetist José Bruno Parrinha, saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, flügelhorn player Yaw Tembe, and flutist Clara Saleiro, the piece expands the space between intimacy and vast sonic landscapes, tracing yet another path through Toral’s ever-evolving musical universe.
This piece was developed in parallel with his acclaimed 2024 album, Spectral Evolution, which marked Toral’s return to the electric guitar after years of exploration in electronic and free jazz domains. Spectral Evolution was selected by Jim O’Rourke to relaunch the Moikai label after 22 years of dormancy and has been hailed by Pitchfork as a “gorgeous ambient suite informed by drone music and vintage jazz”.
A singular figure in experimental music, Toral has worked across rock, ambient, contemporary, electronic, and free jazz, collaborating with artists such as Chris Corsano, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Christian Marclay, and Sonic Youth. From his pioneering guitar album Wave Field to the groundbreaking Space Program, where custom-built electronic instruments redefined performance, his trajectory has been one of constant reinvention.
Now returning to the guitar, Toral’s latest work Traveling Light pursues a synthesis of jazz harmonies, microtonal ambient textures, and electronic resonances, dissolving the boundaries between structure and fluidity.

ELLEN ARKBRO – new creation for three violas da gamba World premiere
For the 2025 Biennale Musica, Ellen Arkbro will present a new work commissioned by the festival for three violas da gamba, further deepening her exploration of harmonic sound and its transcendental qualities. Ellen Arkbro is a composer and musician from Stockholm working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony. Her work includes compositions for acoustic instruments and for synthetic sound, and for combinations of both, as well as installation work. She has studied with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in New York, and with Marc Sabat in Berlin. Ellen has worked with Catherine Christer Hennix and is a member of Hennix’s Kamigaku ensemble. In all of her work, Arkbro focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.
This new composition for three violas da gamba further explores Arkbro’s unique ability to blend deep harmonic resonance with contemplative stillness, inviting listeners to inhabit a shared space and time — an immersive exploration of sound and deep listening that echoes the festival’s theme of collective transformative practice.

CATHERINE CHRISTER HENNIX’S KAMIGAKU ENSEMBLE Italian premiere
Originally founded by Catherine Christer Hennix (1948-2023), the Kamigaku Ensemble reunites for a rare site-specific performance at the Venice Music Biennale to pay tribute to the late Swedish pioneer and multidisciplinary artist, and to present a reactivation of the contemplative practices and compositional principles of sustained tuning transmitted by Hennix directly to the musicians in the final phase of her life. Through Hennix’s characteristic use of high-intensity combination tone harmony, acoustically produced tones and electronic combination tones fuse harmonically and give rise to a sound with a seemingly autonomous force; a sound in which the members of the ensemble navigate the subtle movements of tone through precision-controlled tuning, at once guided by and guiding the emergent process of harmonic structuring. Growing up in a vibrantly musical context in Stockholm, Sweden, Catherine Christer Hennix spent her formative years immersed in modal music, attending concerts by John Coltrane, playing jazz drums, and learning trumpet from Idrees Sulieman. As a musician, composer and sound artist, Hennix went on to become part of the NYC downtown school of sustained harmonic sound and was closely engaged with some of its key figures such as La Monte Young and Henry Flynt. Influenced by her studies with Pandit Pran Nāth, a master of the Kirana tradition of classical Hindustani music, and the contemplative practices transmitted by him, Hennix produced a large body of sound works, including sine-wave compositions, solo works for tambura and for keyboard, as well as ensemble works performed by her own groups, all of which emphasize an understanding of harmonic sound as an expression of the divine. This special performance by the Kamigaku Ensemble will feature Susana Santos Silva and Ellen Arkbro on trumpet; Amedeo Maria Schwaller and Mattias Hållsten on shō; and Marcus Pal on electronics.

AGNESE MENGUZZATO - Undici World premiere
Agnese Menguzzato presents a new work for 8-string guitar and electronics, titled Undici. Agnese Menguzzato is an Italian composer and musician based in Berlin. With a background in violin and Renaissance lute, she has charted her musical path by drawing on historical and contemporary technologies. Menguzzato’s work merges past and current techniques to explore the sonic prospects of the present, often employing the auditory potential of the lute. Growing up amidst the Trentino Alps and the Apennines of Emilia-Romagna, she is driven towards the construction of emotive soundscapes oscillating between the tangible and the ethereal. Her live performances have steadily gained momentum, taking her across Europe to venues and festivals such as silent green Kulturquartier and Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxembourg Platz in Berlin, Norberg Festival, for Turin’s Cripta747 and Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi in Venice. Agnese is founder of the Spydergum ensemble and has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Sara Persico, Paula Ďurinová and Soho Rezanejad.

ABDULLAH MINIAWY - Peacock Dreams Italian premiere
Abdullah Miniawy presents in Venice the Italian premiere of his new musical project with the two trombonists Jules Boittin and Robinson Khoury.
The lyrical depth of the voice of the Egyptian artist merges with the bold expressive capabilities of the two trombones, allowing him to explore unprecedented sound ranges that connect Western and Eastern musical traditions while defying the conventionsof contemporary music.  Through this new trio formation, which freely combines baroque and operatic influences, Sufi and Coptic themes, and musical motifs from the Arabian Peninsula infused with the jazzy cacophony of Egyptian traffic jams, Abdullah Miniawy engages the audience in a musical experience that reveals the transcendental power of his music.
In 2023, Miniawy’s project Le Cri du Caire, a unique blend of Arabic maqam, chanting lyrics, and jazz inspired by the nights of Cairo during the Egyptian revolution won the Victoire du Jazz in the “World Music Album” category. A poet, rapper, composer, and vocalist, Abdullah Miniawy brings together diverse musical legacies with his poignant melodies, rich in influences, where mystical accents meet an overwhelming yearning for freedom and justice. His expansive cultural horizons are reflected in the numerous institutions and festivals that have invited him: from the Avignon Festival to the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, from Haus der Kunst in Munich to the Louvre, to the Philharmonie de Paris and the Museum of Oriental Art in Turin.
As a musician and singer, he has collaborated with Erik Truffaz, Zuli, Kamilya Jubran, and many others. As a composer, he has written soundtracks for artists such as Wael Shawki and his Cabaret Crusades III (at MoMA PS1 in New York). As a writer, his verses have resonated throughout the Middle East, igniting the Arab Spring, from which came his first publication, Extinguishing the City of Lights. As an actor, he has worked with Ala Eddine Slim, the award-winning Tunisian director whose films have been featured in major festivals, from Cannes to Venice.

FUJIIIIIIIIIIIITA - Resonant Vessel World premiere
This world premiere, conceived specifically for Biennale Musica 2025, is a site-specific work that investigates the generative power of sound and water. Through the interaction of water, air, and resonance, the piece aspires to access an unknown sonic dimension, where sound is not merely perceived but inhabited.
Japanese sound artist FUJIIIIIIIIIIIITA has long researched the relationship between acoustic phenomena and organic matter. Known for his unique approach to the pipe organ—an instrument he has radically reimagined by designing a custom-built, manually operated version with limited registers—his work develops around into the elemental nature of sound. While his early explorations prominently featured hydrophones and the resonance of water, his recent practice has shifted toward the raw materiality of air as a sonic force.
Originally conceived for the amplification and diffusion of sound in the architectural space of churches - between complex harmonies and continuous polyphonic textures - the pipe organ has today become a point of contact between past and present experimentation. Kali Malone, Ellen Arkbro, and Yosuke Fujita are among the artists who, in various ways, individually and in collaboration, have devoted themselves to this research. In total identification with his instrument, the Japanese sound artist Yosuke Fujita - known as FUJIIIIIIIIIIIITA, a name as long as eleven organ pipes - has spent a decade of experimentation constructing his own personal organ. With a manually operated bellows and no keyboard, his instrument embodies a strange collision between mechanical sounds and the fluidity of sound waves.
For this new creation, FUJIIIIIIIIIIIITA, whose work is deeply influenced by the cultural traditions of gagaku music and kabuki theater, returns to water. Embracing Venice's rich aquatic identity, the performance becomes a fluid dialogue between his pipe organ and a series of water vessels, where the interplay of liquid and air shapes a continuously shifting sonic landscape. The Teatro alle Tese, in the Arsenale, a former shipyard steeped in history, becomes the resonance chamber for this experiment, transforming into a vessel navigating the fluid interplay between the earthly and the cosmic. The work envisions the concert space as a liminal zone, a kind of spacecraft in which sound becomes a mode of travel. Water serves as both medium and resonator, amplifying frequencies that transcend human perception.

NKISI – new creation World premiere
Musician and artist Nkisi (aka Melika Ngombe Kolongo) presents the world premiere of the latest strand of her ethnographic sound archaeology as part of the opening concert of the Biennale. The new work is based on her investigations into sound and video archives collecting paranormal phenomena - is the latest iteration of her ongoing research interest in tracing the energetic and cosmological dimensions of sound. Nkisi’s practice channels percussive strategies from central and west African musical traditions into confrontations with rave, noise, and industrial sound forms. These hybrid structures become tools for exploring historical memory and collective ritualistic practices connected to sound and trance states.
In her multidisciplinary practice, the Congolese-Belgian artist intertwines her music with ancestral knowledge, tracing its cultural history and ethnographic roots. Nkisi’s work has been presented at major international institutions, including Tate Modern, Münich’s Haus der Kunst and the Centre Pompidou.

ECCO2K – closing night performance/DJ set site specific
For the closing night of the festival, Ecco2k presents in Venice an extended and immersive set that question the relationship between performance and DJ set, specially conceived for the Biennale Musica.
A versatile artist based in Stockholm, Ecco2k is the co-founder, along with Bladee and Thaiboy Digital, of Drain Gang, a collective that has gained cult status and amassed a large following in recent years. Ecco2k creates works that span music, cinema, and fashion design, contributing to various creative fields with his multidisciplinary artistic vision.
His debut album, E (2019), marked a stylistic evolution from his previous hip-hop productions, embracing a more expressive and experimental contemporary pop, blending elements of rap, electronics, and glitch music. In 2022, he collaborated with Bladee on the album Crest, recorded in the Swedish countryside, which further solidified their creative synergy and expanded the boundaries of their musical style. The Fader ranked Crest 22nd in its list of the best albums of 2022, while Pitchfork included it in their roundup of the best progressive pop music of the year.

ALEKSI PERÄLÄ – new creation
Music as meditation: this is how Finnish artist Aleksi Perälä experiences his art, a true calling (“It’s my part to play in the universe,” he has stated). Over the past decade, he has become a point of reference in the innovation of electronic production. Starting with hardware synthesizers, which he gradually replaced, Perälä has found in the laptop his preferred instrument, creating a personal and ever-expanding sonic galaxy. Using sine waves modulated according to the microtonal tuning of the Colundi scale, developed in collaboration with Grant Wilson Claridge, co-founder of Reflex Records together with Aphex Twin, the Colundi sequence stands out for its alien dimension, light-years away from the tradition of Western tonal music. Rather than focusing on pitch, the scale centers on the effects these frequencies can have on the human body, leading the listener into a unique sonic experience.
Immersed in the northern latitudes, among waters and forests, Perälä creates sounds that originate from the digital realm but are inspired by natural instruments and elements - ice, wood, stone, metal - which he samples, programs, and reworks in what he defines as a “collaboration with Colundi”. His music presents itself as “a sonic layering where esoteric frequencies resonate as though shaped by the human body in interaction with the natural world and astral phenomena”, as F. Hudson has written. The author of entire album cycles conceived as a series around individual evocative and symbolic themes (Sunshine, Moonlight, Starlight), Perälä sees music as a flow, a current, a river to connect with.
In Venice, Perälä will present a site-specific quadraphonic musical performance at the Teatro alle Tese, in collaboration with Melissa Briand-Speirs. In this work, the mythology and sonic alchemy tied to the use of Colundi invite the audience to reflect on the connection between sound frequencies, human perception, and the surrounding universe.

BENDIK GISKE - Into the Blue World premiere
Bendik Giske is a Norwegian musician and performance artist renowned for his transcendental approach to the saxophone, using minimalist compositions to evoke vulnerability, transformation, and the complexities of human emotion.  At the opening night of the festival, he will present in Venice the world premiere of his new work Into the Blue. This new work is an exploration of the space between the beats, the spaciousness between the notes, and the textures that arise as breath, voice, and body meet reed and metal.
Inspired by Derek Jarman’s intense observations on the spectrum of color in Chroma: A Book of Color, Giske reflects on the role of observation as a subversive act. In Into the Blue, Giske explores and observes new techniques and sensibilities for his instrument and performance. Drawing from the works of Carolee Schneemann and Trisha Brown, he delves into the capacity of the human body for observation, reflection, and storytelling.
Born in Oslo in 1982, Giske developed a passion for music at an early age, drawing inspiration from jazz, electronic music, and traditional Scandinavian sounds. His experimental and genre-defying career is defined by a deep engagement with the physical and sonic potential of his instrument. Giske is best known for his mastery of circular breathing, a technique that allows him to play continuous, uninterrupted notes. This technique not only challenges the physical limits of the musician but also creates an immersive auditory experience that dissolves the boundaries between music and meditation. His performances, which incorporate elements of dance and performance art, transform the saxophone into an extension of the body, making the act of playing as much visual and physical as it is sonic.

MABE FRATTI – site specific
Renowned for her innovative fusion of classical training and experimental soundscapes, visionary Guatemalan cellist and vocalist Mabe Fratti presents a site-specific performance in collaboration with Venezuelan artist I. la Católica and Mexican drummer Gibrán Andrade. This trio will embark on a continuous hour-long dialogue, weaving together tracks from Fratti’s extensive catalogue with interludes and improvisations. The performance promises to unveil rare and previously unperformed pieces, offering a unique auditory journey that blurs the lines between jazz, folk, avant rock and chamber pop. Born in Guatemala in 1992, Mabe Fratti’s musical journey commenced at the tender age of eight with the cello, an instrument that has since become an extension of her very being. Her upbringing within a Pentecostal church introduced her to improvisation, as she intertwined her cello’s resonant tones with the congregation’s spiritual fervor. This early experience laid the foundation for her unique approach to music, where structured compositions meld seamlessly with spontaneous creation.
In 2015, a residency at the Goethe-Institut brought Fratti to Mexico City, a move that catalyzed her immersion into the avant-garde music scene. Collaborations with artists such as Gudrun Gut and Julian Bonequi expanded her sonic palette, leading to the release oSerum 2f of her debut album, Pies Sobre la Tierra, in 2019. This work showcased her ability to loop and layer cello lines and vocals, creating expansive and emotive soundscapes that transport listeners to otherworldly realms. Fratti’s subsequent albums, including Será que ahora podremos entendernos (2021) and Se Ve Desde Aquí (2022), further established her as a formidable force in experimental music in service of rich, multi-layered works that centre around her striking voice.

LAURIE SPIEGEL The Expanding Universe European premiere
Biennale Musica presents the European premiere of The Expanding Universe, the seminal piece by Laurie Spiegel that explores the relationship between sound and cosmogony, reinterpreted by the Dither Quartet, the electric guitar quartet from New York, known for the versatility with which it interprets experimental repertories that range from composed music to improvisation to electronics.
The Festival thus pays tribute to one of the most influential figures in electronic music, casting new light on a work that continues to reveal its visionary power, inviting us to reflect upon music as a form of knowledge and imagination, a map to navigate the. Mystery of time and matter.
A composer, programmer and pioneer of electronic music, Laurie Spiegel has developed a language of sound that merges mathematics and human sensibility, technology and intuition. Her work, profoundly influenced by cybernetics, by her guitar and ancient lute studies, by folk modal music and African and Indian polyrhythms, considers sound as a living organism that is constantly expanding.
Conceived between 1974 and 1977 at the Bell Laboratories, The Expanding Universe arises from a dialogue between the author and the Groove system, an innovative sound synthesis software. Her sonic experimentation is situated with an aesthetic that refutes determinism and embraces generativity as the fundamental principle of musical creation. The track Kepler’s Harmony of the Worlds was included in the Golden Record that was launched on board the Voyager probe, bearing witness to Spiegel’s ambition to connect music to the vastness of the universe. In addition to her pioneering work with sonic synthesis systems, in 1986 Spiegel developed the Music Mouse – An Intelligent Instrument, a musical composition software for MacIntosh, Amiga and Atari. This programme, which contained an integrated knowledge of the harmonic conventions and scales, automated the processes of composition, allowing the user to concentrate on other aspects of the music in real time.

CHUQUIMAMANI-CONDORI – opening event World premiere
A musical procession on the Venice waterways will be the opening event of the Festival, to celebrate and restore the value of sound as a collective ritual.
The multidisciplinary artist and musician Chuquimamani-Condori, also known as Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, will present a project commissioned by Biennale Musica in which they will make the “water ceremonies” of the past and the present resound. A musical procession of small boats will glide down the canals of Venice and culminate in a live concert by Los Thuthanaka, the duo of Chuquimamani-Condori and their brother Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, in front of the basin of the Gaggiandre at the Arsenale.
Resonating with the words of the Aymaran Pakajaqi artist who recently described their experimental album DJ E as “the sound of our water ceremonies, the 40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the scream of our star, Chuqi Chinchay”, this is one of the special projects of Biennale Musica to connect with the social fabric of the city, starting with the local sonic culture of the lagoon and projecting it into a context of reimagination and syncretism.
Like a living organism, the musical composition will come to life through the choreographed movement of the boats, building a constellation in which Chuquimamani-Condori’s sounds are woven in an abrasive symbiosis between the ancient and the contemporary that redefines the themes of connection, love, & devotion.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - Garden of Brokeness World premiere
Another commission by Biennale Musica that engages with the presence of water is the new monumental work by the avant-garde American composer William Basinski, who reimagines the tape loops of Garden of Brokeness for a number of grand pianos, percussions, and vaporetto motors which premieres in Venice. The sonic architect of melancholy and the ephemeral through the stratified use of tape loops, as in the now iconic series Disintegration Loops, presented at the 2008 Biennale Musica and the object of various orchestral transcriptions, Basinski develops this new work as a multidimensional meditation on time, memory and the continued resonance of the past in the present.

GRAINDELAVOIX – Epitaphs of Afterwardness
The vocal ensemble led by Björn Schmelzer, who founded it in 1999 in Antwerp, with Epitaphs of Afterwardness brings its transformative approach to ancient music to the Festival, weaving together historical performance and contemporary sonic experimentation. Renowned for their raw, expressive sound and deep engagement with the intimate materiality of the voice, Graindelavoix reanimates ancient repertories, treating them as living evolving entities rather than as static historical artefacts. For Biennale Musica they will present a programme in which the Messe de Notre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut, an absolute masterpiece of Medieval religious polyphonic music, dialogues with the great revolutionaries of the twentieth century – György Kurtág, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis – in a dialectical resonance between different musical eras. This special program will be presented with the addition of pianist Jan Michiels.

ENRICO MALATESTA – Jack Ullmann’s World premiere
A unique voice in contemporary percussion, Enrico Malatesta explores the physical nature of sound through an approach that is both minimal and radical at the same time. His performances reveal the hidden resonances of simple materials – leather, wood, metal – transforming percussive gestures into intricate sonic microscopies, which explore the relationships between music, space and movement with particular attention to modes of listening. In Venice, the artist will present the world premiere of the composition Solo VI by the German composer and organist Jakob Ullmann for percussion and audio reproduction devices. Ullman’s music explores the margins of perception, working with threshold volumes and durations that extend beyond the classical format of a concert, inviting the listener to listen carefully at the interstice between silence and the vibrational response of sound.
At Biennale Musica Malatesta will also perform Occam Océan – Occam XXVI (2018) by the French pioneer of electronic and drone music Éliane Radigue. This composition, which is part of the acoustic cycle for solo instrumentalists Occam Océan, was written by Radigue especially for Enrico Malatesta and is the result of a close collaboration with the Italian percussionist.

ACTRESS E SUZANNE CIANI – Concrète Waves Italian premiere
Actress and Suzanne Ciani come together at Biennale Musica in an iconic transgenerational musical meeting to present the Italian premiere of their new musical collaboration, Concrète Waves. Though the respective practices of Actress and Suzanne Ciani arise from two distinct generations and artistic backgrounds, both artists share an unrelenting drive to experiment with expressive languages with a richness and singularity that eludes classification in any style category. Their new collaboration merges the organic fluidity of Ciani’s Buchla expressions with the rhythmic eclecticism of Actress’ so-called “R&B Concrète”.
A master of surrealist sound collages, starting with his revolutionary 2010 album Splazsh, Actress is a relentless innovator of the languages of dance music, and has received invitations from the major cultural institutions such as the Tate Modern, British Arts Council and London Contemporary Orchestra.
An absolute pioneer of electronic music, the American composer and pianist, the “Diva of the Diode”, Suzanne Ciani is known for her iconic works with the legendary Buchla synthesizer and her success as a sound designer in the American television industry, which have spanned her fifty-year career and brought her five nominations for a Grammy award.

MORITZ VON OSWALD - Silencio Italian premiere
One of the most venerated architects of electronic and experimental music, Moritz von Oswald presents the Italian premiere of his composition Silencio. This project, a collaboration with a 16-voice choir, delves into the nuanced interaction between the human voice and analogical synthesis. Silencio challenges and expands the boundaries of electronic music and the traditions of choral music, intertwining the organic with the electronic in masterful ways.
Considered the trailblazer of the Detroit-Chicago-Berlin axis with the foundation of the legendary German label Basic Channel in the 1990s, the classical percussionist, composer, multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer Moritz Von Oswald has had a decisive influence on the development of experimental electronic music for his minimal techno with overtones of dub and reggae as well as for the versatility of his production, which embraces a wide range of musical influences. One example in this sense is his electronic reinterpretation of pieces by Ravel and Mussorgsky in Re-Composed, an album recorded with Carl Craig for Deutsche Grammophon, the prestigious classical music label.

CHRISTIAN FENNESZ – Venice World premiere of the new publication
A pioneering figure in glitch music, Christian Fennesz will present an expanded version conceived especially for Biennale Musica of his seminal work Venice, an absolute manifesto with the unmistakable signature sound of the Viennese guitarist and electronic musician.
Originally recorded in the lagoon city in 2004, Venice was recently reissued by Touch Music in an expanded version to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of this masterpiece of sonic and emotive abstraction, in which an acoustic and an electric guitar, synthesizers, samplers and field recordings gathered in Venice coexist in a sublime tension between beauty and decadence. In the words of the artist, Venice is “a suggestive description of a dignified decline, decay, death, and rebirth”, a perfect encapsulation of the changing and ephemeral nature of the city on water, of which Transit, the album track on which he collaborated with David Sylvian, seems to be the expression with the greatest emotional intensity. An artist whose sound is difficult to classify, Fennesz stands at the origin of the glitch influence, the conceptual form of electronic music that considers error and dysfunctionality as a way to sound out the hidden side of music, before evolving towards more dilated forms of pop, ambient and noise, of which Venice is a particularly emblematic sonic poem. The breadth of his research has led to collaborations with many leading musicians, from David Sylvian to Ryuichi Sakamoto, leading to the Sala Santa Cecilia Ep, to Mika Vainio and Christian Zànesi, artistic director of the GRM in Paris, which led to the modern digital vision of concrete music by the GRM Experience.

DEFORREST BROWN JR. - Speaker Music Italian premiere
A theorist, musician and cultural critic, DeForrest Brown Jr. presents the Italian premiere of the electronic project Speaker Music, a pulsating and high-velocity exploration of rhythm, improvisation and sonic futurism that channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of techno-vernacular expression. Rooted in the traditions of black music, Brown takes on live performance as a self-perpetuating organic system, in which polyrhythmic structures, processed samples of brass and sharp synths are stratified in an experimental territory between techno, free jazz and computer music.
In his book Assembling a Black Counter Culture (2022), DeForrest Brown Jr. has become the absolute reference point for international critical theory on the Afro-American roots of techno, which reinterprets this musical tradition as a cultural product originating in Detroit and a vernacular expression specific to the black community.
With the multidisciplinary nature of his practice, DeForrest Brown Jr. traces parallels between Afro-Futurist experimentalism, techno and other Black-rooted electronic music innovation, connecting his research to the themes of diaspora, generational trauma and speculative futurism, where the music is viewed as a means through which to imagine possible new futures.

CARL CRAIG – Dj set
A key figure of the second-wave techno wave in Detroit, where he was born and raised and still lives today, Carl Craig brings his visionary sound to the festival with a DJ set that embodies the city’s rich legacy of Afrofuturism and sonic innovation. One of the leading architects of the diffusion and development of techno music across the globe, with foundational albums such as Landcruising (1995) and More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art (1997), Craig was able to continuously rewrite the codes of this music, combining the mechanical impetus of technology with the organic fluidity of jazz improvisation. His sets are a journey through the many possibilities of techno in dialogue with a cosmological perspective of sound always projected towards the future, bearing witness to the musical and cultural power of gender.
His label Planet E Communications, inspired both by the electronic tradition of Detroit and his interstellar vision of Afrofuturism, has developed an avant-garde aesthetic that draws on rhythmic impulses, sidereal harmonies and stratifications of futuristic synth, constructing journeys through sound in which the dance floor becomes a place of perceptive expansion.

FONTANAMIX ENSEMBLE – World premiere of the new ensemble version of Le sensibilità delle tenebre by Vahid Hosseini
The FontanaMIX Ensemble proposes a repertory that brings into dialogue two figures who come from different historical and geographical contexts but share a focused research into the metaphysical nature of the cosmic dimension of sound: Giacinto Scelsi, the visionary Italian composer who celebrates the 125^th anniversary of his birth this year and Vahid Hosseini, a composer born in Tehran in 1984, whose training embraces both Persian music and western experimentations. The ensemble will present Pranam, Mantra and Quartet No. 3 by Scelsi,, while Hosseini’s compositions Mur (a mourning song from the Zagros region) and the premiere of a new ensemble version of Le sensibilità delle tenebre will be presented.
Two authors, both of whom have been explored by the contemporary ensemble from Bologna, and who are widely separated in terms of history and generation, but whose paradox of exploring sound by bringing together distant worlds becomes the stimulus for them both for a profound meditation on the meaning of music and deep listening.
Scelsi, fascinated by the East and its esotericism, has profoundly influenced the French musicians known as “Spectralists”. Through his radical investigations into timbre that anticipate the minimalist aesthetic and drone, he has opened new avenues for listening in which music is experienced as an art that can hone perception and a new path to an understanding of the universe.
Hosseini, aligned with this thinking, brings his own experience as a composer trained in Iran, Italy, Finland and Germany. His composition explores the intersections between Persian music and the European avant-garde, placing sound at the centre of a reflection that involves the perceptive dimension of listening.
This musical journey weaves together East and West, past and present, exploring sound not only as a physical and acoustic phenomenon, but as a vehicle for a cognitive and transformative experience that interrogates our relationship with time, space and sonic material.

MAXIME DENUC – Elevations Italian premiere
Born in France and based in Brussels, Maxime Denuc fuses the expressive richness and emotional power of the church organ with a contemporary electronic music sensibility, suspended between the euphoria of trance and techno music and the geometries of Baroque polyphonic music, in a synthesis that is poetically expressed in his latest album Nachtorn for midi-controlled organ.
At Biennale Musica, Maxime Denuc will present the Italian premiere of Elevations, an installation that incorporates the inspiration of the dub techno aesthetic into the fragile ephemeral sound of an organ controlled by computer via midi specifically created by the artist with Belgian organ-maker Tony Decap. Featuring elements of harmonic repetition, cyclicity and subtle variations of the motifs typical of dub techno, Elevations draws inspiration from the melancholic post-rave atmosphere that lingers at the end of a party, when bodies relax and night transitions into day. Scheduled throughout the duration of the Festival, Elevations captures this moment of emotional and perceptive liminality, in an immersive sound and light installation that explores concepts of fluid time, caducity and altered states of perception.

SUNN O))) –
Sunn O))) are the cult drone metal duo whose monolithic sound conjures a sense of the transcendent and transformative power of distortion, resonance and volume. Working together for over two decades, the duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson has redefined the possibilities of heavy music, dissolving the boundaries between metal, ambient, and experimental composition. Their performance, which is also a kind of immersive ritual, arrives in Venice for the first time as part of the Biennale Musica 2025.

BIENNALE COLLEGE
This is the programme that La Biennale di Venezia, and all its Departments, promotes to support young artists, selected through international calls, for theoretical-practical residencies the aim of which is to create original works engaging with mentors and teams of experts. In alignment with the theme of the Festival, which explores the idea of music as a form of cosmogony, the call for Biennale College Musica 2025 aims to select 5 musical projects – live performances or acousmatic compositions diffused through multiple channels.
The focus of the call is on the possibilities offered by electronic and electroacoustic music to expand the potential of acoustic instrumentation and develop independent compositional and performative instruments to build complex musical universes that explore the generative nature of music.
The programme of residency, research, creation and production that will take place in Venice across three sessions to be held from May to October, using the spaces of Arsenale and in particular the CIMM studios (Centro di Informatica Musicale e Multimediale of La Biennale di Venezia) will have as its final outcome the premiere of 5 original works by the selected musicians at the 69^th International Festival of Contemporary Music.
The mentors selected for the College, who come from different fields of artistic and theoretical research in contemporary music (from the field of academic research to performance practice, from audiovisual multimedia research to club culture, from electroacoustic music to sound design), will include: Ellen Arkbro, DeForrest Brown Jr., Chuquimamani-Condori, Thierry Coduys, Lorenzo Senni, Marcel Weber (MFO).