November 5 · 6-9 p.m.
Theodora Extra, Zamora 85, Barcelona
Limited seats. Register to reserve your spot.
Music has become the soundtrack to everything, from scrolling and working to commuting and sleeping. What happens to listening, and to sound as an art form, when all music is background music?
Join us for an evening of conversation and live performance in Barcelona, bringing together artists, coders, musicologists, and thinkers working at the crossroads of web3, AI, creative coding, sound art, and digital media art.
Panel Discussion
All Music Is Background Music Now, drawing on the Post-Ambient Manifesto by Vlady Che. The panel explores how ambient listening, algorithmic curation, and new technologies are reshaping how we make, hear, and value sound.
Live Performances
- ϙue — quadraphonic live set, Lisbon PT, + secret guest
- Halifax Jr — hybrid live set, BCN
- Hum-Ag0g — live set, BCN
Artwork by Juan Issa
Typography by Kyiv Type Foundry
Who it's for: musicians, sound and media artists, developers, researchers, musicologists, and anyone curious about the future of listening.
Presented by
- Ninety-Fourth, an independent new media platform focused on sound and culture
- Biorhythm, a cross-sensory semiotic organisation
- Trajectory Ltd., a UK-based non-profit organisation focused on tech, culture, and human development
- Theodora Extra, a cultural association based in Barcelona
Carrer de Zamora, 85, Sant Martí, 08018 Barcelona, Spain
Exhibition Catalog
Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden
1992
Julius Eastman emerges in this interview as a composer who sees his avant-garde, boundary-pushing work not as a rupture with tradition but as a natural continuum rooted in his classical training, framing his uniqueness through a philosophy of authenticity and "naturalness" rather than deliberate innovation.
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Indonesia
A small speaker studio from Solo, Central Java. The focus sits on the cabinet as much as the sound it carries — hand-finished surfaces, artwork treated as part of the build rather than decoration added after. No grand narrative behind it, just a steady output that circulates between design and audiophile circles without trying to belong to either.
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Martin Hannett, the engineer behind Joy Division's sound, took dub's cavernous echo, spacious low-end and studio-as-instrument philosophy and reshaped it into the cold, atmospheric blueprint of post-punk.
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The engineer who built his name on Ryuichi Sakamoto sessions in the early '80s, Ono was handed an unusually open brief by Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons' Spring-Summer 1988 menswear show: make the clothes look beautiful. He answered with runway scores recorded across Tokyo, New York and Rio, pulling in Arto Lindsay, John Zorn, Bill Frisell and the downtown avant-garde to fuse jazz, bossa nova and ambient into something with no real precedent. Released as Comme Des Garçons Vol. 1 and 2, the recordings turned a fashion soundtrack into a standalone body of work - still traded today as one of the defining artifacts of '80s Japanese sound design.
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Dub didn't emerge in England — it arrived with it, carried across on Jamaican sound systems brought by the Windrush generation into cities like London, Birmingham and Bristol through the '60s and '70s. What took root wasn't imitation but continuation: British-Jamaican engineers and producers — Dennis Bovell chief among them — built on King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry's studio techniques, stripping songs down to bass and echo for a UK audience raised on both reggae and punk. By the late '70s the two scenes had fused outright, with Public Image Ltd and The Clash lifting dub's spatial logic straight into post-punk, while Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound pushed it further into noise and dub techno through the '80s — laying the groundwork for jungle and dubstep a generation later.
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Exhibition card
Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, San
1998
THE BARDO PROTOCOL:
The modern rave is a simulation. We have traded the dangerous, transformative uncertainty of the true underground for a sanitized, algorithmic feedback loop. The first raves emerged as a random glitch in the system, an atypical anomaly in abandoned industrial zones where sound became a gathering point for those who didn't fit the matrix. Today, we have arrived at the era of "choreographed catharsis": a world of predictable drops and "Business Techno" that satisfies the Ego instead of shattering it.
This is a manifesto for the return of the Functional Ritual.
I. The Architecture of Transition: Sound as the Entry Point
In the Tibetan tradition, a Bardo is an intermediate state between death and rebirth. It is a moment where the old Self has dissolved, but the new one has yet to form. We use sound as the singular entry point into this interweaving of unique experiences.
- LOW KEY (The Entry / The Void): Deep Drone and Ambient. This is the practice of Deep Listening. There is no rhythm to dictate what to feel. This is the moment of the listener's total presence, where external noise subsides, exposing the internal space. This is the Bardo of Dying - the moment you let go of the world.
- HIGH KEY (The Peak / The Dance of Thoughts): Ritualistic rhythms at 173 BPM. At this frequency, the dance of the body transcends into the dance of thoughts. The analytical mind is unable to process such density and capitulates. You are no longer dancing to the music - the music is dancing you. This is the Bardo of Reality - an encounter with the raw energy of the Self, where every sound is an unpredictable flash.
II. System Glitch: The Magic of Randomness
Why does the "pseudo-rave" fail? Because it has excluded Randomness. Algorithms seek predictability, but a true experience of rebirth is only possible through a "glitch," through an error in the program of expectations.
The Bardo Protocol is an act of algorithmic sabotage. We return to the state where the rave was an atypical situation, a challenge to the system.
III. The Ritual of Presence
This is an invitation to view the dancefloor as a spiritual exploration.
Our sets are a Ritual. We use 173 BPM as a tool to penetrate the layer of social masks. It is about the state of "here and now," where the dance of the body becomes a dynamic meditation, and the dance of thoughts becomes a path to liberation.
Best known as one half of Pan Sonic, Mika Vainio took on "Headphones" for Björk's 1996 remix album Telegram, released under his alias Ø. The original, written with then-partner Tricky, was about falling asleep to a lover's music. Vainio stripped it down to almost nothing: a slow pulse, occasional piano, a sampled didgeridoo, the vocal cut apart and reordered so it enters only halfway through.
If there were only one track allowed to stand for queerness as I understand it, this would be it. Not queerness as identity or content, but as a structure of feeling: a present haunted by intimacies that never fully arrived, or arrived and were withdrawn before they could be named. The original song is already about proximity mediated by sound, two people close only through headphones, never in the same room. Vainio's version pushes that further into absence. The voice is there but late, cut loose from its own sentence, circling a meaning it can't quite reach. It plays like a place remembered rather than a place visited. A saudade with no fixed object. The ache of a future that was promised somewhere in the original recording and then never delivered.
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Ahead of the Berlin A/V premiere of Quiet Pieces, Abul Mogard shares Quiet Pieces - Live at Norbergfestival, a live document recorded on 10 July 2026 at Norbergfestival, the experimental festival staged across a former mining landscape in Norberg, Sweden.
The recording was captured inside Mimerlaven, the festival's cavernous former mining structure — a pithead frame built in 1957 for iron ore extraction and processing, in use until operations ceased in the 1980s. The building's vast, reverberant acoustics shape the performance as much as any instrument, as Mogard reworks and reimagines material from his 2025 album in a live setting.
The recording precedes the Berlin premiere of the Quiet Pieces A/V piece, made in collaboration with visual artist Marja de Sanctis, staged as part of HALF LIGHT at silent green's Betonhalle on 23 October 2026.
HALF LIGHT
23 October 2026 - Betonhalle, silent green, Berlin
Abul Mogard & Marja de Sanctis - Quiet Pieces A/V Premiere
Rafael Anton Irisarri
Concepción Huerta
Info & tickets: tinyurl.com/2s45ppcn
[Listen]
[Listen]
2025
Nesta is a sound art radio show blending field recordings of everyday football life with ambient and drone music. The project is rooted in the philosophies of saudade (joyful sorrow for what is lost) and hauntology (the spectral presence of the past).
We celebrate football as freedom and faith across all scales: from triumphs on the backyard pitch to victories on massive arenas. The sonic fabric forges a timeless acoustic space, mixing real-life recordings with music from various eras.
The name Nesta is a tribute to Robert Nesta Marley, whose passion for football and music became a symbol of worldwide freedom.
We love music. Music is life. Life is beautiful.
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[Listen]
Karin Nakagawa, Arve Henriksen
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Taganana, Tenerife, Canarian Islands, Spain
2024
საქართველო is an Idm, experimental, drone, ambient selection from sound artist in Georgia. Broadcasted from Sphere Radio community in Leipzig, Germany. Recorded at Tenerife, Spain Dec 2024.
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[Playlist]