RIVERBERI IN RISONANZA

Fondazione Culturale San Fedele is pleased to announce the spring edition of INNER_SPACES, the festival of electronic music and audiovisual arts that continues to be a benchmark for experimentation and interdisciplinary research. Entitled Reverberations in Resonance, the season unfolds in eight events, from January 26 to May 18, 2026, at the San Fedele Auditorium and the Church of San Fedele in Milan, featuring leading figures of contemporary electronics and digital arts.

Reverberations in Resonance evokes acoustic phenomena that not only characterize sound production but also its sustain and duration—parameters widely employed in electronic music. The eight spring season events follow one another like concentric waves, exploring different modes of reverberations in resonance and configurations that transcend the electronic sphere, embracing dance, tabla, piano and amplified organ, audiovisual works, experimental jazz, and baroque ensemble in multiple forms and combinations.

The opening, on Monday, January 26, marks the first multidisciplinary performance of music and dance in the history of INNER_SPACES: French composer Jonathan Fitoussi on modular synthesizers, with his Poème Symphonique, revisits elements and resonances of Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony. His music finds a unique reverberation in the visual and corporeal element of dancer and choreographer Fanny Sage. In the first part, Viennese sound architect Robert Schwarz explores the acoustic properties of insect communication, focusing particularly on the spatio-temporal patterns generated by collective phenomena such as swarming and synchronization, resulting in a structure of sympathetic echoes and vibrations.

On February 2, Canadian composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Kara-Lis Coverdale presents From Where You Came, aiming to tune into a common vibration between earth and body through sound; considering composition as a method of inner inquiry, she transforms the emotional resonances of lived experiences into electronic signals. Meanwhile, Berlin-based sound artist Perila, in her new audiovisual work ASH, proposes a kind of ritual to enter a slowed and expanded temporality, gradually producing a sonic transformation that evolves from a material and minimal state into stabilized tonal reverberations, symbolizing a reached meditative state.

An explicit immersion in the dimension of resonance was envisioned by German composer Hans Otte in his 1984 work Das Buch der Klänge (The Book of Sounds). Each piece becomes the representation of an autonomous inner world, a contemplative journey rediscovering sound, made even more incisive by Ars Discantica, who on February 16 rework and spatialize in real time the piano’s resonances through live electronics. In sharp contrast comes the live set of the British duo Emptyset, titled Dissever, a sonic exploration with a material approach to sound, where reverberations dissolve and are absorbed into noise stratifications.

On March 2, Pavel Milyakov (Buttechno) presents an ambient audiovisual live set seeking relationships between sound, image, and space, culminating in an abstract reverberant construction. This acts as a prelude to the solo tabla performance of Pandit Sanju Sahai, one of the foremost interpreters of the Benares gharana (school) of northern India. The Maestro will select a raga suited to the San Fedele Auditorium, with a gradual rhythmic intensification through an ascent leading to the tenfold multiplication of rhythmic-melodic figures—another gateway into the subtle folds of reverberation that become ecstatic percussive vortex.

Reverberations in resonance find their fullest and most appropriate realization on March 23 in the naturally reverberant space of the Church of San Fedele with the sacred representation Miserere mei Deus. Lorenzo Ghielmi’s baroque ensemble, with soprano Monica Piccinini, perform two poignant and rarely heard works of the Lenten season: the French-style Miserere by Michel Richard Delalande and Giovanni Felice Sances’ Stabat Mater, an intense chromatic passacaglia. At the center of the program, a new work commissioned by INNER_SPACES from Canadian composer Sarah Davachi for organ and live electronics on the theme of the Miserere.

On April 13, the Brooklyn-based trio Purelink make their debut at San Fedele. Their project develops a sonic language that explores the possibility of suspending the perception of time through slowed movements. Ambient and dub textures unfold into rarefied surfaces, where reverberations expand to evoke a contemplative dimension. Producer Dasha Rush, on the other hand, leads resonance toward a more cosmic and immersive dimension: her electronic landscapes expand into space, opening scenarios oscillating between introspection and sonic exploration.

By intertwining the deep percussive sonorities of the double bass with a soft, sometimes whispered voice, Austrian artist Helene Glüxam creates a texture that penetrates the instrument’s most intimate resonances and prolongs them into an essential song. In the second part of the May 4 concert, Jim O’Rourke, Christian Fennesz, and Eiko Ishibashi open the sonic matter to an unusual collective dimension: electronics, guitar, and keyboards merge into a flow alternating density and rarefaction, where each timbre reflects and transforms into the other.

Finally, on May 18, Milanese collective Cortex Of Light develops resonance in the visual and spatial domain: sound intertwines with images and projections, generating an immersive environment where reverberations become luminous architecture. Then The Orb, pioneers of ambient electronic music, gather this tension and transform it into immersive flows, where rhythmic stratifications and samples expand into boundless soundscapes. The encounter between the two projects marks a closing that unites visual experimentation and ambient tradition, opening the concert space to an amplified perception.