The ninth edition of Electronic Parade continues at the Teatro Arsenale in Milan with the autumn events of 2025. The event, organized by MMT Creative Lab (Music Musicians Technologies), this year has as its theme New Times / All the World – Technology from globalization. After the first meetings in October, the calendar enters the second phase, where the relationship between artificial intelligence and musical creation is explored in depth.
The meeting will take place on October 25th The intelligence of the double bass… and the bassoonwith a workshop on artificial intelligence and improvisation. Within the event, the double bass player Ferdinando Romano and the bassoonist Gianmarco Canato will propose a performance that brings together acoustic instruments, electronics and machine learning. Romano, a doctoral student at the Como Conservatory, conducts part of his research at Ircam, The Institute of Acoustic/Music Research and Coordination of Paris, focusing on the role of Artificial Intelligence in improvisational processes.
On November 15th the guitarist Silvia Cignoli will present Allegory of Earth and Watera work for guitar and electronics in dialogue with the images of Salvatore Insana. The visual artist, active between photography and video, stages his poetics of visual erosion in a direct comparison with sound. The London musician Caius Williams is also expected during the evening, in collaboration with the Laboratorio Palestro collective. Williams, active in the British experimental scene, explores improvisation on double bass and electric bass, collaborating with notable artists such as Charles Bullen, Steve Noble and Daniel O’Sullivan. His most recent activity is the GRAIN exhibition at the Avalon Café in Bermondsey, dedicated to new sound practices.
On November 16th, however, he will return to the scene Ornithorhynchus Live Somewherea multimedia work by Giancarlo Schiaffini and Walter Prati, with the participation of Gianmarco Canato and Matilde Sartori. The performance takes up a project from 1985 Ornithorhynchus Live in Bauhausupdated to contemporary languages and artificial intelligence technologies. Sartori’s intervention introduces components of software and visual interaction, reflecting in the context of globalization and digital aesthetics.
«AND a multimedia work where sound, artificial imagination, human presence and memory of the past trace a path around the very meaning of the platypus – Walter Prati, artistic director of the event and former founder, tells Linkiesta Etc by MMT Creative Lab –. It is a one-of-a-kind animal that incorporates typical characteristics of very different animal species. Listing them, thinking of them all included in the life of the platypus makes you think of an invention. But it is the invention of a human species that is not a single thing, that does not have a single way of life, that encompasses very different experiences and vitalities. The platypus understands them all and harmonizes them. What does the platypus have to do with electronic music? Nothing, if it hadn’t already been bothered – forty years ago – by the authors themselves for a first reflection on the very particular life of the platypus. Then it was Ornithorhynchus live in Bauhaus and therefore the comparison with a historical period that was intolerant towards political and social commitment. Today the reflection concerns how the platypus can help us to understand our imperviousness to change and so reluctant to recognize diversity as a value».
The closure of Electronic Parade is entrusted to the Swiss-French composer and sound artist Noémi Büchi, who will perform with Live Liquefaction. His research combines electroacoustic orchestrations with layered rhythms, building soundscapes suspended between form and chaos. Büchi, active between Basel, Zurich and Paris, works across music, dance, cinema and theatre, and is one of the best-known voices of the new European generation of electronic music authors.
Along with performances, MMT Creative Lab also supports research through a doctoral scholarship at the Verdi Conservatory in Como, dedicated precisely to the study of the relationship between artificial intelligence and music. Collaboration between generations and disciplines remains the cornerstone of the event, which maintains the format of an open laboratory and collective reflection on contemporary sound. «Electronic Parade it is effectively a “parade” – explains Walter Prati –. As in all “parades”, everything that will be present on the scene is presented, in this case, electronic music. We have no distinctions of musical genre, generations of invited musicians or aesthetic categories. We bring to the public’s attention everything that is not considered “commercial”, the entire musical field that stimulates critical thinking, which seeks to awaken conscience and knowledge to address the deliberately chaotic thinking that today is widely fed to common sense».
Prati also underlines how within this “parade” of proposals, space has been reserved for two main interdisciplinary elements: on the one hand the entry of artificial intelligence into our lives and on the other the question of cultural globalization. «Artificial Intelligence as a proposal for study and experimentation outside the world of commercial production; a study that makes use of the collaboration of two musicians – Ferdinando Romano and Gianmarco Canato – who had access to an AFAM research doctorate, at the Conservatory of Como, precisely on this topic – continues Prati –. Globalization is the necessary confrontation between diversity and the awareness of the need to create a new, broader and more articulated community. A vision opposite to what is proposed today as a majority reference and harbinger of cosmic disasters».
