15 years young, the Italian music festival celebrates its anniversary by centring on Transition — Gender, Digital, Green. ROBOT Festival 2024 welcomes the important futuristic folk musician Lyra Pramuk to spearhead the concept by writing the edition manifesto and debuting her new show in Bologna. The growing presence of traditional music mined for contemporary experimentation takes “retro to its logical conclusion” as foretold by the comedy TV series The Might Boosh. Yet retro only in its references, this festival is a boundary-pushing step towards the future.
Lyra Pramuk’s ROBOT manifesto speaks to the universality of experiencing transition, whether that’s from night to day or inhale to exhale, underlining a natural and human reality in the theme. She astutely points out “What is human civilization if not a transition?”. Also on the line-up, someone who can speak to a long-spanning transition in electronic music is Richie Hawtin, who started out in the Detroit techno scene in the early 1990s, before the shift to streaming and advent of the iPod. Hawtin even has a compilation named Transitions. A DJ set by aya is also sure to be very exciting, as an artist who deals in timeless disorientation and euphoria in the club, that has an edge of the dystopian. Her latest EP Lip Flip was released to fund her facial feminisation surgery, explicitly centring on her experience as a trans woman. These artists cover Gender and Digital transition, whereas the Green element seems to be looked after by the festival’s efforts to reduce waste with compostable and reuseable cutlery along with a sustainable mobility initiative.
ROBOT Festival is best known for highlighting prestigious artists, having platformed Ryūichi Sakamoto, Caterina Barbieri, Holly Herndon, James Blake and Floating Points since their inception in 2008. Both rising and established legends feature on the line-up for the 2024 festival. We can’t wait for Evissimax and Modeselektor, along with dmstfctn + Evita Manji. Dmstfctn + Evita will present their collaborative audiovisual project. On the topic of the visual, this year the festival includes an art installation created by Anonima/Luci and Heith, titled TRANSITION. The piece employs light to interrogate space, as light is something that lacks its own material structure or mass, emphasis is placed on movement, the dynamic and intangible, as well as the accompanying music. ROBOT will see the Northern Italian city of Bologna soon become aglow with unmissable creative encounters and we’re counting down the days.
