Lost Music Festival: a total work of art in the maze of Franco Maria Ricci

The Labyrinth of the Masone is among the largest in the world built entirely of bamboo. It is the dream of Franco Maria Ricci, publisher, designer and visionary collector, who in 1977 promised his friend Jorge Luis Borges - the writer who more than any other has made the labyrinth a literary archetype - to build the largest maze in existence in those very fields. Opened in 2015, this space is now a museum, nature park and multifaceted cultural center at once, where art is intertwined with philosophy, botany and literature.
The Lost Music Festival was created to enhance this heritage, but it does so with a language that is at once experimentation, music, sound performance, and immersive installation. The live performances are not just concerts: they are sound rituals, ephemeral installations, avant-garde performances that move between the pyramid, the museum court, the bamboo corridors and the hidden paths of the maze. Nature itself becomes a sounding board, sound merges with space and nature.

In the fascinating setting of the museum, the exhibition dedicated to artist Luigi Serafini, author of the famous Codex Seraphinianus, further expands the dreamlike dimension of the festival. Published by Ricci himself in 1981, the Codex is an imaginary encyclopedia, written in an indecipherable language, populated by hybrid creatures and impossible landscapes. The exhibition Da Serafini a Luigi: l'uovo, lo scheletro, l'arcobaleno does not simply celebrate the work that bewitched Tim Burton and Italo Calvino: it explores the artist's entire poetic universe, transforming the museum itinerary into an initiatory journey through visions, symbols, memories and perceptual traps.
This dialogue between visual and sonic art finds a powerful resonance in the Lost Music Festival. Like the Codex, the live performances are writings of impossible worlds, alternative sonic alphabets that challenge conventional logics.

Among the most interesting performances was Otay:onii, a Chinese artist and composer, who presented a poignant and visceral, at times ritualistic set of distorted voices, industrial noises and a performative use of the body as an expressive vehicle. It was a total performance, bordering between concert, installation and contemporary dance. Also of high intensity was the performance of Lyra Pramuk, who deconstructed and recomposed voice and sound as in an alchemical act. Her compositions seem to arise from deep spiritual introspection, transforming the body into an instrument of liberation and joy. The queer collective Tristwch Y Fenywod, on the other hand, brought gothic and dreamy sounds, ethereal and corporeal at the same time, evoking broken dreamlike atmospheres, while Klein worked on the concept of image and identity with a layered, ironic and powerful live performance between sonic fiction and visual self-analysis. There was no shortage of moments of pure experimentation, such as Safety Trance's set, where IDM, jungle and hardcore merged into a tribal and futuristic vortex. Or the Santarosae project presented by Hesaitix, in which sounds intertwined with the nocturnal nature of the labyrinth in a conceptual, at times abstract experience that seemed to evoke the very spirit of the place. The TakKak Takkak duo offered a hypnotic rhythmic crescendo based on deep, ancestral percussion, while Significant Other and AKA HEX contaminated the labyrinth with sounds from different traditions, creating bridges between cultures, rituals and possible futures.
Special mention also goes to DJ Special Guest, who brought hybrid sounds between rural ambient and electronic reminiscences, and the corner curated by Box of Tangerine, an oasis of listening and sound contemplation among selected vinyls and meditative spirit.

The Lost Music Festival is not just a musical event: it is an aesthetic experience, a laboratory of perception, a site-specific artwork. Every sound, every gesture, every installation seems to converse with the symbolic geometry of the labyrinth, with the nature of the bamboo that grows as a vertical thought, with the museum rooms that tell of Ricci's collecting and visionary obsession.
The labyrinth itself becomes the protagonist: a compendium of all labyrinthine forms in history, a millenary symbol that in this context becomes mental and artistic space, a place of bewilderment and rediscovery. As in Borges' stories, the labyrinth of the Lost is a mirror of the soul: those who enter it do not come out the same.

This editorial team recommends that you visit the labyrinth and take part in future editions, to lose yourself and find yourself again. To listen to the sound of the avant-garde and the future in a place that holds the art of the past. To experience a festival that is truly a transformative experience. A journey without boundaries, where contemporary art, sound and nature merge into one powerful enigma.