Robot Festival 17

Robot Festival reaches its seventeenth edition with the title “?Syntax Error”. The theme addresses the moment when we stop understanding the system, overwhelmed as we are by information, truths and fabrications. At DumBO I followed both nights of the event. The first thing that stands out is the variety of the lineup and the presence of live performances. This had already happened in the past, but this year that element is even stronger, especially thanks to Marina Herlop, Upsammy and Valentina Magaletti.

Also curious is the length of the sets: all between an hour and an hour and a half, whether dj set or live performance. It almost feels like a deliberate choice to make room for as many names as possible and for their stylistic differences. That's the case with Actress who, in the hottest hour, alternates futuristic techno with long ambient stasis in his live set “Radical Frame”. Every artist, in short, is not here just to make people dance to the usual setlist, but to carve out their own space and express themselves without constraints.

Day 09/10/2026

Space Afrika

They arrive from Manchester with the new “Quiet Storm” just released, bringing with them the damp nights of their city. They are Joshua Inyang and Joshua Tarelle Reid, childhood friends even before being a duo. Standard-bearers of the ambient dub scene, they lay down drones and haze that serve as a backdrop for samples drawn from the underground scene and moments of social struggle. The set thrives on echoes of voices run through a vocoder, the kind that paved the way for names like Shinetiac and Pendant. At one point one of the two Joshuas leaves the stage and steps down into the crowd, gasping. His cries are soaked in delay and reverb, just like the entire sound system, dark as a Burial without a kick drum. We're talking about anguished vocalizations, lingering on the "s" sounds, sibilant and lashed by effects.

It's from these cathartic moments that the low frequencies enter, telluric and monolithic, onto which he hurls his obsessions, shattered into fine dust by the electronics. A nocturnal poetics where lethargic mists alternate with lyrical, floating openings. Behind them, projections scroll by: an urban landscape fading like a memory into the haze, street scenes, club scenes, scenes of rebellion. Then suburbs filmed with an amateur camera and traffic accidents underscored by sampled strings. Pathos is also lent by an attentive, aware audience, clearly not there by chance.

Upsammy & Valentina Magaletti

The collaboration between Upsammy and Valentina Magaletti carries forward a sonic research with the enthusiasm of a child and the awareness of two already established careers. Theirs is a genuine concert, not a simple live set. Even drawing on material from the album, it proves far more intoxicating live than on record. Music-box tones, bright, delicate and playful, unfold over carpets of percussion shattered into granules. Samples surface that sound like chirping birds or marbles, all reiterated in pseudo-random loops. What emerges is literally a rain of jagged, synthetic fragments, over which the two move through odd time signatures and IDM progressions.

The true distinguishing trait is granular synthesis, which sketches landscapes like streams, or like a thousand sharp blades cascading to the ground. Amid these scenarios, more harmonic passages open up, though still retaining a strong edge of musique concrète and modern classical influences. Then it swerves toward broken, frenzied rhythms that, like laser bolts, dart between low and high frequencies. It's the ideal terrain for Magaletti's drum improvisations. The method is that of math rock, but filtered through the more abstract and concrete canons of intelligent dance music. Wrapped in haze, the two move with ease between resampled material and impactful layering. It's a sound that doesn't work by accumulation, but by a mind in motion. The second half is perhaps less thrilling and the set maybe a touch short, but the performance remains very good.

Blawan

After a brief intro, the industrial techno hammer blows kick in, bordering on power noise in their use of samples. The low frequencies crash down like a boulder. Now far removed from the style of his early days, Blawan's sound has been shaped after that of British Murder Boys, bent to the canons of transhumanism. The result is screeching distortion, guttural percussion, factory-floor blows and satanic vocoders filtered beneath a thick, blazing timbral carpet. The grooves are raw, and the whole pursuit aims straight for a knee to the gums. We're in the devil's forge, where post-industrial society is hammered out with ultraviolence and rusted iron.

At certain moments you can dance to it and nearly headbang, at others it feels like listening to the soundtrack for a dance of the underworld. The narrative is carried by long, alienating breaks that stretch and compress the rhythm, growing ever more frequent without ever feeling intrusive. Close to a claustrophobic, irreverent The Bug, Blawan nonetheless ends up staying too much on the surface. The flow is at times muddled, and the chaos of oversized effects gets buried under a devastating rhythm section. One wonders whether, stripped of those forays into rugged brutalism, there's anything left. The set moves between ferrous techno, satanic electro and post-human noise, but it doesn't always manage to pull a soul out of its sharp edges.

Batu

He returns to Robot seven years on, bringing Bristol bass and the spirit of his own Timedance label. First off, he puts the DumBO sound system to the test, bringing out the definition of the percussion, the solid four-on-the-floor gallops and the sub-bass built for the night's climax. In its first phase, his set is a graft of techno and UK bass: from the former it takes bpm and physicality, from the latter the sharp hits and crystalline sound. It's one run after another, combining rhythm, layering and bangers — an amalgam of obsessive textures underpinning computational and vocal mantras, in the jungle tradition.

But his set doesn't live on this alone, and that's where the sophistication of the work lies. Even when he loosens his grip, he keeps the floor suspended with dissonant arpeggios and a mounting vertigo that never finds release. Over an hour and twenty minutes, it moves from the most physical tracks to a drift across genres and speeds, with strong nods to Livity Sound and breakbeat. He channels the British urban tradition, alternating Dubstep-school wobbles, 2-step syncopation and four-to-the-floor kicks, closing with a big speed garage celebration. The build is excellent, able to keep bodies moving even through the most jaggedly broken-up sections.

Boys Noize

The evening's crescendo finds its conclusion in Boys Noize, who here offers pure club music rather than anything resembling his albums. Galloping rhythms and earthquakes, dizzying electroclash and spiraling loops mark the breaks between one onslaught and the next. The recipe includes acid techno and a furious electro that frequently distorts everything in its path, kick drum included. The cyberpunk and cyber-industrial pull is strong (see also his collaborative album with Nine Inch Nails). The artist taps into a precise imagery: a controlled violence with a martial gait, even gesturing toward gabber. Shrill frequencies pierce through the roar.

The pattern is more or less always the same: a hint of the theme, the drop, and a few dozen seconds of relentless pounding. Obsessive vocals mark the peak moments, perhaps excessive but effective. The limit lies in the tendency to keep recycling the same solutions. Listening to it for a couple of minutes certainly makes you want to dive in, but then a didactic mechanism takes over. The drop-plus-danceable-groove sequence returns almost identically with every cycle (8 bars of explosion, 16 of dancing). But that's partly the role he was asked to play, and he can't be blamed for it.

Day 10/10/2026

Marina Herlop

On stage, Herlop moves between synths, electronic percussion, a Nord keyboard and castanets. With her are a drummer and two backing vocalists, one of whom also plays synthesizer while the other plays electronic drums. It's wild, primal music that, at times, in its handling of voices, evokes Amazonian peoples. The exploration lies not so much in the electronic timbres as in the harmonies and the macrostructure of the singing — angelic and spectral, bestial and ancestral at once. The artist's versatility emerges in her Carnatic influences and in her ability to translate them into a borderless idiom. The result is a revisited fourth world, vibrant and energetic, yet one that also slips into the vocal experimentation of Meredith Monk and the suspended choirs of Morton Feldman's “Rothko Chapel”.

It's like dreaming of an archaic deity revealing an incredible truth to us in an incomprehensible language, whose meaning we nonetheless grasp. Bird-call samples surface frequently, processed digitally so that, while still recognisable, they sound synthetic. Polyrhythm intertwines with vocal manipulations. Rather than following a fixed structure, the set unfolds as a stream of spiritual consciousness, alternating long cathartic passages with raw, visceral sections of vital explosion, punctuated by piano interludes or dreamlike digressions. After every track the crowd erupts in applause, and Herlop smiles, genuinely thrilled.

Moodymann

The Detroit guru, who as a young man actually taught Stingray how to mix, steps up to the decks with the confidence of a preacher before his flock. He blends Chicago house, deep house, disco and warm, seductive soul, with an old-school mixing style. He grabs the mic to ask us if we're having a good night. No track is a mere filler: each one has a melody, a theme that stays with you from start to finish. On top of these themes he builds breaks, even abrupt ones, which precisely for that reason unexpectedly heighten the swelling euphoria of a room immersed in the groove.

The rise is exponential: it starts with old funk-rooted tracks, gradually climbing in tempo and bass. The transitions don't chase a destructive tension, but nestle in as expressions of ecstasy, following the natural growth of an ever-fuller texture that melts into singing and Black roots. Over an hour and a half he manages to drag us from Herlop's celestial choirs all the way to the most full-blooded garage house. Perhaps the peak of the festival, his is a set brimming with energy, in which he confirms himself as the undisputed king of the floor. It's a hymn to life, whose psalm he knows exactly how to channel.

Actress

The same Actress who closed out Robot back in 2014 at BolognaFiere returns with his new live show “Radical Frame”. The first thing that strikes me is the extremization of his dialectic between ambient and techno: no longer fused into a single lethargic whole, but kept separate. The second is the unusual structure. It starts above 150 beats per minute, plunges for twenty minutes into a massive ambient section, and then takes off again at full speed, like a journey through the thousand pieces of information that crush us every day. In the first phase he comes across as more cerebral than usual, almost like abstract IDM in his use of odd time signatures and polyrhythms. Then he veers towards treated vocal samples over a four-to-the-floor beat. The groove holds up even without a kick drum, over a blend of percussion, subwoofer and layered textures.

It's a work of subtraction that evokes eras still unknown to us. In the central section, almost lyrical breaks for voices alone follow one another, drones covered in hiss and whispered laments that fill the void. The mood turns distinctly dub. From this floating state a filtered kick drum re-emerges, as if arriving from another room of the club, and from that moment the bpm climb vertiginously. What follows is an alternation between futuristic soundscapes and bionic pulsations. The blend has a post-human quality, yet it retains that velvety touch typical of the English visionary.

DJ Stingray

His face hidden behind a balaclava, the legend of Drexciya behind him: Stingray arrives from the Motor City to push the rhythm beyond every speed limit. His mixing is unpredictable: sometimes he blends tracks together, sometimes he cuts them off abruptly and launches straight into new ones. Relentless, he gives no quarter, and he's able to move the floor both through impeccable track selection and through the speed of his transitions. It's a continuous jolt, whether the techno, electro or breakbeat side prevails.

A cybernetic sound, rooted in a twenty-year tradition, yet one that shuns neither modern touches nor forays into the four-to-the-floor beat. And this is perhaps his greatest skill: making people dance even where the classic four-four is missing. He favours broken rhythms and dense material, fused into a continuous earthquake. And above all he knows how to keep surprising, even as the barrages of tracks follow one another relentlessly: after a few tracks he brings back one that's even more scorching than the last. Detroit has never sounded so intense.

Mace

He has travelled through hip hop, Italian pop and long psychedelic journeys, and it falls to him to close out the night. On paper, he's a dj free from the constraints of genre and tempo. He opens with progressive house and tribal rhythms, standing out above all for a strong melodic sense. Amid arpeggios and glissandos, acid lines and drum solos, he proves his eclecticism and his vast vocabulary. Not always, however, does he manage to express it with charisma. Stylistic variety is his strength, as is his ability to alternate between distant moods, speeds and pulses.

Packing melodies, vertiginous drops and broken rhythms into the same set can be a point of pride, but it's a double-edged sword. This diversity makes things hard to manage, and some passages sound self-indulgent or ill-suited to a closing set, while others seem like the perfect choice of the night. And it's precisely that freedom, which on paper was his promise, that here turns into his limitation. That constant change of course, from the softest house to industrial elements, risks becoming a lack of direction.

By the end of the two nights, in any case, the error evoked by the theme made itself felt: in the sudden changes of register, in the unlikely juxtapositions, in a lineup that rejected the linear logic of a club night. Not all the languages spoke to each other with the same fluency, but it's precisely in the most abrupt jumps that the festival found its syntax. Now in its 17th edition, Robot confirms its vocation.

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