MARCO MALASOMMA - UMA

Marco Malasomma closes his personal journey through the dystopian world of George Orwell's “1984” with “UMA”, the conclusion of a trilogy destined to remain etched in the memory of devotees of Italian industrial electronic music. While “Jura” (2018) and “Neolingua” (2024) were fully immersed in Orwell's text, serving as a potential warning for a lost humanity, “UMA” expands its horizon, moving definitively beyond the literature that imagines future dystopias and into the dystopia that has actually materialized before our eyes. Artificial intelligence, endless wars, algorithms that dominate our lives, unmanned aircraft, drones, boundless investment in weapons, pervasive surveillance mediated by smartphones, the unchecked power of multinational corporations, truth and lies constantly intertwining and being exploited for the sole purpose of profit.

As Malasomma himself puts it: “We no longer need to imagine a Big Brother or a Newspeak: we already live inside them.” In this dystopia that is no longer imaginary but fully realized — one that might resemble Aldous Huxley's “Brave New World” more than George Orwell's “1984” — Malasomma conjures a tenth muse born of artificial intelligence, joining the nine classical muses of Greek mythology: Uma, precisely. Where each of the nine Greek muses inspired a different art form, Uma is generated by an algorithm and embodies the essence of the post-truth era, born from the thousands of voices that flood TV, social media and newspapers every day. Malasomma manipulates recordings of news broadcasts and journalistic reports, distorting them and drenching them in percussion to create martial, post-industrial rhythms, as if to depict the unsettling advance of machines and artificial intelligence.

“Euterpe”, the muse of music and lyric poetry, opens the album with the vocals of Cluster C (the project of Apulian singer Maria Di Tullio), who lends her magnificent voice as an instrument over IDM rhythms, creating a strong sense of estrangement between a crystalline voice and the austere landscape built by Malasomma. “Clio” (the muse of History) is the track that could stand as the album's manifesto. Distant horns, drums repeating obsessively, incomprehensible words hurled into chaos: history ceases to be shaped by humans and is instead processed by AI, which creates and destroys it at will, as in “1984”.
“Melpomene” (the muse of tragedy) is the longest track and sounds like a requiem (bells dictating an extremely slow tempo), moving and therefore human, gradually replaced step by step by robotic rhythms that supplant all emotion. Other tracks shift register, such as “Erato” (the muse of love and erotic poetry), enriched by Shahd Awayed's oud, once again a contrast between human emotional depth and the cold electronics generated by algorithms.

No longer a warning (unheeded), as the two previous albums of the trilogy might have been, “UMA” is the soundtrack of our present moment, music comparable to a snapshot of the transitional period between human and posthuman.

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13/07/2026