PRODUCTIONS
Foreste Elettriche // Radiophonies → Atlas→ Radia → Self portrait illuminated by electric light → Mnemos (coming soon) // Sleep Concert // Live Sounds → Talus → Cinema for the ears //Phonograms→ Il Mare di Dirac
ELECTRIC
FORESTS
Discover the invisible sound of your city​
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Foreste Elettriche (Electric Forests) is the sound-walking experience curated by L’Impero della Luce that allows you to listen to the city's electromagnetic soundscape and discover the secret voice of high-voltage substations, traffic lights, underground cables, street lamps, Wi-Fi networks, neon signs…
Throughout the modern era, we have scattered electrical and electronic devices everywhere that constantly and involuntarily emit a myriad of impulses, hums, crackles, and hisses. Even though we cannot hear them with the naked ear, these sounds
are continuously passing right through us.
We live in an electric forest: just as trees cannot hear the sound of their leaves rustling in the wind, human beings are also surrounded by unintentional sounds that their ears cannot perceive.
An experience inspired by Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks
The project draws inspiration from the famous Electrical Walks by Christina Kubisch, a pioneer of electromagnetic induction music. The goal is to unveil the "hidden symphony" of traffic lights, street lamps, communication networks, and anti-theft devices, making audible what is usually silent. No technical skills or prior knowledge are required to participate: curiosity and a love for listening are all you need.
The Technology: Listening to the Invisible with SOMA Laboratory's Ether
To capture the electromagnetic landscape during our sound walks, we use Ether, the anti-radio created by SOMA Laboratory, a partner of Foreste Elettriche since 2020.
Some of the organizations and festivals that have hosted us
Foreste Elettriche has already been chosen by cultural institutions, museums, and innovation festivals such as:
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Convergenze
Lago Film Fest
Lucia Festival
Memoriale Veneto della Grande Guerra
Musica in Prossimità
Pesaro Capitale della Cultura 2024
Segni New Generation Festival
Stazione di Topolò / Postaja Topolove
Trieste Science Fiction Festival
Usmaradio / Tactus Festival | Università degli Studi della Repubblica di S. Marino
RADIOPHONIES
Radio Experiments​
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Audio documentaries, sound postcards, sound collections, and festivals dedicated to radio listening, treating the radio medium as a space for immaterial and radical research.
ATLAS
ATLAS collects 7 audio tracks created by L’Impero della Luce using the electromagnetic sounds of 7 different locations: an exhibition, a factory, a World War I bunker, a tavern, two major European cities, and a center for radio research.
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The sound collection was designed to be broadcast starting October 17, 2024, exclusively via radio
streaming to raise a few questions, such as: what is the meaning of the music market today? How do we consume and experience our music? Can radio—in the new century—be the primary vehicle for broadcasting a certain type of sonic language? Or can it become that once again, ensuring the survival of experimental languages?
ATLAS has been broadcast by:
January 13, 2025
Festival Internacional Radiofónico de Arte Sonora Monteaudio (Uruguay)
December 15, 2024
Fango Radio (Italia)
November 23, 2024
Jet FM / Broken Island (Grecia)
November 20, 2024
Radio Raheem / Syntonic (Italia)
November 10, 2024
Resonance FM / Sonic Darts (UK)
November 8, 2024
Radio Kapital / Guest Space (Polonia)
November 4, 2024
Resonance FM / Sonic Darts (UK)
October 17 2024
Usmaradio (San Marino)
Find out more about the project:
Do you have a radio show and want to broadcast ATLAS?
Write to us:
Radia. Mini-festival of radio listening
From February 19 to 22, L’Impero della Luce curated a mini-festival of radio listening at the Memoriale Veneto della Grande Guerra (Veneto Memorial of the Great War) to reflect on history through contemporary and archival sound works, featuring leading figures in sound and research such as: Andrea Borgino / RaiPlay Sound, Roberto Paci Dalò / Usmaradio, Patrizio Peterlini / Fondazione Bonotto, and Club Recordo.
Listen back to the festival podcast and discover all the guests on the website: radiafestival.com.
Ph: Laura Bisceglia
Self-portrait illuminated by electric light
A sonic self-portrait created by L’Impero della Luce for Kunstradio and broadcast on June 1, 2026, during the "Blaue Stunde" show.
Some find a hidden magic in the silence of a city at night: the poetry of streetlights piercing through the fog, or their golden light cutting through the darkness.
Yet, in these landscapes, we look for something different: a silent sound, a vibration hidden within the folds of the electromagnetic panorama, invisible to the naked ear. Through sound, we will narrate
the frantic race of an electron and what truly inhabits the silence. We will guide you into the electromagnetic roar of factories and the desolate song of the sea; we will take you inside the oldest power plants and among the people observing our journey, seeking to answer an eternal question: if silence does not exist, what else can sound be?
SLEEP CONCERT
A performance for a sleeping audience
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A special concert that begins at midnight and unfolds continuously until morning, entering the borderland between sleep and wakefulness, where perceptions shift toward the inner world.
Spectators are invited to bring their own sleeping bag, pillows, mats, blankets, and anything else needed to settle in for the night.
In the morning, at the end of the concert by L’Impero della Luce, spectators can take part in "Public Dream": a group talk over breakfast to share and discuss the dreamlike and perceptive experiences that occurred during the Sleep Concert.
Following in the footsteps of Robert Rich
Even though Terry Riley had already begun this practice in 1970, it was Robert Rich who formally defined it in 1982. An ambient composer and musician, Rich was interested in investigating REM sleep stages and the possibility of influencing them through auditory stimuli. The first Sleep Concert was performed in the Stanford University dormitory where Rich was living; it started at 11 PM and continued until 8 AM, welcoming the composer's friends, colleagues, and students equipped with sleeping bags. The audience was invited to fully experience the physical sensation, the community, the scientific experiment, and the mystical ritual.
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To discover the whole story:
Some partners that had slept with us:
Sleep Concerts have already been hosted by cultural institutions, museums, and innovation festivals such as:
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April 11/12, 2026
Segni New Generations Festival (Mantova)
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March 7/8, 2026
Stazione delle Arti (Marano Vicentino, VI)
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October 28/29, 2023
Trieste Science + Fiction Festival (Trieste)
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November 5/6, 2022
Segni New Generations Festival (Mantova)
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August 15/16, 2020
Parco della Favorita (Valdagno, VI)
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July 1/2, 2020
Cartiera di Vas / (Setteville, BL)
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LIVE SOUNDS
Concerts and special projects
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L'Impero della Luce explores the sonics of electric current, amplifying and organizing in real time the inaudible sounds of electricity produced by everyday objects and urban environments.
In concert form, the musical production of L'Impero della Luce stems from the recycling of discarded technologies—old power supplies, clock radios, CD players, CRT televisions—and small everyday devices like lamps, fans, and electric toothbrushes.
For our concerts, we prefer unusual locations, such as hydroelectric power plants (Ex Centrale Pitter, May 2026) and convents (Tactus Festival, Monastery of Santa Chiara, December 2025), fortresses (San
Giusto Castle, February 2024), cemeteries (Certosa di Bologna, July 2022); dungeons of medieval palaces (Tallinn Music Week, October 2021); ancient paper mills (Vas Paper Mill, September 2020); museums (Museo del Novecento, Venice Mestre 2019; SMO, San Pietro al Natisone 2019; Museo Civico di Asolo, 2019); churches (Church of San Gregorio, L'Arsenale Festival, 2019); steam trains (John Cage's Train, Bologna-Porretta Terme, 2019)...
2023-2024 TALUS
Talus is the name given to a touring series of performances dedicated to experimentation and the anti-comfortable. Like a roll of the dice, TALUS is an act of trust performed by the artists to disrupt the comfort of familiar paths.
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With Talus, L'Impero della Luce has chosen to completely abandon the sound devices they usually use live, replacing them with unknown objects found on-site or brought in by the audience.
TALUS is a uncomfortable, wild exploration, the spontaneity of chance, hazard, uncertain fate, the fortuitous, life, events happening in places, among people and the environment. Hosted in various locations, the game of Talus draws inspiration from a 1969 quote by Pierre Schaeffer:
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"I prefer an experiment, even aborted, to a successful oeuvre."
Some partners who have played with us
February 5, 2023
USMARADIO (Rimini)
TALUS #1 – Amplified objects: gear and equipment from the Giardini Pensili studio of USMARADIO.
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March 24, 2023
Teatro Coppola (Catania)
TALUS #2 – Amplified objects: small electrical devices brought by the audience [fans, lamps, power supplies...].
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December 1, 2023
Tactus Festival (San Marino)
TALUS #3 – Amplified objects: gear and equipment from the University's Aula Magna.
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February 10, 2024
Trieste Science + Fiction Festival (Trieste)
TALUS #4 – Amplified objects: display cases and installations from the exhibition Alabarde Spaziali. 60 anni di Fantascienza a Trieste.
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August 21, 2024
Festival I Fumi della Fornace (Macerata)
TALUS #5 – Amplified objects: small electrical devices brought by the audience [fan, power bank, power supplies...].
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December 10, 2024
Festival Musica in
prossimità (Pinerolo, TO)
TALUS #6 – Amplified objects: a miscellany of household objects brought by childrens.
2026 CINEMA
FOR THE EARS
An experience of light and sound to accompany presentations of the book Altri Suoni. Storia nascosta della musica elettronica by Johann Merrich (Arcana edizioni 2025). L’Impero della Luce transforms historical research into a performative and sensory experience.
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Immersed in a flow of light and frequencies, Cinema per le Orecchie (Cinema for the Ears) is a sound and light experience designed to give voice to the electronic matter of the past. A DJ set inspired by the
tracks narrated in the book and real-time visuals will transform historical research into a performative and sensory experience, offering an original and accessible way to visualize and listen to the hidden history of contemporary sound.
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Cinema per le Orecchie is an original production by L'Impero della Luce, created as part of Radia - Minifestival di Radioascolto (MeVe, February 19-22, 2026) and produced with the support of MeVe, Veneto Memorial of the Great War.
PHONOGRAMS
Recorded music, for your consumption​
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L’Impero della Luce lives in the realm of the immaterial. We do not sell physical copies of our creations. On this page, you will find our phonograms ready for listening.
IL MARE DI DIRAC
Recorded and composed between 2019 and 2020, Il Mare di Dirac (The Dirac Sea) is our first album. We decided to dedicate it to Nikola Tesla and to all the brilliant minds of women and men who, over the past two centuries, have contributed to the building of contemporary physics.
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Divided into six movements, each section—except for the third—commemorates the discoveries made by some of our favorite physicists, such as Ettore Majorana, Richard Feynman, and Lise Meitner, led by Paul Dirac and his famous Sea.
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This choice might seem pretentious, but it actually reflects a small part of our curious attitude towards world phenomena, and our way of understanding the core ingredients of our project: sound and light.
Read the listening guide:
If you are curious about our world, if you want to host one of our Electric Forests in your city, if you are interested in our sound projects or want to build a collaboration, write to: imperodellaluce@gmail.com.
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ars sine scientia nihil est
