as part of the Fabbrica Europa 2025 festival
A narrative and engaging live performance.
Automatic Popular Music is the latest album by Nicola Ratti. Here, the adjective ‘popular’ is a consequence of the other, ‘automatic,’ since the task of generating the melodic patterns and harmonic structures of the album’s tracks was entrusted to the machine.”
Within the narrative, two people are in a room. They sit with their backs to each other. One plays the piano; the other slaps their hands against their legs. They do not see each other, never make eye contact. They can only listen, look around.
Nicola Ratti is a multifaceted musician and sound designer who has been active for years in various experimental felds.
His sound production creates systems that take shape from repetition and dilation through performances, concerts or sound installations, with a particular focus on the construction of environments that gravitate in relation to the space and architecture we inhabit and by balancing the emotional and perceptual orientations to which we are accustomed.
Born in Milan in 1978, he has performed solo or in other ensembles in Europe, North America, Russia and Japan, and his albums have been released by several international labels. He has to his credit as a musician collaborative projects such as Bellows with Giuseppe Ielasi, NR/MA com Masato Egashira, What We Do When in Silence with Alessandra Novaga and Enrico Malatesta, Superpaesaggio with Enrico Malatesta and Attila Faravelli.
As a composer and sound designer, his works cross different felds starting from theater, as the main context, to cinema via performing arts, radio works and sound-art in international contexts such as theater festivals, biennials and museums.
Since years he curates and organized events that focus on the relationship between sound, space and the body.
Member and co-founder of Standards, a cultural center active in Milan between 2015 and 2022, and now of LL Edizioni, a platform for artistic and cultural productions.
photo (detail): Luca Del Pia
