Electronic music and sound art are approached here as situated practices,
grounded in specific conditions, irreducible to forms or genres. This project
explores what makes them possible: tools, gestures, ways of working, but also spaces,
scenes, social and political contexts. It documents and archives their processes.
At a time when music circulates endlessly, often detached from the conditions
of its existence, it proposes to slow down and look more closely. Not as an abstract
stream, but as something happening here and now, for someone, in a specific context.
What is at stake is also our relation to time, technologies, modes of attention,
social tensions, and forms of collective organization. Electronic and sonic practices
appear as ways of working with — or against — these conditions.
The project follows the processes: how things are made, circulate, transmitted,
and replayed. Above all, it observes how these practices, through bodies, machines,
and spaces, continue to transform — leaving a critical and living trace
of their histories and stakes.
grounded in specific conditions, irreducible to forms or genres. This project
explores what makes them possible: tools, gestures, ways of working, but also spaces,
scenes, social and political contexts. It documents and archives their processes.
At a time when music circulates endlessly, often detached from the conditions
of its existence, it proposes to slow down and look more closely. Not as an abstract
stream, but as something happening here and now, for someone, in a specific context.
What is at stake is also our relation to time, technologies, modes of attention,
social tensions, and forms of collective organization. Electronic and sonic practices
appear as ways of working with — or against — these conditions.
The project follows the processes: how things are made, circulate, transmitted,
and replayed. Above all, it observes how these practices, through bodies, machines,
and spaces, continue to transform — leaving a critical and living trace
of their histories and stakes.
WHAT THE CITY MAKES US HEAR
SONIC CONTROL, acoustic exclusion and architecture through SOUND
There is an idea that recurs frequently in soundscape studies: to control sound is to control space. In the context of the contemporary city, this has probably never been more accurate and, at the same time, more overlooked. Because today's city is traversed by intentional sounds. Not merely by noise, which dates back at least to the industrialisation of cities.
These are sounds that are designed, placed and calibrated to act without being truly perceived — and therein lies all the difference. A car horn tells you something. The music playing in a train station corridor, the high-pitched frequency emitted by a box bolted to a park railing — these sounds tell you nothing; they produce something, directly, bypassing language and consciousness. In this sense, we are dealing with an entirely distinct category of intervention upon bodies.
Classical music in train stations, or the art of making people feel they don't belong
One of the most telling examples of sonic control remains to this day the music broadcast in transitional spaces, thoroughfares and commercial areas. Now perfectly integrated into the habits of everyday life, their inconspicuous appearance makes them a formidably effective tool — precisely because they cloak themselves in the appearance of a benevolence that is, in fact, deceptive.
Classical music played in public spaces has a precise history: the Tyne and Wear Metro introduced it as early as 1997 as a deterrent against so-called antisocial behaviour. A spokesperson explained, without embarrassment, that the measure was introduced not in response to any actual criminal acts, but because young people were deemed likely to engage in suspicious behaviour. Transport for London extended the programme to more than 65 stations from 2003 onwards.
In this context, classical music functions not simply because it is assumed to be unpleasant to those one wishes to drive away, but because it operates as a territorial marker, signalling to whom the space belongs and which type of body is welcome within it. As Lily E. Hirsch analysed in Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment, and as work such as Marie Thompson's on the weaponised use of classical music demonstrates, this is not a matter of musical taste but of cultural capital — what Anglophone sociology has termed sonic exclusion.
The Los Angeles Metro deployed Beethoven at the Westlake/MacArthur Park station in 2023 and, in a more trivial example, in 2019 West Palm Beach near Miami played Baby Shark on a loop at night to drive homeless people away from beaches and luxury pavilions. In every configuration, the logic is identical: not to formally prohibit access to spaces, but to render the space unbearable for certain bodies. The problem is not addressed at its source — it is merely displaced.
The Mosquito, or discrimination at a fixed frequency
The Mosquito is arguably the most documented and most straightforwardly brutal example of a coercive sonic system. This device, invented by Howard Stapleton in 2005 and first tested in Barry, Wales, emits a tone at a frequency of approximately 17 to 18 kHz. It remains inaudible to most adults but is perceived without ambiguity by young people. Subjected to this continuous whine, the effect is unpleasant enough to transform public space into hostile territory within a matter of minutes.
The German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health concluded that the device was not entirely safe, particularly for infants and young children who, unlike adults, are unable to move away from the sound source. And yet it has been presented as a security reinforcement solution. No security guard. No visible camera. No verbal warning. A frequency.
What is striking is that it does not target behaviour. It discriminates by age group against all those whose hearing is still sharp enough to detect it — including babies. Since the threshold of tolerance is physiological, so too is the discrimination. In 2010, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe unanimously adopted a recommendation calling on member states to ban the device — though it lacked the power to enforce such a prohibition. In 2016, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child reiterated the call. In 2017, a campaign by the Scottish Youth Parliament persuaded ScotRail to remove its devices — a genuine victory, but a local one. An estimated 3,500 Mosquito units were active in England at the time of the first campaigns. The device remains available for purchase, deliverable within forty-eight hours.
The LRAD, from the Pittsburgh G20 to the streets of Belgrade
This, however, has crossed a qualitative threshold. The LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) has existed since the 1990s in the military domain. It was first used against civilian protesters in the United States during the G20 summit in Pittsburgh in 2009, where a researcher present as an observer — not a participant in the demonstration — suffered permanent hearing damage after being caught in the acoustic beam. The city of Pittsburgh reached a settlement of $72,000, without admitting liability, but committing to regulate future use of the device. Since then, LRADs have been deployed against Occupy, against the Standing Rock defenders in 2016, in dozens of cities during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and in January 2026 in Maple Grove, Minnesota, against protesters demonstrating against ICE operations in the wake of the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. According to the authorities, the LRADs were used there in their amplification mode to announce crowd dispersal orders, rather than as sonic weapons as such.
Then came Belgrade. On 15 March 2025, hundreds of thousands of people had gathered to commemorate the victims of the roof collapse at Novi Sad railway station. During a minute of silence, a sudden panic dispersed the crowd within seconds. Thousands of protesters described experiencing something indescribable: headaches, confusion, nausea, pressure in the ears. Photographs identified what appeared to be an LRAD 450XL, mounted on a police vehicle. Serbian authorities initially denied any presence of the device, before conceding otherwise while insisting it had not been activated.
Earshot, an organisation specialising in acoustic investigation — from European protests to conflict zones — concluded in its June 2025 report that it was highly probable that the protesters had been subjected to a directional acoustic weapon. Of nineteen videos analysed, not one succeeded in capturing the sound. And that is precisely the characteristic of a high-pressure LRAD. A beam so narrow that it is imperceptible to anyone not directly in its path. The invisible weapon, above all others. On 29 April 2025, the European Court of Human Rights issued an interim measure, ordering Serbia to prevent any future use of sonic devices for crowd control purposes, while noting that it was not necessary to rule on whether such a weapon had in fact been used. To date, no one has been charged.
Always the same frequency
This marks the first time within European territory that a state has been formally challenged by the ECHR over the alleged use of a sonic weapon against a peaceful crowd. And it is precisely this that finally makes visible what everything else had already been illustrating beneath the surface: the continuum between the box bolted to a park railing and the directional sound cannon aimed at a crowd in mourning is only a matter of frequency adjustment. The same technology, the same manufacturers, the same logic. Hostile architecture — anti-homeless benches, anti-sleeping spikes — sparked public debate when it first appeared in cities. It was visible. Hostile sonic architecture, by contrast, remains almost entirely invisible: inaudible to those who deploy it, leaving no tangible mark on the cityscape. It operates in the spectrum, in the literal sense.
The question, then, is not whether the music played in train stations is pleasant. Or whether the Mosquito device works efficiently. The questions that matter concern the intentions guiding the decision. The answers sketch, by what is absent, the map of the real city. Not the one drawn up in urban planning documents, but the one defined by which bodies may move through it, stop within it, sit down in it, gather collectively for a cause — without a frequency violently driving them away. To listen to the city as a political act is to refuse to let that map remain invisible.
To continue reading :
Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, MIT Press, 2010.
Lily E. Hirsch, Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment, University of Michigan Press, 2012.
Gordan Savičić & Selena Savić (dir.), Unpleasant Design, G.L.O.R.I.A., 2013.
Juliette Volcler, Le son comme arme. Les usages policiers et militaires du son, La Découverte, 2011.
Marie Thompson, "Sounding Out the Mosquito: Towards a Politics of Acoustic Exclusion", Social & Cultural Geography, 2017.
“Sonic Attack on a Silent Vigil”, Earshot, june 2025.
DIGGING IN EXCESS
BETWEEN DIGITAL ABUNDANCE, PARALLEL ECONOMIES, AND LISTENING FATIGUE
Not really a platform in the traditional sense. Rather an underground network, a parallel market where files circulate freely, without rules, without mandatory payment, without real traceability. What passes through it is not only rare music, it is also a form of value detached from any official economy. Artists receive nothing. Yet for many DJs, it is an indispensable tool. There one finds records lost for a long time, obscure rips, entire catalogs vanished from conventional circuits. It is at once a treasure and a moral dead end. Everyone knows well that this zone sits outside any formal economy, but the access it represents is too precious to give up. Here, digging gains in depth as the links with the real conditions of musical production wither away.
What "knowing how to search" means now
This shift from scarcity to abundance transforms the very nature of the skill. Research on the various electronic music scenes, notably the work of Gábor Vályi, shows that today, value lies less in the possession of rare objects than in the ability to move with discernment through considerable masses of sound. Digging becomes a practice of filtering, a practice where accurate listening spots singularities within otherwise homogeneous musical flows.
Vinyl, the gesture, and the conformism that comes with it
In this context, the return of vinyl in certain electronic scenes resembles an attempt to reintroduce friction into a system that has become too fluid. Attending a DJ set where only records are played is anything but trivial. The act is visible, the handling tangible, the physical stakes seem real. There is a presence, a risk, a direct relationship to sound and its temporality that the digital medium does not engage in the same way. But this valorization of the vinyl record also holds its share of ambiguity. In certain scenes, it is no longer a choice but indeed the tacit norm. And as always, when a practice becomes normative, it generates, in series, its own codes. Formats converge, structures align and the margins of surprise shrink. What once distinguished now homogenizes.
The money question everyone carefully avoids
Then there is the concrete and brutal factor of cost. Producing vinyl today is expensive. Pressing plants are saturated, raw materials more costly and production timelines longer. A reality documented by the IFPI as well as Music Business Worldwide. Distribution prices bear witness to this. On secondary markets like Discogs, certain records reach sums well beyond their original value and their practical usefulness. The record becomes a dual object: a working tool and a speculative asset. Vinyl record digging, often imagined as a pure and disinterested practice that would take place in small record shops haloed with an aura of authenticity, is inevitably caught in the trap of these speculative economic logics.
Two hundred listens for nothing
This hybrid context: digital abundance, informal circulation, material scarcity, amplifies the tensions within digging. There is always more to discover, abundance has not disappeared, it has intensified. But it does not give itself up easily. It demands time, concentration, a form of endurance that can be exhausting. Listening to hundreds of tracks to keep only two or three, and sometimes even none at all. Coming back, trying again, doubting. A fatigue sets in, alongside a sensory overload. And yet, DJs must continue to build something coherent and personal. Finding a throughline without repeating oneself or dissolving into the noise. A delicate balance.
And yet, despite the fatigue, despite the contradictions, digging remains deeply gratifying. For many, it is even a sort of anchor thrown into the sea that serves as a landmark. One learns enormously. Slowly, almost imperceptibly. The ear grows sharper, memory grows richer and patterns emerge. This shapes a relationship to music, quite fortunately, but also to time, to attention and to subjectivity. A demanding practice, if not an ungrateful one, but rarely entirely devoid of meaning.
The tools are coming. Now what?
It is in this tension between constraint and a certain pleasure (sometimes subversive, as we have seen) that digging persists. It is not entirely defeated by digital abundance, nor completely frozen by vinyl fetishism. It mutates. New forms are already emerging as technologies evolve: AI-assisted exploration, algorithmic analysis, vast sound databases to exploit. But these tools will not replace the act of searching in practice, they will simply shift its contours. Tomorrow's digging will probably be more hybrid, probably more assisted, it must be admitted, but it will always rest on one central skill: finding as much as making sense of continuous and overflowing musical flows.
Thus, far from being on the verge of disappearing, digging changes form, adapts, absorbs its contradictions which it brings back out positively into practice. And this is perhaps where one of its essential characteristics resides: an activity that never quite settles, that continues to find meaning and to establish subjective hierarchies where everything seems chaotic, already given and yet overflowing with hidden treasures.
To continue reading :
Gábor Vályi, Digging in the Crates. Practices of Identity and Belonging in a Translocal Record Collecting Scene, Doctoral thesis PhD in Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2010.
IFPI Global Music Report, 2025
VEINTIDÓS RECORDINGS: TWO HEADS, ONE NUMBER
In Barcelona, Cruz and Marine built an entire universe around a single number. Veintidós — 22 Recordings — was born like so many essential things: on the margins, with no plan, between two day jobs and the sleepless nights of a young couple with a child. Since then, the project has spread into a constellation of records, an agency, a merchandising line, and an appointment-only record shop called Integrity, now housed in a loft in the 22@ district, a neighborhood of tech companies where no one expected to find a label. All of it carried by a visual identity haunted by devils, eyes and coats of arms, discovered one day in an occult-book stall at Barcelona's flea market. Between hand-stamped boxes, buyout offers turned down, and sleepless nights, the story of 22 is that of a duo who refuses to choose between the intimate and the grand project.
Duality: A User's Guide
Cruz, you were in a doom metal band before turning to electronic music — what remains of that culture in the way you produce today?
C — Wow, that's something very few people know, I was very young! Honestly, since electronic music became my job, only a few albums have stayed present in my daily life. I still regularly listen to Kyuss, Black Sabbath and Los Natas, and sometimes it has an impact on my productions. At times I feel like that period is fading a bit, but it's still there. I'm trying to bring guitar into my new live set, so a small part of that period is coming back today.
Marine, you studied architecture: how does that technical and spatial approach influence the way you approach a record sleeve, a logo, or a space like Integrity?
M — What I love about architecture is the inspiration that comes from going out, looking at buildings, and feeling emotions within a space. Even when I'm not designing architecture, the spaces I find myself in are a huge source of inspiration.
It's interesting because I had my own architecture firm and, a few months ago, I decided to leave it to devote myself fully to 22. Partly a question of time, but also because there were certain things about architecture I didn't enjoy. I find in 22 a form of creativity and freedom of expression.
You both say that 22 Recordings started as a hobby that "started taking up more and more space" — at what point did you realize it wasn't a hobby anymore?
M — When I no longer had time to sleep between my two jobs and the kid, hahaha.
C — I think at the beginning it was a hobby because we didn't really know how to do things or exactly what we were doing. Everything was a process of trial and error, we trained ourselves progressively, and the shift toward something professional happened fairly naturally.
Over time, 22 took up more and more space in our lives. The team grew and my personal career also evolved in parallel. At a certain point the project demanded so much time and energy from us that we simply decided to take the leap and commit to it more professionally.
M — We were also able to see the project from the outside, through other people's eyes. Through conversations and encounters, we realized our project was much bigger than we imagined.
The name "Veintidós" and the horned logo: where exactly does the number 22 come from, and why have you systematized it so much throughout the catalogue?
It's a number we both have in common and that represents a lot of personal things for us. But 22 is much more than a label: it's first and foremost a platform that let us connect people and put out music that resonated with us within that concept.
We always talk about the project as if it had its own name, almost as if it were a person. The duality represented by the number also represents our relationship and our partnership, and I think that idea is very present in everything we do.
For the catalogue, at first we wanted everything to be connected and for there to be a shared identity between releases. At the same time, organizing it that way was also a simple way of cataloguing and classifying all the content we were producing.
A Mirror, Not a Genre
Your music has been described as "romantic EBM" — is that a term you consciously use for each signature?
The terms used to describe our music sort of appeared on their own. We've tried to express ourselves through the label's curation and the music we choose to release. We've gone through periods of romanticism, euphoria, anger, happiness, and a lot of changes we've lived through and will probably keep living through.
That's why it's very hard to find a single word to describe 22's sound. The label is, in a way, a reflection of our life, and a lot happens in our life. I think the music evolves with us.
How does a track go from being a demo to becoming a numbered "Chapter" in the 22REC series?
M — I think there are weeks where Cruz spends a lot of his time listening to demos and doing a first selection, which then comes to me for the final filter. It's also a process closely tied to the personal moments we're going through.
Sometimes we receive tons of demos we really like musically, but that simply don't match the moment we're living. And sometimes we hear something and immediately feel it has to be part of 22, and we just decide to release it.
In the end, it's about finding that match between the music, the moment, and the place.
You distinguish several series — 22REC, 22247, 2226, BS22, IR, digital — could a single track exist across several of them, or does each have its own criteria? How do you think about these different series?
C — I think everything that comes out on 22 contains, in one way or another, a small part of us. In reality, all the records could come out together without needing to distinguish them within the catalogue, but the different series emerged at specific moments, in response to different needs and musical periods.
22REC was our first series. It's the matrix and, for us, the soul of the label. New Beat, EBM, and industrial music have always fascinated us, and it was a very natural way to express what we wanted to do with 22.
When 22247 appeared, we were looking for something closer to the clubs we frequented and the music our friends were making. There was a slightly more minimal perspective, which also matched a more minimalist period of our lives.
2226 also has that more minimal side, but it's more oriented toward bands and synthesizers.
IR started as an independent series and eventually became BS22, which appeared more recently, with a more techno-oriented approach and a closer link to the kind of club we frequent today.
Digital is a different story. It happened when we realized our music had traveled much further than we imagined, but not everyone had the means to buy our records. So we decided to open that door and make our music accessible to more people, regardless of format.
Esoteric imagery, the devil, the Eye of Providence, coats of arms, the wolf appears on almost every sleeve: where do these influences come from?
When we started the label, we wanted to give everything we released its own visual identity. We started searching and exploring references around that aesthetic and, one day, we came across a collection of books and objects related to occultism at Els Encants, a flea and antiques market in Barcelona, and it really caught our attention.
It became a huge source of inspiration for the label's early visual identity and, in a way, it shaped the direction we took afterward.
Wax and Its Discontents
More concretely, what are your main production constraints today, pressing, mastering, deadlines, and how have you adapted to the current tensions in the vinyl industry?
C — From my point of view, I think the vinyl industry is becoming more and more professional and modern. The main limitation we face today is production capacity: there are times when the market is quite saturated and the number of records that can actually be pressed remains limited.
Despite that, I think vinyl is going through a good period. It's a loyal, durable format and, among all existing formats, it retains something very particular: it represents a link to the analog and to something real. People who truly appreciate this format keep choosing it, and I think it will always have its place in music.
Thirty Voices, One Table
The "4 Years / 30 Tracks" series closes a four-year chapter: how did you choose the artists who would appear on it, and did it force you to revisit your own history?
Putting that album together was really fun. Obviously it forced us to look at our history, but it also made us realize how much everything had grown since our beginnings.
At the same time, it gave us a lot of freedom to build the compilation differently: we dug up some demos we already had, asked friends for music, and also reached out to artists we admire.
It also taught us that working as three people with more than 30 artists at once can be a huge challenge, hahaha. But in the end, anything is possible, and we definitely learned a lot from making this compilation.
"22Selectors" — the podcasts — seems to be your most open space, with very different guests. What role does it play?
22Selectors is another part of the big table that 22Recordings has become today. It's a space where we like to spotlight artists we appreciate and whose musical selection we value, even when we don't currently have the chance to release their music or book them for one of our parties!
Sometimes we discover artists who aren't part of our closest circle, and that makes us really happy. Being able to share one of their sets and introduce them to our community makes us even happier.
It's a platform we love a lot and would like to keep developing, because it lets us open 22's doors a little wider and show everything that exists around the label, beyond our own releases.
By Appointment Only
You describe Integrity as a space that extends the encounters that happen beyond the booth and the afterparty — concretely, what does a typical day at the shop look like?
C — I'll try to skip the whole digging part: buying records one by one, cataloguing them, listening to them, all the logistics, cleaning them, tagging them… I think that's something a lot of record shops do. I'd rather focus on the most magical part of Integrity: the moment someone arrives at the shop.
The fact that it's an appointment-only shop allows for a very close connection with the person who comes to dig through the crates. I like talking with people, understanding why they're coming and what they're looking for, and then trying to help them find it. I'm happy to say people almost always leave very satisfied.
We put a lot of care into the selection and the records we carry in the shop. We put a lot of love into this project, and I think people feel that and appreciate it. Especially when DJs I have a relationship with stop by: it often feels more like a hangout between friends.
Even if it might sound a bit cliché, I find it quite magical to share records, laughs, and conversations outside of a club.
How do you choose the records sold in the shop? What's your guiding line and how do you find them? I get the impression there's a strong emphasis on second-hand records and old-school references.
C — I think Integrity is a project that reflects a lot of my personality when it comes to curation. There are moments when I'm completely focused on a particular type of music, and that's exactly what you'll find in the shop.
I try to have a bit of everything, but I think each small batch we buy has a very particular color, quite similar to what's happening musically in my record bag at a given moment. The selection evolves with me and with what I'm listening to.
I try to focus mainly on the second-hand market. There are a lot of record shops in Barcelona working with new releases and, even though we also like carrying certain titles that represent us, what interests me in particular is spending time searching for rare, hard-to-find things and club-oriented music.
Why did you choose an appointment-only system rather than opening to the public : what does that change in the relationship with customers and collectors?
C — It changes everything! Welcoming people into such an intimate space lets us do three things that, for me, are part of the project's DNA.
First, it lets us support each person in a very personalized way. When someone books an appointment, they can tell us what they're hoping to find, and I usually take some time to think about what they might be looking for and prepare the shop so the experience is as good as possible.
It also opens a little window into how the label works internally. Music is constantly being made in our office/home, we're always working on something, and I find it really interesting that people can see a bit of how everything works from the inside. Very often, people come in with projects similar to ours and we end up having really interesting conversations: we can share our experiences, but we also learn a lot from them.
And finally, it gives us the time and space needed to build a personal connection with customers and collectors. Devoting yourself to music requires a certain sensitivity, and I think we learn something new every day thanks to someone new. It's great.
That said, we'd really like the shop to be open to everyone one day, but for that we clearly need to keep growing the project and the team… or at least wait until Alma can work with us!
The space is a loft located in the 22@ district, an area more geared toward tech and business than music: was that a strategic choice or an opportunity you took advantage of?
Fewer people live here, and the neighborhood is much less exploited than central Barcelona. But the people who live here have projects, they want to make things happen. It's a neighborhood with a lot of young people and a community that helps each other, shares ideas, and is always ready to develop new projects.
Obviously it's harder than having a physical shop in central Barcelona, where there's much more foot traffic. But for us, the value this community brings us matters much more. We love being here, being part of this community, and developing the project from a place that feels like us.
Family Business
How did the idea for the agency come about? What are the selection criteria for the artists who make up this new roster?
M — The agency came about fairly naturally. We've always organized 22 showcases in Barcelona, Italy, France, Romania… and we always want to do more and more of them. When we organize them, we always try to spotlight the artists/friends the label represents musically. That's where the idea of representing those artists came from, but we didn't have the time.
Now that I've put my architecture project on hold, I thought it was the right time to develop this activity. Honestly, I really enjoy it and I learn something new every day. For the agency, I decided to work with Robyn, who's part of the team.
For 22, it's a new experience, a new goal, but it also has something we love a lot about the label: being close to the artists and developing energy and projects together with them. It's hard because at the start it's complicated to make the activity viable, but we put a lot of energy and love into it, and I hope it can keep growing over time.
Grown Sideways
You define underground as "a way of life" rather than a musical genre — what does that mean concretely in your decisions, including the least visible ones, and not just in your musical choices?
Underground is definitely a way of life for us. Today it might be a bit removed from the dampness of certain clubs or the stained state of our collection of T-shirts from labels we love and are friends with, but I think today that concept lies in the way and the places where we release our music, and above all in the places where we do NOT release it.
It's present in the way we greet our loved ones with a hug when they come to one of our parties, in what we feel when we see one of our T-shirts in a club or on the street, in the artists we choose to invite to our events, and in how we treat the people who come to them. It's also in things as simple as the time we spend stamping EVERY box that leaves our house OURSELVES.
I think our current definition of "underground" is very tied to everything that's real, to our ideas and our principles. We've received offers and opportunities to turn our project into a big machine, but we've always chosen to stay close to what's real, to things made with love.
For us, in the end, underground has less to do with the size of the project than with the way we choose to run it.
We've been to places that smelled of dampness but that didn't have as much love and realness as our project, and that helped us shape and clarify this concept.
The network you've built outside Spain — Paris, Milan, Italy — is it the result of a deliberate development strategy, or does it come more from affinities and encounters?
Like pretty much everything with 22, things always happen fairly naturally, based on the relationships we build with people. Sometimes it starts with a meeting at the shop or at an event, and from there the idea of developing an event somewhere else in the world is born.
The idea of traveling to other countries also comes from the fact that, even though we're based in Barcelona, our records sell all over the world and we have a fairly large community, spread out geographically. I think these experiences of bringing our roster and our energy elsewhere are always incredible. We're very happy to be able to do that.
Knowing we have an audience we can actually meet is something that, when you work all day at the office, you don't really realize. Being able to meet our audience and the people who love the label, talk with them, share a moment… that's something words can't really describe.
M — I feel like I could talk about that for hours, hahah. Having a family and being part of the electronic scene is hard. First of all because it's not that easy for me to go out, to travel… Obviously my daughter has always been my priority and I've had to learn and make decisions to find a balance.
But when you find it, I think it's pretty amazing. Because the two things are completely compatible, you just have to find a way to make them work and give each its own place.
There are also more complicated things that come into play, like the way other families look at you, because society still struggles to understand that you can have a model slightly different from theirs. There's also the fact that Cruz is a DJ and travels a lot for work, which means I'm often alone with Alma. But we learn from all of it, and I think good things can come out of it too.
Looking ahead, I'd like society to evolve so that women, mothers in particular, can have a different place within the electronic scene, so that we can feel freer to live this life without fear.
Where do you see Veintidós/Integrity in five years: still with this artisanal, intimate model, or evolving toward greater scale, even if it meant losing part of that identity?
Obviously we want the project to keep growing, but if growing upward means losing part of our identity, we'd rather grow sideways.
We'd like our family to keep expanding and for more and more people to join the project. Today Robyn works with us and we're very happy to have her on the team, and we're really looking forward to others joining us, contributing, and sharing this adventure with us.
For us that's very important, because the people who work with us end up becoming part of our family. We're very lucky to be surrounded by people who are always ready to lend a hand, jump into new adventures, and help us grow the project together.
For the coming years, we'd like to live more and bigger adventures, but while keeping this close, human way of doing things. If we could keep growing with an ever-bigger family around us, that would be perfect.
To continue :
22 Recordings bandcamp: https://22recordings.bandcamp.com/music
BS22001, the latest record by 22, produced by C.ru.z, for their new series dedicated to those who want to channel their anger against the madness of today's world: https://22recordings.bandcamp.com/album/bs22-c-ru-z
MÉLIA ROGER
An Ear Turned Toward the Living
Mélia Roger speaks of listening the way one speaks of care. Not in the therapeutic sense of the word, but rather as a very concrete gesture. Auscultating a landscape, searching for what still beats beneath the surface before it stops. She was born in 1996, trained in sound engineering at ENS Louis-Lumière and then, for the final year of her master's, at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. Now a PhD candidate in research and creation at Le Fresnoy, she continues in parallel to work for the studio HAL, where she took part in developing a multichannel 7.0.2 microphone tree designed for Dolby Atmos sound libraries. A tool of very high precision, the kind found on the biggest film mixes. And that is precisely the strength of her path. An engineer capable of millimetric technical rigor chooses to put it to nonconformist use, cultivating alongside it a deliberately makeshift field recording practice, one she describes as tentacular rather than traditionally stereo.
From vocal deepfake to lichens
It all began with a graduation thesis carried out with the help of Nicolas
Obin at Ircam. The Voice is Voices (2019) cloned her own voice from hours
of recordings, from Wikipedia pages on weather and amphibians, chosen
for their wealth of phonemes. The piece was played over five separate channels, the human voice imitating that of the clone until it became impossible to tell them clearly apart. The process left a lasting trace in her work. Since then, the technologies she uses are never simply means to be placed in service of some project. They are never entirely transparent and imperceptible. They interpose themself, always, between bodies and the different strata of their manifestation.
At another scale, the same trouble reappears in Intimacy of lichens, made in 2021 during a residency in Brazil. There Mélia Roger develops what she calls an eco empathic listening device. Tiny microphones placed on her own body, from the hands to the fingertips, by way of the wrists, which turns touch itself into an organ of listening. No more need to point a microphone in a direction. It is enough to press it against the skin, and it becomes an interface, a point of contact between body and world. The idea would return later, applied this time to the mineral in Intimacy of stones (2021). As for Dear Phonocène (2024), it transposes that same sensibility into the exhibition space by questioning the concept of the phonocene, the sonic imprint human beings have left on the acoustic landscapes of the world.
A member of the association Sonatura, Mélia Roger has also made the Douglas pine monocultures near Roanne, forests she has known since childhood, a recurring ground for experimentation. She is drawn to these plantations, clear cut every forty to sixty years, precisely for their acoustic poverty. What is left to listen to in a forest so poor in diversity of species? Rather than shaping a reassuring soundscape from it, she documents this silence with the seriousness of a field ecologist, with automatic recorders, protocols, datasets that can be reused for research as much as for installation.
soon at Panorama 28, Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing
© Quentin Chevrier
A practice between two worlds
Somewhere between field recording and sound engineering, Mélia Roger refuses to pick a side. A sound engineer for cinema part of the time, with credits on several feature films, in editing as in mixing, and an artist researcher on the other, she does not seek to make these multiple facets converge toward a uniform meeting point. The technical precision acquired in cinema doesn’t serve to smooth over the work she undertakes for her installations. That expertise allows her, on the contrary, to free herself from the canons of listening. To assume the flaws of a recording, the silences, the uncontrolled gestures still perceptible after mixing. It is also hard not to notice her attraction to damaged places. For her, listening is not a supplement of soul, it is a gesture heavy with meaning, one that reveals important strata in the composition of our environments. Listening engages us while exposing us, and lets no one leave entirely unscathed.
What remains to be heard after the flames
Sous mes doigts, la forêt (Under my fingers, the forest) (2026) extends this question, but this time after a fire. In October 2025, Mélia Roger travels to the Corbières in the Aude, ravaged a few months earlier by the summer fires. There she gathers charred snail shells, Rumina decollata, or decollate snails, and scans one of them in 3D. From this object of a few centimeters comes a sculpture one meter sixty tall, an enlarged fossil 3D printed in 28 pieces of PLA at Le Fresnoy, then covered with stone powder, giving it a character at once bony and mineral.
It is inside the form that the knot of the device plays out. A great number
of magnetic sensors lie beneath the skin of the sculpture, like so many nerve endings, each triggering one of the hundred sound clips the piece is composed of. Ants recolonizing the soil, bats echolocating in slow motion, wild boar crossing a river returned to life, the voices of the park's ecologists counting the birds
of the perimeter. Part of this material comes from the Sonosylva program, led
by the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle. 110 automatic recorders scattered through French forests, whose more than 200 gigabytes of sound archives cover precisely the territory of the Corbières. To hear all this sonic matter, the public holds in their hands an object designed with the designer and researcher Martin de Bie, a form reminiscent of a stethoscope, which one brings slowly toward the shell. Too quickly or too abruptly, and the sound cuts out. The title is therefore not a mere poetic image, it is literally under the fingers that the forest takes back its many voices. And one must accept getting lost in it, like diving into a space whose cartography has failed us, for want of a synoptic view of what the sculpture holds.
This piece belongs to the doctoral research Mélia Roger is pursuing at Le Fresnoy with the CEAC of the Université de Lille, under the supervision of Alexandre Chèvremont and Robin Meier. Sous mes doigts, la forêt directly extends the research of Dear Phonocène, her installation on Douglas pines, toward what she now calls an audio post naturalist practice. A listening that no longer seeks only preserved nature, but questions what has been damaged, polluted, transformed, and thus what remains there to be heard.
To continue :
Sous mes doigts, la forêt will be on view from September 11 to January 3, as part of the Panorama 28 exhibition at Le Fresnoy (Tourcoing),
then from February 4 to March 7, 2027, during the Experimenta biennial (Meylan, Grenoble).
Le Fresnoy overview page : https://www.lefresnoy.net/ecole/etudiant/644/
Artist’s website : https://www.meliaroger.com
IVANA DAMA
The Politics of Breath
There is something symptomatic in the way artists from conflict zones are presented: the question of trauma can occupy a central place, and rightly so, told and retold until the work itself stands as testimony. Or, conversely, it is carefully kept at a distance. Ivana Dama does neither. She was born and raised in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her early childhood during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. The memories of her childhood, time spent in air-raid shelters, the sounds and vibrations of warning sirens, helped shape her interest in air and sound as her main mediums. These are not incidental biographical details; they are raw material she works with coldly, without staging them.
What led her to focus on sound was the moment she first heard archival recordings made during the bombing, including the sounds of air-raid sirens. Until then, she had not realized how deeply those sonic memories remained embedded within her. Images of the events had never affected her in the same way, but hearing those sound recordings produced an immediate physical response.The image documents. Sound reactivates. This is not a hierarchy but
a difference in register. And it is that register she has been exploring ever since, often using low frequencies and analog electronics to restore sound's full materiality and reveal its almost tactile dimension. She creates connections between the corporeal, the physiological, and the political.
Thomas Erben Gallery, New York
Her most recent work embodies this logic. Breathing Alarms (2026), currently on view at the Wende Museum in Culver City, is an installation set within the museum's East German guardhouse. The piece centers on surveillance, atmosphere, and the politics of breath. The choice of location is not incidental: the Wende Museum is dedicated to the history of the Cold War, its collections gathering artifacts, archives, and everyday objects from the former Soviet bloc. Grafting such a piece inside a former East German guardhouse is a way of short-circuiting the regime of representation. We are no longer confronted with something that evokes control, we are entirely inside it.
What makes Ivana Dama's work so singular is precisely that it does not negotiate between the intimate and the political, nor between devices and their field of action. We feel her works before we can fully grasp their stakes. This is where the physicality of her sonic installations resides. And through that physicality, we also better understand the central question running through much of her research: understanding cannot be separated from a form of experience. Some things may be more relevant and more powerful when felt rather than explained.
detail, Wende Museum, Culver City
The title itself says something precise. An alarm that breathes. Or a breath
that alarms. Air as a simultaneous vector of life and imminent threat.
This parameter is a constant in Ivana Dama's practice. Her current research explores the development of a tool capable of signaling the urgency of both social and ecological crises, foregrounding the inextricable connections between the two, given that they most often occur simultaneously and likely arise from the same root causes (as intersectional theories suggest). The air raid siren of her Belgrade childhood and contemporary ecological collapse thus share a common structure: thresholds crossed, bodies exposed, warnings
that arrive but are rarely heeded.
Wende Museum, Culver City
To continue :
Shoutout LA — Meet Ivana Dama
https://shoutoutla.com/meet-ivana-dama-sound-artist-and-researcher/
Wende Museum — Ivana Dama: The Air Belongs to the Children https://wendemuseum.org/event/frameworks-ivana-dama-the-air-belongs-to-the-children/
Wende Museum — Breathing Alarms
https://wendemuseum.org/exhibition/ivana-dama-breathing-alarms/
Artist’s website : https://www.ivanadama.com
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