From her unique position within the current music scene, Marta De Pascalis examines the deeper truths of human-machine relationships. Drawing on textures and timbres that recall a time when electronic music waved towards the future, her compositions focus on ever-evolving harmonics, often with roots in early and Renaissance music. The combination of the two elements sets her work apart from any temporal categories. Fresh from premiering her new work, Stoma, at the Biennale Musica in Venice, De Pascalis presents the latest evolution of her work at Kookoo. In her hands, magnetic tape and analogue synthesizers become a form of cosmic speculation, exerting influence over both the artist and the listeners. ‘Machines reconfigure the body,’ says De Pascalis. ‘Through their sound waves, they alter the perception of time and space, reshaping it into a new sensory continuum, into a resonant field sealed in the rhythm of a cosmic breath.’ It is with this breath and in this rhythm that De Pascalis conveys ‘a message that lingered in the void/ as if a greeting to a shadow hadn’t/ been delivered’. These lines, written by Amelia Rosselli, belong to an oeuvre that had a deep and lasting impact on De Pascalis. A poet of exploration, as she defined herself, who wrote in English, French, and mostly Italian, Rosselli is a singular voice in 20th-century poetry. A history of resistance and loss underpins her very musical and mesmerizing quality of writing. Sonus Ruinae, De Pascalis’s ground-breaking album from 2020, was released on Morphine Records, a platform renowned for showcasing key figures in avant-garde electronic and outernational music. No one other than Morphine founder and label head Rabih Beaini honours this Kookoo night with his presence. His DJ sets are informed by a decades-long practice between techno and jazz, based on an extensive musical knowledge and an acute sense of improvisation. Let’s state the obvious once more: Few people craft the kind of emotional, exploratory dancefloor experience that Rabih Beaini does. Kookoo’s resident visual artists, Carly Fischer and Yukihiro Taguchi (a.k.a. mokume Berlin), were inspired to create new artworks in response to Amelia Rosselli’s poems. And so were Kookoo hosts Mieko Suzuki & Ara for their music selection at the beginning and end of the night, welcoming and greeting all the physical presences, machines, and shadows to Ohm.