Today the musical world is opening a space in which a concert ceases to be a work performed before a listener. It becomes a state that arises within each person and at the same time between everyone.
10 October 2026 at 18:00 Biennale Musica opens at the Venetian Arsenale. The festival's first event will be the world premiere of Alignment — a new live performance by the American musician Laraaji.
The title translates as “alignment,” “attunement,” “bringing into accord”.
And the date itself — 10.10 — is astonishingly in tune with this idea. For those who perceive it as a symbol of transition, the concert becomes a beautiful reflection of what is happening: the new world does not appear somewhere outside. It unfolds when our perception attunes itself to the wholeness that is already present in everything.
A concert listened to with the whole body
Alignment is conceived not as a traditional performance with a stage, rows of seats and a predetermined distance between artist and audience.
It is a sound bath.
Listeners are invited to be in a receptive state: to sit or lie with closed eyes, allowing the music not only to reach the ear but also to pass through the body.
The sound will combine:
- an electroacoustic zither;
- the African finger piano — the kalimba;
- a keyboard synthesizer;
- voice;
- natural sound loops;
- soft percussive textures.
The music will be born through improvisation — out of the performer's meditative presence and his interaction with the space. Quiet, contemplative passages may give way to moments of rising intensity, which is why Alignment cannot be fully repeated: it exists only in that encounter which happens here and now.
When sound ceases to be external
Usually we say: music sounds, and a person listens to it.
But in Alignment this boundary becomes almost indistinguishable. The vibration of a string gives birth to a wave. The wave passes through the air, the space and the listener's body. The nervous system responds to timbre, frequency, pulsation and changes in volume. Breathing may slow, attention may expand, and the sense of the body's familiar boundaries may grow softer.
Music is no longer perceived as an external object. It becomes an inner experience.
A person does not merely hear the vibration — he is himself a body capable of vibrating together with it.
Thus a state of attunement arises: the instrument, the musician, the architecture and the listeners no longer exist as separate parts of what is happening. They form a single temporary sonic whole.
A voice free of meaning
A special place in the performance is occupied by Laraaji's voice. He uses vocalizations and an invented language — sound not bound to a familiar vocabulary or literal meaning.
When known words disappear, the mind has nothing to hold on to. The voice ceases to explain and begins to convey a state directly — through pitch, breath, timbre, pauses and the movement of sound.
This returns us to one of the most ancient qualities of the human voice. Before it became a means of conveying concepts, it was already vibration: a cry, a call, laughter, a sustained tone, a song without words.
In such a sound, meaning does not disappear. It moves to another level — from verbal description into direct experience.
The voice does not tell about a state.
It creates a space in which that state can be felt.
From the streets of New York — to the Venice Biennale
Laraaji's creative path began long before today's world premiere. Having trained in classical composition and piano, he gradually came to free improvisation and the modified autoharp, whose sound he transformed with the help of electronic effects.
In the 1970s he played on the streets of New York. During one such performance, Brian Eno heard him. Their meeting led to the recording of the album Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, which became part of Eno's famous series Ambient.
However, Laraaji did not limit his creativity to a single musical direction. He unites sound with meditation, bodily presence and practices of conscious laughter, regarding music not only as an artistic work but also as a way of changing the quality of attention.
That is why Alignment continues his many-year path quite naturally: here music does not fill the space — it helps the space, the body and the consciousness enter into a coordinated sounding.
Attunement instead of effort
The very word alignment offers a different view of inner transformation.
We are used to thinking that in order to pass into a new state one must exert effort: overcome oneself, renounce the former, rise somewhere or earn access to another reality.
But a musical instrument does not force itself to sound higher. It is tuned.
When a string reaches the right tension, it naturally responds to the corresponding frequency. If a consonant note sounds nearby, a resonance arises between them.
In this image, transition is not an escape from one world into another. It is a change in the tuning of perception. The world remains one, but a person begins to hear more connections in it, to feel more deeply, and to act not out of resistance, but out of alignment with their inner nature.
If we speak in the language of the Fifth Dimension, it manifests not as a new place where humanity will one day arrive. It is a way of being present in which the experience of separation diminishes and the sense of the interconnectedness of all living things unfolds.
The Fifth Dimension IS — the only question is what frequency our perception is tuned to.
The sky belongs to everyone
After Alignment the programme will continue with a performance Heaven Is Ours / O Céu é nosso — “The sky belongs to us”, created with the participation of Brazilian baloeiros Zulu and Rafa under the curation of Sissel Morell Dargis and Adriano Rosselli.
Even the sequence of titles sounds symbolic:
Alignment — Attunement.
Heaven Is Ours — The sky belongs to us.
First the inner and the outer come into alignment. Then the feeling disappears that the space of light is somewhere far away and belongs to someone else.
The sky does not become ours as a result of conquest. It has always been part of the single space in which we live, breathe, hear and create.
Why this is happening precisely today
Scientifically, the date 10.10.10 does not determine the properties of the music and does not give the concert an objective “portal” power. But a symbol is capable of directing attention — and attention changes the quality of experience.
That is precisely why the coincidence of the date and the title of the premiere sounds so beautiful.
10.10. Alignment. Attunement.
Today in Venice, music invites us not to observe the transition, but to become a participant in it: to close our eyes, let go of the habitual separation between performer and listener, and discover that a single sound field already exists.
The transition begins at the moment when we stop seeking a new world outside and allow it to manifest through our own state.
What did the music remind us of today?
That attunement does not erase uniqueness.
Each instrument preserves its own timbre. Each voice sounds inimitable. Each body receives the music in its own way. But it is precisely thanks to differences that a three-dimensional harmony is born, one that a single note could never achieve.
Unity is not sameness. It is the ability of many forms to hear one another and together create a sound that did not exist before.
Music does not transport us to a new dimension. It changes the way we are present — and then a new depth unfolds in the familiar world.
