The end of summer 2025 left a smell of burning in the air. And not only a metaphorical one. A popular uprising, sudden and unprecedented, swept through the streets of Italy. From the general strike of September 22 a permanent mobilization opened up that touched more than a hundred cities. For days, for weeks, the geography of the country was rewritten: ports blocked, logistics hubs interrupted, highways and stations occupied, schools and universities turned into spaces for discussion.
In these weeks millions of people of every category and generation took to the streets, not only to protest but also to remember - or learn - how to be many, together, asking for the same things and inventing a common language. During the various demonstrations there was a constancy not seen for several years: not an episodic flare-up, but a slow and stubborn combustion, able to feed itself.
After this fire burned itself out, the first question that all the movements asked themselves was: how do you keep a flame alive when the wind stops blowing?
If the political answer belongs to other spaces, perhaps here at GOLEM we can attempt another angle. We can ask ourselves what remains, and what can be born, in the places where politics meets imagination. How can art — and more precisely, making music — accompany a protest, inspire it, or become a laboratory for new languages?
After years in which music has been swallowed by aesthetics — and aesthetics by the algorithm — perhaps the time has come to stop for a moment. To ask not so much how we appear, but how and why music is made. We have spent too much time measuring the relevance of a project by the number of collaborations with Balenciaga, by the cool, clean feed, or by appearances at events sponsored by questionable brands. And in this landscape, perhaps, we should also set aside those who, through poses and glossy productions, try to position themselves as radical artists.
For those who want to stand on the side of the arsonists — not as a pose, but as a choice of camp — the paths are many, even though every gesture has a price and a consequence. No one can pretend that it is simple, today, to stay outside the circuits that guarantee visibility, decent fees or a minimum of economic stability. And yet, the moral question is not resolved in moralism. It is a concrete question.
What does it mean for an artist, in an era of structural precarity, to say no to a festival or an institution of dubious moral standing? It is a question that runs through all the professions involved: from independent musicians to sound technicians, from curators to graphic designers, from the collectives that organize self-managed events to individuals who get by on intermittent fees. And, at the same time, through an audience that can decide to reward the more genuine and militant realities, instead of situations that often resemble showcases for advertising and booking agencies more than anything else.
Every time an engagement is accepted, a part of oneself and a part of one's idea of the world is put at stake.
And every time it is refused, a price is paid in visibility, livelihood and future possibilities.
The point here is not to decide among ourselves a code that could grant certificates of purity, but rather to know how to recognize the tensions at play and to hold a line that manages to unite coherence and sustainability.
And this implies uncomfortable questions: how many compromises can we accept without turning into what we wanted to fight? But above all, what happens if we begin to build — truly — alternative circuits of support, distribution and mutuality, which allow us to refuse without disappearing?
Perhaps, just as militant networks manage to coordinate by interweaving bodies, ideas and logistics until fragmentation is transformed into collective strength, the world of music too -experimental, militant- should begin to recognize itself as a network.
A network not of marketing but of mutual aid, capable of connecting spaces, artists, technicians, listeners; capable of building autonomous infrastructures that do not depend on institutional grants or on sponsors with dirty hands.
A network that can host and nurture experiences, residencies, diffuse festivals, moments of shared training. Places where sound is not product but process, an exploration of spaces and of one's own perception, to learn to listen even before performing.
A network that is not afraid to declare itself partisan, and that knows how to inspire those who listen to question themselves about new languages, modes of presence and forms of sonic solidarity. But for all this to happen, an ethics is not enough; a practice is needed. Practices that make the scene not only more cohesive, but also fairer, and above all more sustainable, thinking of the economy of sound as an economy of time and mutual support.
This means sharing resources, equipment, spaces, contacts; withdrawing energies from competition and giving them back to cooperation, rejecting the logic of the artist-as-company and rediscovering the strength of collective action.
This is because the anger of these weeks must not die out when social media stop displaying photos of maimed children or with the news of a shaky colonial peace, but must inspire us to carry forward a series of collective initiatives that inspire others to carry on the struggle, each according to what they do best, and including those who engage with the sound arts as part of a collective path.
In this, recalling experiences like those of Crass may seem banal, but also like a reference, like someone pointing out a possible road to take. The English collective had understood that making music could be a total political act: not only in the lyrics or the sonorities, but in the very way of producing, distributing and living it. Autonomy, self-management, horizontality, refusal of the cultural industry, coherence between means and ends: sound as community, the band as commune. Today, in a radically different context but in some ways a more urgent one, that intuition speaks to us again, not as nostalgia for a “pure” era, but as a reminder of what can happen when the artistic gesture stops being individual and becomes collective. When a song is no longer the property of the one who writes it, but the heritage of those who live it.
The aim is not to romanticize the past or to build yet another self-referential scene. It is, rather, to open possibilities: spaces where music can support the movements, and where the movements can in turn support music.
What is needed now is to build the conditions so that this energy does not remain episodic, but translates into lasting networks, into common practices, into a culture of sound that knows how to stand on the side of those who resist.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →