17.07.26
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Acting as the centrepiece of Turin’s Spellbound Festival this year was a concert you are meant to sleep through, inspired by accounts of unexplained sounds heard in the desert. 

Nkisi – the alias of musician, composer and sonic researcher Melika Ngombe Kolongo – has spent years investigating what she calls the paracoustics of listening: the moments where sound exceeds existing systems of explanation, instead appearing through hallucination, oral history and cosmological tradition. Her ongoing research project, Anomaly Index, which premiered at Venice Biennale Musica in 2025, brought together compositions exploring ethnographic wax cylinder recordings, near-death musical experiences and the auditory peculiarities that have haunted desert travellers across cultures and centuries.

Desert Songs was presented at Spellbound Festival in June and grew directly out of that research. Working with ALMARE – the Turin-based artistic organisation behind Spellbound, whose practice sits at the intersection of sound, art and ecology – Nkisi began rethinking the project through the experience of sleep itself. The result was an eight-hour overnight sleeping concert held inside PAV Parco Arte Vivente, composed not for active listening but to shift the audience’s awareness between wakefulness and slumber, inviting them to stay the night as the performance unfolded around them. Spellbound returns for its second weekend on 26-27 September, tickets are available via DICE. 

We caught up with Nkisi following the festival to talk about the research behind Desert Songs, what it meant to compose for a sleeping audience, and why she thinks sleep might be one of the few spaces left that resists productivity culture.

 

Let’s start with an introduction. Please, introduce yourself and tell us about your approach to sound and composition

I’m a musician, composer and sonic researcher working under the name Nkisi. My practice moves between composition, performance, installation and research, exploring sound not simply as a medium of communication but as a force that shapes our relationship to the seen and unseen worlds. Through my research project, Anomaly Index, I investigate moments where sound exceeds existing systems of explanation, whether through noise, auditory anomalies, oral histories or different cosmological traditions. I’m interested in what these moments reveal about the politics of listening: how societies decide what counts as meaningful sound and what becomes dismissed as noise, myth or hallucination.

How has it been working with ALMARE on this project?

Desert Songs originally grew out of paracoustic research for Anomaly Index, but I had imagined it much more as a concert and a compositional work. Working with ALMARE allowed me to rethink the project through the experience of sleep itself. Instead of asking how an audience listens during a performance, I began asking what happens when listening continues after awareness slowly shifts into sleep. Sleep stopped being simply the context of the performance and became part of the compositional practice itself.

What was it about Spellbound that made this feel like the right context for Desert Songs?

Much of my work explores altered states of consciousness, possession, hallucination and trance, so the sleeping concert felt like a natural extension of those questions. It offered a context where the audience wasn’t expected to consciously analyse the music but could encounter it through shifting states of awareness. Rather than writing music to be listened to attentively, I found myself composing for a state in which listening itself is continually changing, a state inviting musical phenomena instead of assuming predicted forms of music.

How did conversations with ALMARE develop from Desert Songs’ initial conception to where the project is now?

Initially the project centred on historical accounts of travellers hearing “impossible” sounds in the desert: voices, music, or entire cities appearing through sound alone. I became fascinated by these acoustic mirages as moments where listening itself becomes something on its own, a sonic entity. Diving deeper, I realised I wasn’t only interested in illustrating those stories; I wanted to recreate the perceptual conditions they describe. In the composition, I didn’t want to only focus on trying to represent that desert in some kind of way but also on composing the holographics themselves, the sounds that emerge, dissolve, and echo, like the mirages that inspired the research.

Desert Songs grows out of your research for Anomaly Index, which premiered at Venice Biennale Musica last year. Can you explain what that project was about for those who are unfamiliar?

Anomaly Index is an ongoing artistic research project that explores the paracoustics of listening. I’m interested in how dominant modern epistemologies create separations between signal and noise, knowledge and superstition, or reality and hallucination, and how these distinctions shape the ways we understand sound and our relationship to the world, as well as how they create social relations. Noise became an important material within the research because it resists fixed representation and opens up other ways of listening, it also actively interacts with our bodies. The presentation at Venice Biennale Musica brought together three interconnected short compositions that explored these ideas through different case studies. The first focused on the para-materiality of ethnographic wax cylinder recordings, not only the voices within them but also the noise, degradation, and physical traces carried by the recording medium itself and the paracoustic phenomena it initiates when replaying/listening. The second was the first iteration of Desert Songs; exploring auditory anomalies and the relationship between the landscape and haunted listening. The third was inspired by recurring accounts of music experienced during near-death experiences.

You’ve been researching accounts of people who experienced auditory hallucinations in the desert. What drew you to these stories?

What drew me to these stories was the phenomenon itself but also the fact that it appears across so many different traditions. I became interested in the multivocality of these experiences. One phrase that kept coming up was “the intruder hears differently. ” I think that’s a beautiful reminder that listening is always relational. The way we hear a place is inseparable from the way we inhabit it and from the cosmologies through which we understand it. What also fascinated me was that the landscape itself actively participates in the production of these sounds and perceptions. At a time when questions of land and settler colonialism continue to shape our world, I think this also becomes an ethical question. Landscapes are never empty. They already contain histories, relationships and ways of listening that exceed the perspective of the intruder.

How do you even begin composing music that is intended to accompany sleep? What’s the process like?

I quickly realised I wasn’t composing music for sleep so much as composing within sleep. As the project unfolded, I found myself moving between ancient traditions, esoteric practices, folklore and scientific understandings of sleep. Many of these traditions understand dreams very differently from dominant modern epistemologies. Rather than being treated as secondary to waking consciousness, they are often understood as places where encounters and guidance occur. The composition follows five sleep cycles, each with its own sonic ecology. I worked with different colours of noise, psychoacoustics and subtle shifts in texture to accompany the changing physiology of sleep. I also composed it with gentle disruptions. Sleep isn’t a static state of calm, it’s constantly moving between different depths and forms of awareness, and I wanted the composition to breathe with that rhythm.

How did it feel to play for eight hours with a sleeping audience? Spellbound views the sleeping concert as a collective, creative act. Is this an element of the project that resonates with you and does it change how you think about what you are creating?

It felt surprisingly intimate, like a collective form of telepathy. Even though people were asleep, it never felt passive. There was a strong sense that we were all sharing the same journey through the night. Performing outdoors reinforced that feeling. The changing light, the sounds of the park and the gradual transition from darkness into sunrise all became part of the work. The environment wasn’t simply surrounding the performance it was composing with me. It felt like we were collectively inhabiting a space of listening together. I don’t think Desert Songs offered an escape from reality. It created a temporary space where we could rehearse another way of inhabiting it, one that values dreaming and the unknown as forms of knowledge rather than interruptions to the flow of everyday life.

Spellbound talks about sleep as a resistance to productivity culture. Is this something you connect with personally as an artist?

Yes, sleep might be one of the few remaining spaces we have that resist complete optimisation and algorithmic productivity. As artists, we are constantly asked to remain productive, visible and always available. Sleep asks us to surrender control and to experience the intranatural realms – nature’s hidden dimensions. These realms for me are packed with symbols and emotions I bring back to the ‘real world’ as music and images. The same rules don’t seem to function there, I enjoy visiting the dragons.

What do you hope people will take away from the experience, or take into their dreams?

I don’t necessarily hope people remember the music itself. I hope they wake up with the feeling that something shifted, even if they can’t fully explain what. Dreams stay with us in fragments rather than clear narratives, and I like the idea that the piece might continue to exist in that way too. I hope the experience leaves people with a curiosity towards listening, not only to sound but also to those forms of listening that don’t always fit within dominant ways of knowing.