FUTURE NOW Musical Diaries
What happens when musical tradition meets curiosity, a spirit of experimentation and a forward-looking perspective? FUTURE NOW Musical Diaries brought this question to life across a wide range of sound worlds – showing just how diverse the paths are that young musicians can take into the future.
The series opened with MOHIRON from Tajikistan, an ensemble that embodies the festival’s ethos like few others. Deeply rooted in Tajikistan’s traditional music, the young musicians combine it with European and Latin American repertoire. Alongside traditional music, the programme featured arrangements of works by Vivaldi and Abreu, for example. During the subsequent Q&A, it became clear that this musical exchange is not simply a stylistic exercise for them, but an integral part of their identity as young musicians.
At the Lách Tách concert, traditional Vietnamese singing met electronic sounds and contemporary sonic experimentation.
By using the entire space of the concert hall for their performance, the duo held the audience spellbound with their multi-layered musical sounds, in which past and present merged. When Lách Tách performed the music they had composed especially for the occasion together with the Luxembourgish orchestra musicians, a particular sense of curiosity could be felt among the audience.
JISR // جسر // BRÜCKE also demonstrated just how curious audiences are about new sounds and instruments.
At the sold-out concert, Arab-Andalusian music was skilfully presented not only in terms of its sound but also through the commentary between the pieces. During the Q&A and after the concert, there were lively discussions, questions, opportunities to try things out and conversations about the instruments. Here, the encounter with music did not take place solely on stage, but continued directly between musicians and audience members.
With ni-va & Stellan Veloce, the concert hall itself became an experimental space. Striking black-and-white projections, unusual spatial perspectives and an invitation for the audience to answer the question “What does the future sound like to you?” with sounds of their own made the performance a multi-layered experience. ni-va demanded attention and openness, and in return opened up a world full of colours, nuances and atmospheres.
Finally, the ensemble &ñịoن turned experimentation into a sensory journey through sound. Viola da gamba and keyboard met such unexpected sources of sound as a massage gun and a toothbrush. In this performance, both unusual and captivating, questions of belonging, heritage and movement were explored – in words as well as in sound.
FUTURE NOW Musical Diaries showed one thing above all: future music has no single sound. It emerges wherever traditions are reimagined, boundaries are crossed and new connections are forged – and wherever young musicians and their audiences come together to discover what might sound next.
Thank you for the support to
Here is the 2026 FUTURE NOW Musical Diaries program:
Traditional Tajik sounds meet international works and merge into a captivating concert experience. MOHIRON combines musical heritage with fresh artistic ideas.
TAJIK MELODIES FROM DIFFERENT REGIONS · Qalb (en. Heart)
IDIBEK TOSHEV · Jilva (en. Radiance / Graceful Allure)
ANTONIO VIVALDI · Escala Palladio (arranged for Tajik national instruments)
HAKIM MAHMUD · Zavqi Javoni (en. The Joy of Youth)
JONIBEK SATTORZODA · Guftugu (en. Dialogue)
ZEQUINHA DE ABREU · Tico-Tico
KHUSHBAKHT NIYOZOV · Badakhshoni (en. From Badakhshan)
JOVIDON HASANOV · Kuhistoni (en. Of the Mountains)
VITTORIO MONTI · Csárdás
IDIBEK TOSHEV · Khusnoro (en. Radiant Beauty)
IDIBEK TOSHEV · Sarchashma (en. Source)
Vietnam
Lương Huệ Trinh combines traditional Vietnamese music, everyday sounds, and electronic textures into multilayered soundscapes between reality and illusion. In dialogue with singer Vũ Thị Thùy Linh, the Lách-Tách concert gives rise to cross-temporal musical encounters in which past and present flow into one another.
Vietnamese composer and performer Lương Huệ Trinh builds her musical practice by exploring materials from traditional music, everyday life sounds, and electronic sounds. She shapes and places them in new relationships, creating multilayered sonic landscapes that blur the boundaries between reality and illusion. Her music becomes emotional wanderings that guide listeners through layers of memory, through space, through the sharing of personal thoughts.
In the Lách Tách concert, Lương Huệ Trinh invites Vũ Thị Thùy Linh, a traditional Vietnamese vocalist, to join this voyage. Vũ Thị Thùy Linh presents the ancient melodies of Ả Đào, a millennia-old traditional music form from Northern Vietnam blending poetry and music with highly refined vocal techniques and the most complex tonal system, accompanied by Phách (claves) and Trống chầu (drum). Two artists, two distinct approaches to sound, collide and create a space with folds in time.
What belongs to the past and what is unfolding in the present do not remain separate but interweave, generating sonic moments where the boundary between old and new becomes blurred – at once strange and familiar. The music here does not explain but poses questions – about time, about memory, about what still resonates.
The concert will be followed by a Q&A/discussion with the audience.
Morocco
Five musicians from Morocco unfold the tradition of Arabo-Andalusian chamber music and combine classical works with contemporary compositions. Historical depth and contemporary sonic artistry weave into a journey through the North African and Mediterranean cultural space.
TRADITIONELL ANDALUSISCH · حبك القمر (en. Even the moon has fallen under your spell)
ANDALUSISCHE MUWASCHSCHAH · ريم رمتني (en. Reem cast me aside)
N. N. · يا قلبي خلي الحال (en. My heart, let things rest in their own truth)
TRADITIONELL CHAABI · العار يا العار (en. Have mercy, have mercy on me)
ANDALUSISCHE MUWASCHSCHAH · لحبيبي أرسل سلام (en. I send my greetings to my beloved)
TRADITIONELL ANDALUSISCH · أنا قد عيّا صبري (en. My patience has grown weary)
Argentina & Germany
The ni-va ensemble from Buenos Aires join forces with the musician Stellan Veloce and combine live electronics, improvisation, and algorithmically generated sequences into continuously evolving sounds. In their performance, fragile and dense soundscapes emerge that oscillate between the familiar and the indeterminate, calling the very act of listening into question.
Chamber music on a laptop? The ni-va Ensemble from Argentina brings it to Berlin. This live digital music project was founded by students on the Electroacoustic Composition programme at the National University of the Arts (UNA) in Buenos Aires. The ensemble focuses on exploring sound in real time. Their live improvisations combine various approaches to electroacoustic music, including acousmatics and musique concrète.
At FUTURE NOW Musical Diaries, the four-piece laptop ensemble from Buenos Aires presents an electroacoustic improvisation in four acts. To achieve this, they use synthesizers, sampling techniques, virtual instruments as well as self-programmed sounds and algorithms. The ensemble creates dense sonic spaces in which electronic, recorded and seemingly familiar sounds are constantly remixed. What do we hear when we cannot see how a sound is created? And how does our hearing change when the origin of a sound can no longer be clearly determined? The ensemble takes precisely this uncertainty as the starting point for a concert that sets perception, expectation and sonic imagination in motion, also using visual projections that move and change in response to the sound. At their concert as part of Young Euro Classic, the musician Stellan Veloce is supporting the ensemble. Their music is characterised by the warm tones of the cello combined with electronic elements. The five musicians improvise together, working with sounds in the moment, giving each performance a genuinely new timbre.
The concert will be followed by a Q&A/discussion with the audience.
Vietnam, Germany, Egypt, Argentina
Four musical biographies meet and, within the FUTURE NOW ensemble &ñịoن, form a shared space of listening and creation. From friction and convergence emerges a composition that does not resolve difference, but renders it productive.
Hearing, embracing and celebrating differences: four musical traditions, four biographies in a first-time musical encounter. The FUTURE NOW Ensemble &ñịoن explores what happens when different musical upbringings challenge and contradict one another. Through a collaborative creative process involving misunderstandings, unexpected common ground and the gentle unlearning of habits, a composition emerges which will be performed for the first time at FUTURE NOW Musical Diaries.
The ensemble consists of Berlin-based musicians working across disciplines. The Argentinian composer and sound artist Joaquín Macedo is dedicated to experimental music and collaboration with performers. For Laris / Lara Bäucker, the search for a connection with the audience is at the heart of their musical practice – through voice, performance and composition. As a composer, sound engineer and video artist, Vinh Tran, a Berliner with Vietnamese roots, works across an analogue-digital continuum. He modifies guitars with acoustic distortion devices, plays algorithmically derived patterns on the piano or uses the laptop as an instrument. Hatem Hamdy, born and raised in Cairo, combines Arab and Western traditions, drawing equally on his perspectives as an engineer and composer.
The result of this multifaceted encounter? No one is here representing a particular culture. Instead, music emerges from a shared process: not four individuals working side-by-side, but a shared collaboration that allows everyone to shine.
The concert will be followed by a Q&A/discussion with the audience.