At Polifonic the landscape is not a background, it is part of the show. When the sunset falls on the centennial olive trees of the Masseria Capece, the led lights of the stage light up together with the darkness that comes. On the stage “Stone”, made in a red ground quarry, the bass rebound against the rock walls and the music mixes with the surrounding landscape.
For its eighth edition, from July 22 to 26, Polifonic has reported in Valle d’Itria over 70 international artists, distributed on five evenings and three locations, Cala Maka, Masseria Capece and Le Palme Beach Club, with the addition this year of a fourth stage plus one: the Echoes Stage, born from the collaboration with Rinse FM France, among the internationally reference broadcasters for electronic music. The theme chosen for the 2026 edition, Sensory Bloom, has not remained a marketing label: it has guided concrete choices on how sound, light and space had to intertwine with the landscape of the valley, between site-specific installations designed specifically for those places and a fair plan that left the poles sufficient physical distance not to interfere with each other.
And it is precisely that distance, they tell the chronicles from the festival, to have made the difference about the experience. Living outdoor clubbing, without the four walls of a club, has meant being able to choose where to stay, under cash, in the heart of the track or in the most peripheral areas, without ever losing freedom of movement. It is a fruition of natural music, almost physical, which the festival built on purpose exploiting the breadth of the 18 hectares of Masseria Capece, a estate dating back to the fifteenth century.
On the artistic front, the lineup put together legends of the international scene and names that are rewriting the present of electronics. The back-to-back between Carl Craig and Moodymann, two pillars of Detroit school, crossed techno, house, soul and jazz in an unpredictable dialogue. MACE has brought its experimental sound universe, between hypnotic rhythms and melodic openings, with an industrial visual design that has dialogued with the natural frame of the masseria. Sama’ Abdulhadi confirmed his role as the world techno reference in a set between the night and the dawn of July 25, while Chet Faker brought on the main stage the second Italian date of his tour A Love For Strangers, mixing electronics, soul and songwriting in a more intimate bracket. Around them, names such as Ben UFO, Tiga, Djrum, Job Jobse, Lena Willikens and the live Voices From The Lake held together a programming capable of ranging from techno to house, to ambient and dub.
Behind the scenes, the festival is the result of non-commercial choices, said Marco Sala, who founded the festival together with Michele Girone. The artistic casting follows the personal taste of the duo, more than the logic of cassette: the stated goal is to return an electronic scene of niche but capillary, rooted in a territory that, Sala told, is cradle and culture of electronic music since the nineties.
This is where the vision of the future of the project is born. Sala imagines a model that can come out of the borders of Puglia, bringing elsewhere the same formula that made Polifonic recognizable: a festival able to overcome the very definition of musical event, until it becomes a complete cultural experience, that interweaves landscape, art and community. In the future, he told Sala, he sees a model that from Puglia can be exported: to the showcases organized in Europe and in Italy will follow other evolutionary steps, also on the plane of events. To replicate elsewhere what you already do here means to have more stages and to give more possibilities of expression to the talents of electronic music.
L’articolo When the masseria becomes pure energy: within the eighth edition of the Polifonic Festival comes from IlNewyorkese.
L’articolo Quando la masseria diventa energia pura: dentro l’ottava edizione del Polifonic Festival proviene da IlNewyorkese.
