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In a time of frenetic music programming and instant gratification, Lost Music Festival carves a slower, more enigmatic path – literally and metaphorically. Set within Italy’s vast bamboo labyrinth near Parma, it unfolds as a quiet pilgrimage through sound and space. The Labirinto della Masone shapes the festival’s pace and rhythm. Here, disorientation is intentional, stillness provocative, and getting lost becomes a way of arriving. Artistic Director Luca Giudici leads us through its winding logic.
Lost (an acronym for Labyrinth Original Soundtrack) eschews the usual festival formula: no headliners, no main stage, no engineered peaks. Instead, its rhythm is dictated by architecture. Set within the Labirinto della Masone, a sprawling bamboo maze near Parma, Lost takes its cues from a structure made not for speed, but for wandering. Conceived by Italian designer and publisher Franco Maria Ricci, the labyrinth was born of a promise to his friend Jorge Luis Borges, and that lineage of magical realism continues to echo through both the space and Lost’s curatorial approach. ‘The labyrinth is absolutely at the core of how I think about the festival’, says Artistic Director Luca Giudici. ‘It’s not just the background – it really shapes how things unfold’.
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Labirinto della Masone: Between the walls of meaning
Inspired by the mythic pull of labyrinths, Ricci envisioned a maze as both a site of wonder and a sanctuary for reflection. Unlike traditional hedge mazes, he chose bamboo: fast-growing, resilient, and alive with motion. Spanning eight hectares and made from over 200,000 plants, the labyrinth rises from the flat fields of Fontanellato in a star-shaped design by architects Pier Carlo Bontempi and Davide Dutto. At its centre lie Ricci’s neoclassical buildings, housing his art collection, a library, and a chapel.
Mazes, historically, have always carried dual meanings: they can represent both journeys of confusion and paths to transcendence. From ancient Greek myths like the Minotaur’s labyrinth to medieval pilgrimage mazes carved into cathedral floors, these structures represent a journey inward toward th e self and outward again. In Ricci’s hands, the labyrinth becomes a site of temporal dislocation, a space that invites slowness, surrender, and spatial unknowing. ‘Most architecture helps you to move faster. Labyrinths do the opposite. They ask you to slow down, to get a bit lost.’, Luca explains.
'Most architecture helps you to move faster. Labyrinths do the opposite'
Cultivating a sense of shared time
That ethos informs the entire curation. What began with founder and project manager of the Lost musical project Mattia Amarù’s instinct to place music within the labyrinth’s winding paths has since grown into a multidimensional experience: long listening sessions, overnight stays, and the subtle, shifting feeling of time stretching. ‘You don’t walk to a stage - you find it’, Luca tells us. ‘It’s not just about what’s happening, but how time passes while it happens.’ Within this context, music becomes a means of orienting oneself, a way to reveal and be revealed by the space itself. It’s in this immersive, languid slowness that Lost finds its identity.
Part gathering, part introspective journey, Lost exists in the in-between. ‘More than anything, I hope it feels intimate’, says Luca. ‘Lost is kind of like a collective ritual, but at the same time, it’s very personal.’ Within the maze’s disorienting paths and shifting tempos, each person carves their own experience. Some might sink into stillness; others might be stirred, even unsettled. There’s no prescribed way to feel. Only the invitation to tune into a different rhythm, one where time stretches into unrecognisable shapes and sound becomes something to move through, together and alone.
Part gathering, part introspective journey, Lost exists in the in-between. ‘More than anything, I hope it feels intimate’, says Luca. ‘Lost is kind of like a collective ritual, but at the same time, it’s very personal.’ Within the maze’s disorienting paths and shifting tempos, each person carves their own experience. Some might sink into stillness; others might be stirred, even unsettled. There’s no prescribed way to feel. Only the invitation to tune into a different rhythm, one where time stretches into unrecognisable shapes and sound becomes something to move through, together and alone.
The labyrinth’s soundtrack
In keeping with the artistic vision of its founder, Lost’s curation weaves together art, experience, and experimentation, cultivating a contemplative, multisensory atmosphere. This year’s lineup explores the deeper reaches of the electronic music continuum, showcasing adventurous acts like LOIDIS (the dub-infused alias of ambient virtuoso Huerco S), mu tate & Nexcyia, and Piezo b2b Upsammy, alongside completely new live shows from Hesaitix, the world premiere of GRIEND (Puce Mary & Rainy Miller), and MOBBS & Susu Laroche, presenting their collaborative debut, ZERO. In a striking shift of texture, Otay:onii will deliver an acoustic concert with a grand piano – a rare moment of stillness at the heart of the happening.
The music doesn’t direct attention so much as dissolve it. ‘In a place like this,’ Luca explains, ‘sound becomes more than atmosphere – it turns into a kind of map.’ The soundtrack becomes a tool for (dis)orientation, and a catalyst for transformation. ‘You don’t walk to a stage – you find it.’ And once you do, sound and structure begin to mirror each other.
'You don’t walk to a stage – you find it'
This spatial disorientation invites a slower, more embodied mode of listening. The soundtrack becomes a tool for (dis)orientation, shifting between suspended stillness and immersive intensity. Lost draws from the same mythic and esoteric currents that shaped Franco Maria Ricci’s original vision: symbolism, mystery, the transformative power of the unknown. It’s a natural fit for Luca, whose curatorial language is steeped in symbolism and transformation. ‘The sound had to reflect that tension – something that could shift between suspended, quiet moments and more intense, almost overwhelming ones. I like to work with tempo and contrast. It’s never just one emotion. It needs to move.’
Over time, the relationship between sound, space, and nature has deepened into something more-than-human; the labyrinth ‘speaks back’. Everything matters: how the bamboo sways, how people move, where light falls, where silence lingers. This organic unpredictability resists control – and that, too, is the point: ‘We build with the space, not just inside it.’
A living architecture
The character of Lost can be traced to a line from a conversation between Franco Maria Ricci and Jorge Luis Borges: ‘Tutto ciò che sta ai margini della norma’, which translates to ‘everything that exists on the edge of the norm’. A quote that Luca stumbled upon in the early phases of shaping the festival as a concept. It felt like a perfect articulation of what Lost was becoming: a project unfolding at the borders of convention, guided as much by intuition as by structure: ‘That edge, that space just outside of what’s considered normal – that’s where I’ve always felt Lost belongs.’
Designed as a site of wonder and reflection, Ricci’s maze mapped a path that would one day host cultural and artistic exploration. Even as the festival grows, its foundation remains intimate, flexible, and deeply human. ‘It’s built by the people, with the people’, he says. Everyone involved works closely on the ground during the festival. ‘That’s a key part. It keeps us connected to the community and helps the whole thing stay human, flexible, and real.’
As for what’s ahead, Lost isn’t chasing scale, but depth – an ongoing dialogue between history, space, and sonic experimentation. In a time when cultural experiences are often designed for instant consumption, Lost proposes something slower, more intricate. In Luca’s vision, the future lies in ‘staying close to the DNA of Lost – that thin line around the margins of the norm’. The festival’s sonic direction, he explains, will follow a ‘natural evolution, not a shift’, prioritising intimacy and curatorial precision over expansion. More than anything, Lost is a space for artistic risk, for experimentation without spectacle. This year, that ethos takes shape through two world premieres. ‘That’s the kind of direction I care about’, concludes Luca. ‘Not bigger, just more precise and meaningful.’
Lost is not simply hosted within the labyrinth. Rather, it exists in constant dialogue with it. Franco Maria Ricci’s vision, shaped by ancient mythologies and literary imagination, laid out a space where disorientation could become discovery. Today, that architecture becomes an invisible collaborator, a scenography that guides experience as much as it contains it. In Lost, design is not a static backdrop but a living, breathing presence that asks its roamers to move differently, to listen differently, and to inhabit time and space differently.
Lost Music Festival 2025 is taking place from July 4th - 6th. See you at the Labirinto della Masone.
