Some artists spend years building other people’s sound — until that sound becomes their own voice. AKA5HA is one of them.
Electronic songwriting where no single element dominates: voice, samples, synthesizers and acoustic instruments transform together. On stage, a large LED wall will host visuals curated by the artist himself — because the image, too, is part of this unstable balance.
AKA5HA closes the 24th edition of Imaginaria with an open-to-all evening — a closing party where music is not background noise, but a final act. The best possible way to say goodbye.
The Artist
AKA5HA
AKA5HA (pronounced Akasha) was born to a Bolognese father and a Sardinian mother and currently lives in Bologna. A trained pianist, his artistic journey begins with production: years spent building tracks for other artists in the urban and electronic scene, working with samples, programming, studio technique, mixing and mastering — with a particular focus on the voice.
Before stepping into the spotlight, he spent a long time on the sound side — building music for others, refining a craft he now channels into his own writing rather than keeping it separate. His first forays into authorship, including Incanto e Disperazione (2022, self-released) and the founding of the collective Matching Criteria, mark the moment when technique begins to become language.
Rifiorirai, produced, mixed and mastered by AKA5HA himself, with artistic direction co-shared with IOSONOUNCANE, was released on 7 November 2025 on digital and vinyl via Tanca. A rebirth without consolation: the album begins with farewell, moves through grief and disorientation, and settles into a lucid rarefaction. It emerges from the constant dialogue between urban influences — in the use of words, the posture of the voice, autotune and digital synths — the world of acid, raw electronics, closer at times to techno; and folk echoes with wide dynamics that often bind the two worlds together.
On 26 June, non è uno; sono due was released — five tracks written in the immediate aftermath, in the creative wake of Rifiorirai. A more essential, more organic EP: fewer layers, but the ones that remain keep returning, insisting. A single story in twenty minutes. Available on digital and coloured vinyl.
The present is an electronic songwriting project where voice and sound hold each other in unstable equilibrium — neither dominates, both transform.
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Ex Monastero di San Benedetto · Conversano
The evening takes shape in a space that carries centuries of memory and transformation — the very same raw materials Imaginaria has always worked with. The festival is built on the conviction that cinema is a language capable of reaching what words alone cannot: the inner vision, the dream, the metamorphosis. That same conviction guides the choice to close each edition with a live set that is not mere entertainment, but a fully realised artistic act.
