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ANXIETY SUCKS, the new project by HISEKA, is a collective work that takes shape through music, photography, writing and a printed edition conceived as an integral part of the experience.
The project unfolds across three different sections, corresponding to three states and three different perceptual dimensions:
ASPHYXIA - BLACK
INTERRUPTION - GREY
TOMORROW - WHITE
The musical sequence also follows the same path, moving from the darkest, most oppressive atmospheres of the BLACK section, through the suspension and the interruption represented by GREY, to WHITE, where the sound opens out towards a lighter register. The beginning and the end of the whole work are given sonic shape by two new compositions by HISEKA, conceived as the opening and the closing of the sequence.
The participating sound artists, in order of appearance, are Andrea Bellucci, Matteo Uggeri, Deison, Gianluca Favaron, Lucio Bonaldo, Testing Vault, Richard B. Lewis, Gianluca Becuzzi, Andrea Marutti, Laura Lupa Bisceglia, Giovanni Lami, Julinko, Upto23, FM, TeZ, Splendore, Francesco Lurgo, Nimh, Michele Borsoi, Sigillum S, DJ Balli, Heli Nemesis, Spheric, Francesco Giannico, Marco Bertoni, Simon Balestrazzi, Francesco Paladino, Ramona Ponzini, Le Forbici di Manitù, Anacleto Vitolo, Fabio Orsi.
ANXIETY SUCKS is published in an A5 fold-out box, designed to gather the different components of the project and set them in relation to one another. The box holds 3 CDs, a 20-page large booklet, 33 photographic cards, 3 cards for the tracklists and 3 different bookmarks.
The front of the 33 cards carries a selection of images from the photographic work made by HISEKA, while the back gathers the credits and the texts by the participating artists.
The booklet also documents the journey of “a sad song for A.” through photographs of the slips collected at its presentations, keeping a tangible trace of the encounter with the people and the artists who helped bring it into being.
The result is an object that does not simply hold the music but extends it, through the images, words and materials gathered along the way.
“Anxiety Sucks” by Paolo Bertoni (Blow Up magazine)
The genesis and development of 'a sad song for A.', conceived as a multimedia project in which poetry, photography and sound were fused in an exploration of anxiety, had unfolded naturally along the firm thread of an intellectual abstraction, in fact self-sufficient, even though it had spread outwards from an individual lived experience. In the initial intentions of its makers, Stefano Gentile and Giulia Dal Vecchio, also an indissoluble entity under the name Hiseka, within that dimension, realised and completed in a superb quadruple box set, the idea of embarking on a series of public presentations had probably not even surfaced.
All at once the impulse not to remain within the sphere of private introspective theorising, though supported in "a sad song for A." by the contribution of the albums by Anacleto Vitolo, Gigi Masin, Fabio Orsi, led them out into the open, across ten evenings between January and June 2026. With the addition of further performative and visual elements, these became an evolution and an expansion of the theme, now perceptible as something tactile through the encounter with those taking part in each event, in a collective deepening of the self focused on a sharing, by no means to be taken for granted and not necessarily resolving anything, of a critical experience that borders on the inevitable.
The original concept of 'anxiety' thus acquired a manifold character, like a box that can hold differentiated sources, manifestations and reactions, just as the content of the three CDs of "Anxiety Sucks" is heterogeneous - a title which, so as not to be marked solely as a jolt, a vital one, of rebellion, elided a potential exclamation mark, latent all the same - which is the completion of the act that preceded it.
On the programme, one track each from thirty-one names that cover a wide span of the Italian experimental scene, brought together on this occasion by the same foundations, the most striking of them the heartbeat, quickened, and the breathing, laboured, samples from fragments of "Affogando in un mare di polvere", the Hiseka work that was included in the box set mentioned above.
"There are as many anxieties as there are people living with them", Giulia writes in the introductory text that precedes the run of pages devoted to the individual experimenters, who set out here their own relationship with anxiety: some left the space completely blank; some, in the face of an iron rationality, declared that they do not know it; some wove its praises as a drive, as nourishment; some condensed it into the name of a drug; some rendered it in lyric form; some referred to their own descents into panic attacks; some understand it as inherent to creativity, as 'muse or enemy'; some simply accepted it, neutral, as a component of themselves; some instead related it to the writing and structure of the piece they gave, linked for instance to the nagging properties of BPM, or shaped through a numerical sequence, applied as a compositional guide, derived from the molecular configuration of an anti-anxiety drug.
The same can be said of what, again, we see in the booklet, in which the plain white cards handed out at the entrance to the presentations are reproduced, heaped together in a kind of dada poem, cards on which people were asked to write down, to translate, what the word 'anxiety' evokes. This implicitly underlines that the sense of the project is not to hand over, or even to put forward, answers, but rather to be a collection of testimonies which in their diversity lead back to a way of belonging to a shared feeling, almost an acknowledgement of human complicity, which, in the total dispersal of ideal bonds we are witnessing, seeks to recover the strength not to be crushed by the pervasive sense of loneliness that accompanies that malaise, represented also by a stirring and at times unsettling series of photographs of considerable impact in which the anxious state, in various settings, is symbolised by a large plastic sheet that covers and oppresses a woman's body.
A single, discreet, suggestion can be inferred: breathing is the path to take towards a course that leads from asphyxia to tomorrow.
order Deluxe 3CD Box set, ltd. 300 copies
order Bundle #1:
- Hiseka / Various Artists "Anxiety Sucks" Deluxe 3CD Box set, ltd. 300 copies
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Anacleto Vitolo "Live Panic" CD
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Fabio Orsi "Live Dream" CD
 
order Bundle #2:
- Hiseka / Various Artists "Anxiety Sucks" Deluxe 3CD Box set, ltd. 300 copies
- Anacleto Vitolo "Live Panic" CD
-
Fabio Orsi "Live Dream" CD
- Anacleto Vitolo / Hiseka / Gigi Masin / Fabio Orsi "a sad song for A." Deluxe 4CD Box set
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