At Patchlab Digital Art Festival in Kraków, audiences experienced something quite rare: a live performance where tradition, technology, and virtual space evolved together in real time.
ALHAJA, created and performed by Javier Muñoz, Luis Muñoz, and Enrique Moya Rosa, is an immersive audiovisual concert inspired by the folk traditions of Castilla-La Mancha and Andalucía. These cultural roots are reimagined through virtual instruments, electronic music, and generative visuals. This was all performed live inside PatchWorld while unfolding on stage for a physical audience.
ALHAJA is a statement about the future of live performance: phygital, embodied, and collective, a performance between two realities.
We sat down with the artists to talk about folklore, virtual instruments, and why PatchWorld became central to their creative process.
PatchXR: ALHAJA is deeply rooted in Spanish folklore. How did that influence the project?
ALHAJA: For us, folklore isn’t something fixed or nostalgic, it’s a living system and we are part of it. We come from regions like Castilla-La Mancha and Andalucía, where rhythm, voice, and ornamentation are part of everyday culture.
In ALHAJA, we treat these elements almost like raw data: palmas rhythms, traditional melodies, geometric patterns inspired by mosaics. Instead of preserving folklore as an object, we wanted to let it evolve. By translating these elements into a digital ecosystem, they can transform, recombine, and exist in dialogue with contemporary electronic music and generative visuals.
PatchXR: Why did you choose PatchWorld as the environment for this performance?
ALHAJA: PatchWorld started as a practical solution for collaboration, especially when working across distance. But very quickly, it became something much more important, almost a creative sanctuary.
What makes PatchWorld unique for us is that it’s not just a tool, but a space. It allows us to connect sound, visuals, gesture, and interaction in one shared environment. We weren’t just performing with software, we were building and inhabiting our own instrument together.
PatchXR: How did working inside a virtual space shape the way ALHAJA was created?
ALHAJA: When you work inside a virtual world, composition, performance, and spatial design all happen at the same time. Sound becomes something physical; you sculpt it with movement and gesture. Visuals aren’t decoration, they’re part of the musical language.
This created a continuous feedback loop. What we heard influenced what we saw, and vice versa. PatchWorld didn’t just host the project, the tool became the medium, and that fundamentally changed how the piece evolved.
PatchXR: What does performing in VR change compared to a traditional stage?
ALHAJA: There’s definitely a shift. Wearing a headset means you lose direct eye contact with the audience, but you gain something else. Inside the virtual space, there’s a different kind of intimacy between performers. We’re sharing a dimension that the audience can witness on screen, even if they’re not inside it themselves. The audience experiences a dual reality: the physical performance on stage, and the virtual world being shaped live.
PatchXR: How did the audience respond at Patchlab Festival?
ALHAJA: The reaction was very positive. Patchlab attracts an audience that’s open to experimentation, and people engaged deeply with the hybrid nature of the performance. People were curious, not just about the music, but about how it was happening. Many told us it felt like watching new artistic possibilities unlock in real time.
What stood out was that people didn’t see the technology as a gimmick. They focused on the atmosphere, the emotion, and the way sound and visuals interacted. That’s exactly what we were hoping for.
PatchXR: How do you see the future of performances like ALHAJA?
ALHAJA: We see the future as phygital, a continuous dialogue between physical venues and virtual spaces. Our goal is to keep evolving the project and present it internationally, adapting it to different contexts while keeping its core identity. ALHAJA was designed to be flexible so It can exist on a traditional stage, in a hybrid concert setting, or fully online.
ALHAJA embodies what PatchWorld enables at its best: a mature creative platform where artists can collaborate, perform, and invent new forms of live expression.
