Locus Solus · Rêverie · Vertiges — three worlds where sound becomes space.

From October 31 – November 9, 2025, the Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF) will host three visionary musical premieres that blur the boundaries between the concert hall and virtual reality. Presented by Ensemble Contrechamps, one of Europe’s most daring contemporary music ensembles, the program features Locus Solus by Raphaël Raccuia & Nicolas Carrel, Rêverie by Sachie Kobayashi, and Vertiges by André Decosterd — two of them created entirely inside PatchWorld.

Festival visitors will step into an unprecedented concert experience, where live instruments and virtual environments merge, blending acoustic textures, spatialized sound, and poetic machinery. ✦ Three worlds experiment in “augmented listening”

At the heart of the GIFF × Contrechamps program lies Locus Solus, a 15-minute immersive composition by Raphaël Raccuia and Nicolas Carrel, created entirely inside PatchWorld. Alongside it, two other world premieres — Rêverie by Sachie Kobayashi and Vertiges by André Decosterd — extend the same vision: bringing together instrumental virtuosity and the expressive plasticity of VR sound.

Each work invites the audience to explore a “unique place” where the borders between concert and installation dissolve — a proposal for augmented listening, in which every gesture, vibration, and virtual connection shapes a shared sensory field.

✦ Locus Solus — the imaginary ascent of sound machines

Locus Solus means unique place in Latin, and the title perfectly describes the immersive universe imagined by Raphaël Raccuia and Nicolas Carrel. Viewers enter a singular three-dimensional space — infinite yet enclosed, ruled by its own logic — a surreal, mechanical organism inspired by Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus Solus. It is a Tinguely-like machine that wants to speak and become a musician.

The piece unfolds as a hypnotic ascent through a landscape of autonomous sonic mechanisms — machines célibataires — that produce words, noises, and music. Built and performed inside PatchWorld, the work turns code into sculptural matter: algorithms, patch cables, and sonic circuits become visible, surrounding the audience in an operatic ballet of sound and motion.

Inside the headset, the audience hears both live musicians — oboe (Valentine Collet) and double bass (Noëlle Reymond) — and their spatialized echoes, impossible to separate from the virtual ones.

“It was important for us to thwart the expectations usually associated with VR,” explain Raccuia and Carrel. “Rather than chasing thrills or vertigo, we favoured slowness, comfort, and the availability of listening. Our acoustic, analogue sound palette keeps a respectful distance from the commercial visions of the metaverse.”


I asked them to describe an example of such a machine:

At the beginning of the experiment, the first machine forms words of two or more whispered syllables. As the spectator slowly rises into the air, a network of spheres arranged in a tree structure is activated, receiving at regular intervals an impulse propagating from the top to the bottom. At each intersection, it can take one path or the other, to the left or to the right, according to a Bernoulli process (a probability space). Initially, the impulse only goes in one direction, inexorably forming the same word. But little by little, the probability of bifurcation increases until it reaches parity, thus forming a multitude of different words, the meaning of which remains to be determined. Each headset plays its own dice, so that no two experiences are ever identical, and the results of the other instances in progress in the room can be heard in the background.

✦ Rêverie — Sachie Kobayashi’s trans-instrumental dialogue

The second PatchWorld premiere, Rêverie, by Japanese-Swiss composer Sachie Kobayashi, continues her research into trans-instrumentalism: the fluid continuum between acoustic and digital instruments. Created in collaboration with Contrechamps musicians, Rêverie explores how instruments dream of one another — transforming timbre into architecture, gesture into landscape.

✦ Live musicians inside virtual worlds

For each session at GIFF, about fifteen audience members will enter the experience simultaneously, wearing VR headsets while surrounded by Contrechamps performers playing live. The result is a hybrid concert where real and virtual coexist: listeners can no longer distinguish what comes from physical space and what resonates from the virtual realm.

As Raccuia and Carrel describe it, “The playing of the instrumentalists in the room, perceived in fragments through pre-recorded and spatialised sounds in VR, shifts the experience towards a live performance, establishing a direct dialogue with the virtual universe.”

✦ PatchWorld as a compositional instrument

Both Locus Solus and Rêverie were conceived inside PatchWorld — our immersive creative platform that merges music, code, and performance into one fluid environment.
Unlike traditional audio software, PatchWorld allows artists to build sound directly in space, connecting musical logic with visual form. Every patch, every sonic algorithm, becomes part of the world the audience inhabits.

“The specificity of PatchWorld,” explain the artists, “is that the piece is written directly in the same space that hosts the audience. The code becomes visible — machines, mechanisms, and connections form the scenography.”

✦ A glimpse into the future of music creation

This collaboration between Contrechamps Ensemble and PatchWorld opens a new chapter and vast spectrum of possibilities in contemporary music! For the audience, it’s a poetic and meditative journey; for the artists, a new way to think sound as space — and space as music.

🗓️ World Premieres at the Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF)

October 31 – November 9, 2025 – Geneva, Switzerland
Presented by Ensemble Contrechamps in collaboration with GIFF and PatchXR

Locus Solus – Raphaël Raccuia & Nicolas Carrel
Rêverie – Sachie Kobayashi
Vertiges – André Decosterd

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