It’s a week before Matteo Milleri is set to debut the first night of his Anyma residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere, and he’s standing in his minimalist Los Angeles home, VR set strapped to his head. He’s scrolling through the test visuals that his creative team beams to the device for review — around 20 tests per day that he parses over for about four or five hours — that will soon show on the domed venue’s 16K resolution wraparound screens.
“We’re just missing the final piece,” says the Italian-American electronic musician, cueing up the bespoke visuals that FKA Twigs and Ellie Goulding filmed for the eight shows. The technical part, which includes robotic arms playing cellos and a quantum computer replica, is pretty much done; Milleri is more concerned with whether the narrative holds.
“The final piece is called Human Now, and basically Eva” — the robot he created as an NFT in 2021 with visual co-creative director Alessio De Vecchi and 3D artist Filip Hodas, a centerpiece of Anyma performances — “is going to turn human to close the circle, and she’s going to be helped by a quantum being. But will it work? The piece is going to work, but will the transformation work? Is she human?”
Popular on Variety
Milleri’s attention to detail has been a crucial linchpin of his Anyma project, an immersive fantasia that blurs the line between concert, concept and cinema. With it, he marries lofty ruminations on humankind’s relation to AI with vivid animations and cutting-edge stage design. After years of developing the show on tour and at festivals, the 36-year-old felt that Sphere, where he became the first electronic musician to have a residency following Dead & Co, the Eagles and U2, was the perfect ambition-scaling venue to sunset his “Genesys” project, a multisensory experience powered by a pair of melodic techno albums.
“I started this project basically to explore possibilities beyond what’s physical. But I never had in mind to have it be dissociative, like in a VR. It was more about extended reality,” he says. “It was not even meant to tour, initially. It was more meant to be digital art and music in an extended reality. But as soon as I saw this building coming to life, I realized that what I had envisioned for the project could potentially be expressed max-ready much sooner than I thought, because this is like being in extended reality.”
At his home, where he just moved three months ago, Milleri talks candidly about his journey since he first announced Anyma on his birthday in May 2021. He largely lets the music and stage show speak for itself, rarely giving interviews, yet he’s open and remarkably loquacious while tracing his arc over several hours. It quickly becomes clear that music isn’t the primary vehicle for Milleri, but rather one of several cornerstones that form the foundation of what he’s trying to achieve: a living piece of art that questions reality by challenging and bewitching those who experience it.
It’s a mission that came into full focus during his Sphere residency, which kicked off on Dec. 27 and concluded on Saturday night. Across the eight shows, Anyma sold more than 130,000 tickets in the 20,000-capacity venue. Milleri initiated conversations with Sphere over a year ago and spent six months (with a one-month break to creative direct the Weeknd’s One Night Only concert in São Paulo) architecting “Afterlife Presents Anyma ‘The End of Genesys,’” an entirely self-funded show confected with a team of nearly 100 creatives from his Afterlife label, Sphere Studios and Woodblock Animation Studios. Once he learned of it, Milleri knew that only a place like Sphere, the state-of-the-art venue that opened in September 2023, could actualize the extended-reality experience the Anyma project intended to create.
“I wanted the show to be as immersive as possible everywhere, and that’s the success of it outside the Sphere already,” says Milleri. “We beat a lot of records — biggest screen in Chile, whatever. And it hit a roof really fast, budget-wise but even literally. You can’t go more than [a certain amount of] feet legally without it being an architectural project.”
The Sphere show, which he describes as a “cybernetic opera,” is an assault on the senses. The visual component on the domed screens is framed around four acts — Genesys, Humana, the End of Genesys and Quantum — that interrogate the relationship between human and machine in telling the story of “AI trying to get out of the box.” On the arena floor, Milleri stands atop a quantum computer replica tucked between real-life robot arms, constructed by Fredrik Gran and Jacob Mühlrad, playing the cello on glass pillars. Custom Midi controllers light up cable cords that snake around his setup, and he performs live to time codes on Ableton with enough elasticity to make space for guests including FKA Twigs, Empire of the Sun, Ellie Goulding and his frequent collaborator and girlfriend Grimes.
Miller’s core creative team — De Vecchi and Alexander Wessely, head creative and stage designer — oversaw all aspects of production, from managing the animators to constructing the set. De Vecchi, who first met Milleri after he pestered him on Instagram for a meeting, has been involved since Anyma’s inception, beginning with the robot Eva head that would inevitably grow to include a body. He described the Sphere process as grueling, sleeping only a few hours a night as he worked remotely from Ibiza.
“It’s just insane because you have so many constraints that come from how the pipeline is designed in the Sphere,” says De Vecchi, 44. “There’s a camera you have to use that is placed in a specific pace and has a specific focal line. There are composition rules, you don’t want people to vomit on each other. You don’t want to make them dizzy. So it was hard. It was not so much adapting the work; it was redesigning the work that also led to redesigning some of the concepts. Also making sure everyone at the Sphere, no matter how cheap the ticket is, gets to see a decent show, not an entirely warped, distorted vision.”
Milleri and De Vecchi
De Vecchi became the first piece to the Anyma puzzle at the onset of the pandemic when Milleri first began thinking about bridging the gap between audio and visual media in the live performance space. He had reached out to digital artists like Dexamœl and Giant Swan, but without a budget — “We didn’t have very much funding in the beginning because we were kind of broke, everyone thinks I wasn’t, but I was,” asserts Milleri — he struggled to convince collaborators to sign on. After some persuasion, De Vecchi agreed to work with Milleri in the ramp-up to Anyma’s debut at London’s Afterlife Printworks in 2022, riding high off Anyma’s viral remix of Meg Myers’ cover of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God).”
“Everything gambled on this one moment, my whole year of creativity,” recalls Milleri. His cultural cachet soon skyrocketed on social media, where hundreds of thousands of followers poured in on his accounts, and collaborators and creatives started coming to the table. Milleri scaled the visuals in tandem with his first “Genesys” album that released in 2023, a record staked on “pure intuition” that was made without an inherent understanding of songwriting fundamentals. (“I didn’t really know what a song structure was supposed to be,” he says, “nor did I care.”)
Milleri soon moved to Los Angeles and started toiling on “Genesys II,” a firmer melodic techno album with increasing pop flair thanks to working proximity to artists like Rüfüs Du Soul and Grimes. “I didn’t have a label, I was independent until last year,” says Milleri. Afterlife, the label he launched in 2016 with his Tale of Us group member Carmine Conte (MRAK), partnered with Interscope in June 2023, and he only signed a publishing deal three months ago. “All these things I had to learn and catch up and then now, just started to grasp the surface of it. Now I can go into a session with high-level artists and coordinate and get my thoughts through, but it’s not easy, especially coming from techno. It’s the opposite of what I learned.”
Over the years, Anyma had cornered a space in the dance music scene, building a legion of core followers from Afterlife shows and a side-quest at Coachella. So when the first Sphere gig was announced as a standalone New Year’s Eve event in July, and additional dates were added due to high demand, it was met with equal parts intrigue and, admittedly, head-scratching. Social media was quick to complain that other electronic acts like Eric Prydz, or even his Sphere openers Tiësto and Sebastian Ingrosso, deserved the booking more.
“People don’t know the story of me. I think it happens with a lot of big artists, like they popped up out of nowhere,” he says. “But actually, no, it’s four or five years of grinding, and for me 15 years. I have not stumbled into this. It’s all been focusing to one pivotal moment, which I think for me now is this. It goes further than what you expect sometimes.”
One of the reasons Milleri agreed to an interview, he explains, is to set the record straight. Social media is quick to call Anyma’s success a product of nepotism, as his father Francesco Milleri became CEO of eyewear company EssilorLuxottica this year. But Milleri describes his career as a rinse-repeat of funneling any money earned back into his art. He notes, for instance, that there will be no concert film from his Sphere performances, as he’d have to pay for it out of pocket.
“Since it’s a new project and it’s strange, it looks like you need a lot of financing,” he says. “People are like, ‘The guy got his dad to pay for all his projects.’ Blah blah blah. Like, look, I don’t know if that’s what you want to be saying around because you’re just going to be telling some kid he has a dream that he can’t do it because he’s broke, because you don’t know what happened here. But this is what I do. I think I do it at a very high level and dedicated my life to it. This is not the platform they gave me to express my creativity, [yet] it seems to be resonating. The rest is up to God. I can’t do more. So questioning myself, I don’t do it, because it would be a waste of the emotions I put into my art.”
The visceral experience of his Sphere residency rang out over the holidays, when fan-captured clips of the shows dominated timelines and For You feeds. It was all pushing towards a “Genesys” finale, a culmination of years of actualizing imagination. Milleri plans to draw this Anyma chapter to a close with a third “Genesys” album, and is already ideating the project’s future as he explores quantum computing and quantum universes, concepts introduced to him by Grimes. Bits of that were explored in the back half of his Sphere shows, the stepping stone for what’s next.
“This arrived to a point of saturation,” says Milleri. “When ideas get recycled a bit too much, I’m the first one to think, what’s next? I want to move forward. But I want to give it a very glorified ending, because it was such an important part of my music and my life.”