Between April 18 and 20, IKEA and TELEKOM ELECTRONIC BEATS will turn Assembling the Future, the IKEA exhibition at Padiglione Visconti for Salone del Mobile, into a pop-up club. Introducing Public Club, a 3-night visual and auditive journey merging established international and local DJs, embracing the community and club culture.

A better Mistake and Metaraph, hosting Public club on the 19th of April, give us a glimpse into their creative journeys and ventures, coming together for the shared passion of music and rave culture bringing to Milan an event that will surely leave an impact on the city's electronic music scene.

A Better Mistake and Metaraph, gives us a glimpse into their creative journeys and ventures, coming together for the shared passion of music and rave culture bringing to Milan an event that will surely leave an impact on the city's electronic music scene.

Simone Ferraro - A Better Mistake

You're the co-founder and creative director of A Better Mistake, whose slogan is Creative Disobedience. What is the inspiration behind the brand?

Creative disobedience means to set minds free to not have any kind of boundaries, to not be ashamed of who you are and to invite people to spend more time focusing and who they really are, understanding their own machine, how they work, how they think and with a long process of trying to reach full expression through creativity. So we wanted to create something that was gravitating around the importance of creativity in a world where there is this simulation of freedom, where people are not used to this anymore to start from a blank page and just have their own ideas. We believe that creativity is the tool that we can use to build individual identities and overall bring those identities to have free expression.
I think in the last 20 years, fashion started having a strong role in society, probably after what Virgil did. I see fashion designers having a very strong impact as maybe could have been during the 70s with musicians, like Bob Dylan giving messages through music because people were listening to it, that was the media that could have been used to communicate. Nowadays I see the younger generation totally controlling the codes of fashion. They made fashion, it belongs to them, and they made it its own language. So suddenly fashion designers have this opportunity to have direct dialogue, speaking the same language. Kids nowadays use fashion to express themselves, to use it on social media to declare their belongings and their thoughts, and that's the point where we can meet them and have a dialogue and bring new ideas through fashion.

How has the journey of building your own brand been? What's in store for the future for A Better Mistake?

Building your own brand has been and still is a dream coming true. You can give space to your imaginary worlds and you build an environment that can support that vision and evolve the narrative and create new ones.
It's a very complicated process, but without a doubt, it's the best job and life experience I've had until now. I think probably the most amazing thing is having the opportunity to work with such amazingly talented people. Starting from my team, is made up of very young and talented guys, musicians, actors, dancers, choreographers, and so many other people who we have been working together and sharing ideas and projects with. This is something that personally makes me very happy and makes the team happy.
A Better Mistake started as a fashion brand but I think it represents a community of people thinking differently, believing in creativity, and share 24/7 the same space. We built this beautiful space here in Milan which is our studio, which is like our laboratory or hub where we spend all of our time, where we meet our friends and our community, we play our music and we create our prototypes.
I consider this just the beginning of the journey, the first three years have been more focused on ourselves, and in a way, we are trying to build a strong narrative. I think building a strong narrative is the most important part of a project like this. Knowing what you want to say and how to say it, knowing this concept and starting to build a way of thinking and talking.
We started in 2020, so with covid, we had a hard moment but at the same time we had the chance not to be in the market from day 0, we had the chance to test ourselves, to test ideas, to work on them and to chop what was not good for us and select the things that really made sense. So what is coming up for the future is getting bigger and establishing all the things we have been doing until today, a stronger collection coming up. There will also be a big collaboration already in 2023 and some new in 2024. We will have new events. We are very close to music and that's somewhere we want to get more into and expand our language and territory.

The brand is curating the party with Metaraph and 999999999. What can we expect from this event?

We had the chance to collaborate with Electronic Beats and Ikea for this event. What we can expect from this event is merging our vision in terms of community and raving, fashion and of course music. I think these are the values of A Better Mistake that we hardly share and want to bring on stage for this event during Milan Design Week 2023. I´m glad and happy to bring on stage our big friends and artists 999999999 and Metaraph. We have an amazing relationship with both of them. I just think it's interesting to offer into a scene like Milan and design week that maybe is not used to attending these kind of events bringing something that is something inside the raving culture, that is something that is more democratic, like bringing people together where for a couple of hours you can leave your judgment and thoughts outside the door and you can just stop talking and enjoy yourself and the music and basically dance, that's the most important part. This is a big chance for me to work in a huge event together with big artists, and with people I share most of my life and vision with. I'm very happy Electronic Beats and A Better Mistake are starting this relationship which I'm sure will last a long time. We have projects on the table for 2023 which I'm sure will evolve into something bigger for 2024.

Metaraph

Hi Metaraph! Can you please introduce yourself? Where are you from? How did you get started in music?

I am Raffaello, also known as Métaraph, 27 years old, born in Puglia with mixed background between Italian, Chinese and Maori. My preferred pronouns are they/them. When I was 12, I studied piano for 3 years and that was my first contact with music ever. Afterwards, at 15, I started studying dance - from ballet to hip-hop to contemporary and more, this was my second approach to music too. After I moved to London, I started with performance art at 21, reconnecting music and body movements under a conceptual approach. At 22, I started to DJ and incorporate my other disciplines, creating a multidisciplinary approach to it and then, two years later, I started to also produce electronic music. All those steps before I actually started to DJ are essential to understand my approach to music and the art of djing and crowd control.

How would you describe your style musically and aesthetically? What is the inspiration behind?

Musically I like to create a journey that tells a story, going through different layers of dimensions and sounds, it is about creating contrasts that create new emotions or tensions. My big inspiration for that is life itself, with its lows and highs, with its lights and darkness. I would describe it as ponderously delicate, brightly dark and viscerally transcendental. As for my aesthetic, it goes back to the days I used to live in London, so fascinated by all the expressive subcultures that I have encountered, goth, punk, club kids and more and all of those elements are in constant evolution and metamorphosis reflected in my aesthetic.

What have you noticed about the Italian raving scene and how do you think it can improve? What differences have you noticed playing abroad versus in Italy?

In the last year, I noticed that lots of new collectives have been rising in Italy promoting such harder sounds which is very different from the generic likes that go towards more deep techno or tech house. Also in terms of aesthetic, I have seen big changes in how the people are dressing and I think it is also thanks to all the social media nowadays that portrays videos of parties from other countries, creating new trends for clubwear. Unfortunately something that I do not see as much yet is about the mindset and attitude which you have and the manners, the culture. This is not something that is possible to transmit through tik tok videos, this is something that comes with time and with education, it‘s about creating safer spaces, with more awareness, and much more.