Don Diablo
Anyma — is the solo musical and audiovisual project of Italian producer and DJ Matteo Milleri, a member of Tale Of Us and co-founder of Afterlife. The project emerged in the early 2020s and combines electronic music with digital animation, stage design and continuous visual storytelling. Anyma’s main musical direction is melodic techno, although different releases also incorporate elements of progressive house, techno, ambient and electronic pop.
Anyma is best known for the albums Genesys, Genesys II and The End Of Genesys, tracks including Consciousness, Eternity, Welcome To The Opera, Syren and Pictures Of You, as well as large-scale audiovisual shows featuring Eva, Adam and other characters from his digital universe.
Matteo Milleri’s early years
Matteo Milleri was born in New York but grew up in Italy. In interviews, he has recalled that video game soundtracks were among his earliest introductions to electronic music. He later became interested in European dance music, Warp Records, R&S Records and experimental electronic artists such as Aphex Twin and Autechre.
Milleri initially studied economics but decided to pursue a career in music and enrolled at SAE Institute in Milan. There he met Carmine Conte, who would later also become known under his solo alias MRAK.
The two musicians discovered a similar approach to electronic music and, after moving to Berlin, formed Tale Of Us. The duo’s first notable releases appeared in the early 2010s, including the Dark Song EP on Visionquest in 2011.
Tale Of Us and Afterlife
Tale Of Us became known for an atmospheric blend of techno, house and melodic electronic music. In 2016, Milleri and Conte founded Afterlife, which developed simultaneously as a record label and an international series of electronic music events.
Over time, the visual component of Afterlife became increasingly important, with the music accompanied by large-scale stage design and digital animation. This environment would later become the foundation for the solo projects of the two Tale Of Us members — Anyma for Matteo Milleri and MRAK for Carmine Conte.
The creation of Anyma
The idea for a separate project began to take shape for Milleri during the 2020 pandemic. With club performances on hold, he started looking for a way to present electronic music as something more than material for DJ sets.
Milleri himself has said that he wanted to create a fusion of music and digital art, which he initially described as a form of digital cinematic portraits. Anyma was conceived not simply as a new alias for solo production, but as a standalone audiovisual platform.
In 2021, the project began developing independently. On 4 June, Afterlife Recordings released the Sentient EP, featuring four tracks: Sentient, Reminding, Fragments and Omnia.
Further releases followed, allowing Milleri to gradually shape his own musical and visual universe.
Running
In December 2021, Anyma released the Running EP. The title track featured vocals by Meg Myers, while the second track was titled Walking.
The release is also representative of Anyma’s early period because Afterlife presented it as a project combining a traditional music release with an NFT component. In this way, Milleri experimented with digital distribution of visual art alongside the development of his music catalogue.
Consciousness
On 18 May 2022, Anyma and German producer Chris Avantgarde released Consciousness on Afterlife Recordings. The track became one of the most recognisable works from Anyma’s early period.
Eric Prydz later produced an official remix, released in August 2022.
It was around the music of this period that Anyma’s recognisable stage aesthetic began to take shape — massive digital characters interacting with an implied boundary between the screen and the physical stage space.
The development of the audiovisual show
A key partner in shaping the project’s visual language was Alessio De Vecchi. Together with him and other artists and animation studios, Anyma developed a system of characters and digital scenes synchronised with the music.
One of the central figures became Eva — a cybernetic humanoid first presented on a large scale during Anyma’s show at Printworks in London in 2022.
Anyma’s stage production is based primarily on digital 3D animation, video, LED technology, stage design and precise synchronisation between visuals and music. For this reason, the popular description of these shows as “holograms” is technically inaccurate.
Welcome To The Opera
One of Anyma’s best-known early collaborations was Welcome To The Opera with Grimes.
The track began appearing in live performances before the release of the debut album and later became part of Genesys. It combines Anyma’s characteristic atmospheric techno sound with Grimes’ vocals and digital visual design.
The collaboration continued over time, with Grimes later returning to Anyma’s musical universe, including material from the The End Of Genesys period.
Genesys
On 11 August 2023, Anyma released his debut studio album Genesys. It contains 14 tracks.
The album features Chris Avantgarde, Grimes, Sevdaliza, Rebūke, Cassian, CamelPhat, Innellea and other artists.
Tracks include:
- Eternity — Anyma and Chris Avantgarde
- Welcome To The Opera — with Grimes
- Samsara — with Sevdaliza
- Syren — with Rebūke
- Save Me — with Cassian and Poppy Baskcomb
- The Sign — with CamelPhat
- Angel 1 — with Innellea
- Consciousness — with Chris Avantgarde.
Therefore, the claim found in some biographies that Eternity was recorded with Rebūke is incorrect.
The concept of Genesys is built around the interaction between humanity, nature and technology. Each track and its accompanying visual material form part of a broader narrative.
Genesys II
The second studio album, Genesys II, was released on 29 March 2024. The project was structured as a two-part continuation of the first album.
The first part featured new material, including Pictures Of You, Higher Power and new collaborations. The second part was devoted to reinterpretations of tracks from Genesys by other producers.
Remixers included Eric Prydz, Amelie Lens, Cassian, Adriatique, Daniel Avery and other representatives of the contemporary electronic scene.
For this reason, describing Genesys II exclusively as a “remix album” would be inaccurate: new original material forms a substantial part of the release.
The End Of Genesys and Sphere
At the end of 2024, Anyma took the Genesys concept to a significantly larger scale.
The The End Of Genesys series at Sphere in Las Vegas marked the first time the technological venue hosted a full residency by a dance/electronic artist. The first eight concerts took place from December 2024 through January 2025, with four additional final shows later added for 27–28 February and 1–2 March. In total, the residency reached 12 performances.
Sphere’s format allowed Anyma to use its enormous wraparound screen and immersive spatial architecture to expand the established Genesys visual aesthetic.
The show was created with the participation of Alessio De Vecchi, who was responsible for the visual concept, stage designer Alexander Wessely, the Woodblock studio and a large production team.
During the residency, Grimes, Ellie Goulding, FKA twigs, Sevdaliza and other guest performers appeared on stage.
The End Of Genesys
On 30 May 2025, Anyma released his third studio album The End Of Genesys — the final part of the album trilogy.
The album contains 15 tracks, including:
- Voices In My Head — with Argy and Son of Son
- Hypnotized — with Ellie Goulding
- Taratata — with Grimes
- Fortuna — with Sevdaliza
- Atmosphere — with Chris Avantgarde
- Work — with Yeat
- Entropy — with Rezz and fknsyd
- Angel In The Dark — with Massano and Nathan Nicholson
- Human Now — with Luke Steele
- Joke's On You — with 070 Shake.
The album completed the Genesys storyline that Milleri had been developing through music and visual art since the debut album in 2023. In an interview with Grammy, he connected the end of the cycle with the need to move into the next creative phase.
Musical style
Anyma works primarily in melodic techno. Milleri himself used this description for his DJ style in his DJ Mag profile.
His music also incorporates progressive house, techno, ambient and cinematic electronica. His production is characterised by long synthesiser lines, minor-key harmonies, gradually evolving arrangements, a heavy rhythmic foundation and vocals that are often used as part of the overall atmosphere of a track.
Compared with Tale Of Us, the solo project has allowed Milleri to connect specific pieces of music more closely with visual dramaturgy.
Digital art, NFTs and artificial intelligence
NFTs did play a significant role in Anyma’s early period. Music releases were accompanied by digital artworks, and some were released directly as linked audio and NFT projects.
However, describing Anyma’s entire visual catalogue as AI-generated art would be incorrect.
The project’s visual universe is created by professional 3D artists, directors, animators and studios, most notably Alessio De Vecchi and his team. During preparations for Sphere, the production involved more than one hundred people.
Milleri does not reject artificial intelligence and considers AI and machine learning to be tools that can be used within a contemporary creative process. However, this is not the same as claiming that Anyma’s well-known characters are simply generated by neural networks.
Recognition
In 2024, Anyma entered the DJ Mag Top 100 DJs ranking for the first time, debuting at number 17 and becoming the highest-ranked new entry of the year.
In the 2025 ranking, he climbed to number 10.
ÆDEN and a new phase
After completing the Genesys storyline, Milleri began developing a new audiovisual concept — ÆDEN.
In 2026, the project received its own world tour. The new visual universe differs significantly from Genesys: Milleri has cited classical and Renaissance art, Greco-Roman antiquity and mythology among its sources of inspiration.
In summer 2026, ÆDEN began an extended residency at [UNVRS] in Ibiza, while the world tour programme included performances across Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas.
At this stage, Anyma is Matteo Milleri’s main creative focus. In a DJ Mag interview in May 2026, he stated directly that the solo project is currently his primary and most complete creative outlet, while the future of Tale Of Us remains uncertain.
