What actually got the show cancelled?
The Istanbul Governor's Office revoked permission for Anyma's ÆDEN tour date at Ataköy Marina Arena, pulled from the calendar days before the September 12 show. Per Turkish Minute (September 3) and DJ Mag (September 4), the trigger wasn't a security assessment or a noise complaint. It was a wave of clips shared by conservative social media accounts that framed the robotic, cyberpunk visuals from Anyma's live show as depictions of "satanic rituals." Provincial press director Emin Gökçegözoğlu confirmed the cancellation cited "satanic elements," though the governor's office has not published a detailed explanation of the decision, per Turkish Minute's reporting.
Anyma, the stage name of Italian-American producer Matteo Milleri and co-founder of the Afterlife collective, builds his live sets around large-scale audiovisual production: masked performers, robotics, sci-fi imagery. None of it was designed as religious content, and no independent assessment has called it that. The "satanic" label originated entirely on social media before spreading into local coverage, per We Rave You's reporting.
Is this a one-off, or a pattern?
It's a pattern, and a recent one at the exact same address. Ataköy Marina Arena cancelled a concert by Irish post-rock band God Is An Astronaut earlier this year on near-identical grounds: accusations that their stage imagery promoted Satanism. Zoom out further and Turkish Minute counts a string of cancellations dating back to 2022, from Iranian musician Mohsen Namjoo's shows being pulled in Bursa and Konya over claims he mocked Quranic verses (he denied it), to Beşiktaş district officials cancelling Russian deathcore act Slaughter to Prevail and Polish metal band Behemoth in February this year for being "incompatible with our societal values."
The 'satanic' characterization has largely appeared in social media posts and media coverage rather than as an independently established description of the artistic concept.
The common thread isn't genre. It's a governor's office moving fast on a public-order pretext once a moral-panic campaign gets loud enough online, with no requirement to show its work afterward.
Why does a robot costume become a censorship story?
Because the mechanism should worry the wider scene more than the theology does. A handful of accounts mislabel a stage show, the label spreads faster than any correction can, and a provincial government cancels a fully permitted, ticketed international show without a public hearing. Electronic music's visual language, masks, avatars, humanoid figures, has always leaned into the uncanny; that's the entire point of Anyma's ÆDEN aesthetic. Treating that imagery as evidence of devil worship isn't a cultural judgment call, it's a pretext that any future campaign can reuse against any touring act whose visuals look strange enough on a five-second clip.
The bureaucratic gap makes it worse. Tickets for the show stayed on sale through Passo even after the cancellation was confirmed, per DJ Mag, with the platform's automated messaging still telling buyers the show was proceeding. That's not a small glitch: it means the decision to pull an international act's permit moved faster than the paperwork to actually stop selling seats to it.
