name-your-price download at Projekt's Bandcamp . Get it for free or donate anything if you fancy. Your funds are split between Projekt Records and Jarguna. Your contributions assist us in releasing more great music.

Sam writes: I had an interesting conversation last Saturday with some record label friends. I was riffing on the present, the future, and how easy it is to find oneself living in a past that is rapidly vanishing. I’m talking about the feelings & experiences around buying & playing a physical object; as well as creating art for this specific format.

Much of what we understood as fact has morphed into a new NOW — because of digital.

There was once a limitation on the output of our art because of the physical object it was conveyed upon. CDs & LPs restricted in a number of ways — the production schedule at our pressing plants, the lead time required by our physical distributors, the minutes-of-playing-time available, and the gotta-have-the-money-to-make-them concern.

There’s another old-paradigm issue that needs rethinking. As you know, Projekt’s Steve Roach is a very prolific artist. Why should his ever-creating mind be limited — as we all were — by the recording industry strategies of fifty years ago? These strategies rationed art; the paradigm of one-album-every-18-months was designed to allow the marketing department time to ring every penny out of a falsely finite quantity of music. Fans love the art and we want more it it! When an artist makes intriguing & amazing work, why constrict their creativity? The shift to streaming shows that once the price cap is removed, you listen to music. Lots of it!

Yes, of course I still love physical objects; and Projekt is not abandoning the CD format. When I look at the trends, though, I see the majority of our audience listens to music digitally. The royalty Projekt pays artists is now 80+% from digital, and 50+% of the total is from streaming; those numbers grow every month. I’m excited to release more music via the digital format, removing the constrictions of the old physical model.

Ultimately, the music is what we crave, not the medium that it lives on. 

This all leads me to today’s new Projekt release from another prolific ambient/electronic artist — Italy’s Jarguna. Just three months ago I was writing to you about his lovely album, ;Prospettive Animiche. Today he’s back with a new digital-only collaboration, Trapped Vol. 3; 92 minutes of ambient / electronic / drone with intriguing collaborative input.

Projekt has the Bandcamp download available for FREE / name-your-price for a limited time. Go ahead and enjoy this new album!

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jarguna and Friends: Trapped Vol. 3

Border Music: 11 poems with 14 poets webbed together via vibrations generated by instruments, objects, field recordings; each using his pen to give life to his emotions. > “In just two years,” Jarguna explains, “I have produced three volumes of Trapped alongside all my other parallel musical projects. I have to thank the artists who dedicated time and trust in me. With the Trapped series I want to represent the metaphorical allusion of me as the spider and the friends, artists and groups as ‘prey’ which I trap into my ‘music web.’”

With this volume, the challenge of intertwining artists from different genres — from darkAmbient to jazz, chillout, folk — grows more complex, creating a release with diverse stylistic changes over the course of 92(!) minutes. It’s an intersection of electronic sounds (synthesizers, samples, loops, many effects) with clean acoustics (classical guitar, ethnic wind instruments, sax, and violoncello.) Together, Jarguna and his prey have created an articulated structure that is difficult to classify in any one style.

“In fact,” Jarguna continues, “I would like to use the term that Nicola Serena thought and proposed as ‘order music’ or ‘fringe music,’ as it is not pure electronic, not pure acoustics. Though I know many people would classify this style as new age, in truth I’ve never been interested in classifying; I don’t want to spend too much time to identify the genre, it’s all a bit unidentifiable — but yes, let’s say border music I really like it.”

🕷️ And what of those spiders that grace the covers of all three releases in the Trapped series? Jarguna has thoughts! “There are very few people who know how to appreciate some animals like a spider, which like others such as snakes and reptiles create a sense of disgust, horror, we can say an atavistic terror. Primordial! I love them and am literally amazed. Without these beings the food chain would break; there would not even be the decomposition of the organic material of the plants which thanks to spiders split and transform into fertile ground. The spider, despite being of small stature, is a formidable predator, patient and capable of organizing amazing architectures with his silk thread that is one of his main weapons: the canvas (web). I decided, metaphorically, to take the form of a spider because one of my life’s abilities is to weave canvases to trap people and situations. Bold, often brash, I capture the attention by pushing artists to meet even though they have very different lifestyles. This is how the idea of ​​these volumes was born. I invite friends to my house and the prey does its job: it creates the canvas. My desire is to try to trap their ideas, eagerly learn their style, learn their experience. I have grown a lot thanks to all the artists who have dedicated their time for me and for these volumes. So I just have to thank my wonderful prey!”

From a David Gilmour-style guitar by Riccardo Dellocchio, to effects-packed synthesizers by Chris Russell, to jazz player Franchesco Schina allowing me to link my syntheses with his sax, Greg Moorcrof with percussion, rattles and guitar, John Tocher and Simone Santarsiero to build drones full of emphasis and mystery, Massimo Di Nocera with his splendid and romantic acoustic guitar (he produces music for yoga practices and I have the honor of coloring his live performances with keyboards and environmental recordings. The energetic “Nightlife” piece by Nicola Serena and Alessandro Manno, Reese William with a drone generated by his voice, Giuseppe Dal Bianco taught ethnic music for 30 years in schools, enchants the senses with wind instruments of various ethnic origins, some also created by him, Ronny (aka Seetyca) we imagined wild and pristine northern forests, and not least the spectacular cello by Henrik Meierkord.

name-your-price download at Projekt's Bandcamp . Get it for free or donate anything if you fancy. Your funds are split between Projekt Records and Jarguna. Your contributions assist us in releasing more great music.