Product Description
1 Thin border
2 Plankton
3 Delicately luminous
4 Environmental changes
Genres: Meditative, Relaxation, Ambient, Electroacoustic Ambient
RIYL: Alio Die, Popul Vuh, jarguna
For his fourth Projekt release, Italian sound-artist Aglaia creates nearly 90 minutes of entrancing deep ambient meditations. While stylistically building upon the electro-acoustic drone of his previous work, Aglaia’s Gino Fioravanti focusses on a total hands-on performance style for Darkness meets red. “For the first time,” he remarks, “I dedicated the utmost attention to the quality of every single sound, every single note. There is nothing superfluous and nothing missing. For many years I used arpeggiators and sequencers to build the long drones of my ambient-cosmic music; this album was entirely played and meditated. Every note was ‘taken in’ and dropped into absolute darkness, waiting for a new one to be born.”
Gino continues:
The color red, featured in the title of this new collection, represents warmth and dynamism. Red is the force that animates the enveloping beauty of black and cosmic space. In yoga traditions, black is tamas, inertia, while red is rajas, dynamism. Together they generate sattva, a harmonic vibration.
The great novelty lies in the use of sounds that are so close in expressiveness and in the way they were played to those generated by acoustic and traditional instruments. The repetition of certain musical phrases was not created by loops, that is, by repetitions of the same musical phrase, but is given by the “affection” I felt in listening, playing them, for certain phrasings.
The result is a continuous dynamism, each wave never similar to the previous one. Each pause, long or short, never similar to the one before it or the one preparing to come. Each note was held and repeated as long as it remained sensitive.
The mixing and layering of sounds allowed me to learn to recognize the depth of space and the fluctuating state of the mind during meditation.
Each thing happens simultaneously with others, often with a good deal of autonomy and distance. This is blackness.
You will be able to feel also the pleasure of sound, the flow of beauty that I wanted to evoke. It was the first time while composing I felt the pleasure generated by sound vibrations. I believe that this state can be transmitted. As I played, images came, memories, dilations presented themselves. I was taken, at times, by slight states of euphoria. This is the red.
Song by song:
1 Thin border — It is a kind of overture. An opening. I tried to sketch landscapes. Within these landscapes I inserted shapes, conjured beings and dilated borders.
2 Plankton — Plankton is also a boundary. A reality that merges with water. It too is a thin boundary. However, it becomes flow, a cascade of life. This wonder is the flow that becomes fragment. It vibrates. The piece is an environmental dance. A universal breath where black begins to become light. I hear in “Plankton” the symphonic evolution that loves to flow, swim and bloom.
3 Delicately luminous — It is the most acoustic-referenced track. The most sparkling. Ascents and descents characterize it. Delicacy paddles in a sea of light. This track is the one in which ambient phrasing and flowing carpets combine harmoniously.
4 Environmental changes — It is an acoustic, symphonic ambient. With this composition, I developed an interest in the dialogue between various sound dimensions. Static changes, drones, phrasing combine together. I finish this album with a fair sense of satisfaction. Something that has never happened until now.
Artist Bio
Gino says, “When I was a teenager I composed more dramatic and romantic music, but over time I chose an aerial music — that is music reminiscent of the motions of the air. Light without heavy emotions. Nothing that captures. These are vibrations that transport consciousness into a free space. Music of the air. Now in my early 60s, I have been teaching yoga and meditation and body-oriented techniques for 35 years. When creating, I want my music to be warm electronics with a warm breath that extends into space. A music that does not offer scenarios but perspectives.”
Reviews Editor –
From Exposé
Aglaia is the musical project of Italian electro-acoustic sound sculptor Gino Fioravanti, started around the turn of this century with a second member Gianluigi Toso; Toso left about ten years later leaving the Aglaia name to Fioravanti, who has since released dozens of recordings, both as a solo artist as well as in collaboration with others (Alio Die in particular); Darkness Meets Red is his fourth album for Projekt Records. Much like the way that Alio Die creates his sound, Aglaia also uses a combination of synthesizers, software instruments, and acoustic instruments — the most prominent of the latter being zither, santoor, and various cymbals, gongs, and bells. The synthesizers are played expressively, you won’t hear sequencers and arpeggiators here (although he may have used them on previous recordings at some point, I haven’t heard it on the work he has done with Projekt) and the smooth blending of synth backdrops and imagery with the acoustic instruments provides a scope which is nothing short of stunning.
The four sidelong tracks come to about one minute shy of 90 minutes, and while the standard for synth based electronics typically comes off as ‘space music,’ the balance of electronics and acoustics in this case is far closer to forward reaching world music, not at all unlike that of his sometime collaborator Alio Die or Forrest Fang; the only space here is the inner space one finds in deep meditation as the mind relaxes and the spirit wanders free. There is no cadence, the sounds just flow freely in every direction, like cloudbursts of color and sonic elegance, as one listen to the appropriately titled “Delicately Luminous” will make abundantly clear — it’s the shortest track on the album at a little over nineteen minutes. Other pieces like “Plankton,” “Thin Border,” and “Environmental Change” take a similar ethic to new heights where a listener can easily get completely lost within and lose track of time, succumbing to its tranquility and shimmering beauty. -Peter Thelen