Product Description
jarguna celebrates his 50th release with an 8-hour collection of music. There’s so much wonderful variety on this one: ambient, drone, tribal, electronic…
Genre: Meditation, New Age, Dark Ambient
50 tracks • 8 hours of music
jarguna is Italian sonic-alchemist Marco Billi. He creates organic-ambient-electronic music in mandala-like hymns of richly enveloping ritual music.
Peter Thelen of Exposé Magazine writes: Marco Billi released his first album using the name jarguna in 2006. (And) he has been one busy guy over the years. Since 2009 he’s been averaging about four releases a year (some in collaboration with others), and the amazing thing is all of them are worthy of attention, especially for listeners who love ambient soundtracks. The sounds and textures that jarguna has assembled are soft, gentle, sparkling, and intensely beautiful, filled with lush tonal colors and powerful imagery, consisting of a mix of dreamy synthesizers, muted and processed acoustic instruments, found sounds, and studio magic as the glue that ties it all together. Yes, there is a lot of intensely powerful ambient music being produced these days, and (jarguna) ranks among the finest.
jarguna writes:
This collection of 50 tracks is meant to be a long journey immersed in my world, my worldview perceived through the music I produce.
As of 2023 I have released more than 49 albums, each with its own story, its own dreams, introspective journeys, but also many real journeys with on-the-spot recordings, tribal chants, ceremonies, and natural environments. The albums are a representation of my life, straddling modernity and contact with native people in search of origin/inspiration/foundation.
This compilation is a selection of tracks mainly with a soft and relaxing character with some passages with tribal, ritual, hypnotic hints.
Actually not all of my discography is based on relaxing music, often classified as New Age, rather, my journeys are often winding as it is, or as it should be an inner path. We can even call it spiritual. As the Bon of the pre-Buddhist Tibetan tradition say, “feed your demons.” Only by learning to see them, recognize them and know how to control them can we overcome many obstacles that we self-inflict or have been inflicted on us by the environment (parents are also part of the environment).
Seven and a half hours of … jargonian atmospheres. This is a roundup of tracks selected since the first album in 2006, not very far in truth, but in these years I have been working hard to express what I had and have inside.
The unfolding of the tracks develops with a slow and rather “sleepy” beginning, full of collaborations, to arrive towards the middle with an increase of rhythmic, sonic impetuosity, a pulsating, energetic heart. After that we plunge into more slow and calm atmospheres, closing with the last 3 tracks again animated with melodic rhythms.
A kind of sine wave facilitates the brainwaves to enter states between Delta and Gamma waves, a cyclic alternation that can also help bring homeostasis into balance.
In many of these tracks there are several or even numerous artists who collaborated in the making of the tracks (see Chimera of a New World for example). Below you see in parentheses the name of the album and the chronological number of publication; then after the parenthesis the name of the artist who is part of the track.
I wish everyone a peaceful listening and that you can appreciate there is a lot of research and desire to spread good energy behind these sounds.
| Track (Album Name, Album Release #) guests: 01 Neogene (Neogene 40°) 02 Älva (Tapestry Flow 33°) with Henrik Meierkord cello 03 Lang-Tang (Trapped Vol1 22°) with Alio Die Loop Bell 04 Sweet Awakening (Trapped Vol3 27°) with Riccardo Dellocchio guitar and Francesco Schina sax 05 Winds of Sutra (Sogni di Sutra nei Venti 21°) 06 Playing for a Lullaby (Trapped Vol2 24°) with Shane Morris vibraphone and Massimo di Nocera guitar 07 Reflex of a Kaleidoscope — Excerpt (Prospettive Animiche 26°) 08 Altoplano Index 3 — Excerpt (Altoplano 4°) 09 Dragon’s Tears (Kitsune 39°) Ryuzen Shakuhachi flute 10 My Temple — Excerpt (My Temple 32°) 11 So Old (La Musica è Sacra 49°) 12 On Top of the World (First Decade 20°) 13 Nebula Part 1 (Nebula 9°) with Seba Gongs and Tams 14 Soul of Ganga (Bansuri – Breath from Soul 2°) with Lorenzo Squillari bansuri flute 15 Post Tenebris (Oscure Presenza 11°) with Uzbazur Drones 16 Paranoia in Supermarket — Excerpt (Paranoia in Supermarket 19°) 17 Silicon Forest (Jupiter8 14°) 18 Return to the Paganism (Pareidolia 23°) 19 Bushland — Excerpt (Bushland 15°) 20 Ceremony of the Ayahuasca (Introspective Course 1°) 21 Shuar Tales (Animas-k 36°) 22 Mound Builders (Transmissions From Serpent Mound 41°) with Chris Russell synth 23 Ouroboros (Archetypes 25°) 24 Vietcong (Resistance 48°) 25 Black Vapor (Sublimation 35°) with Uzbazur Drones 26 The Labyrinth (Esoteric Garden 44°) 27 A Land Burned by the Sun (Nouna 7°) 28 Commutator (Waiting for a Call From the Unknown 8°) 29 Fly Over Dunes (Explore form Satellite 3°) 30 Lhasa River Circles the Fading Sunset Part 2 (Sunwashed Evening Fire 34°) with Sam Rosenthal electronics 31 Geodes (Anatèxis 16°) 32 Chimera of a New World — Excerpt (Chimera of a New World 31°) 33 The Forest Does Not Sleep (Amongst Jungles 45°) with Nicola Serena synth 34 Puja in the Tamale of the Sound — Excerpt (Puja in Temple of Sound 38°) with Sadishiva Kaargyra vocal technique and Chiara Salvadori vocal 35 Spirals of Rosemary (A Peaceful Granular Day 37°) 36 My Temple 2 — Excerpt (My Temple 2 43°) 37 Durga Temple (Soundscape India Nepal 1997 12°) 38 Ring of Life — Excerpt (Ring of Life 5°) 39 Fog Music — Excerpt (Fog Music 17°) 40 Sankalpa (Nidra 13°) with Massimo di Nocera Guitar 41 Reeds Part 4 — Excerpt (Reeds 28°) 42 Reflex of a Reverberation — Excerpt (Reflex of a Reverberation 6°) 43 It Goes Down with Stillness a Violet Light (Materia Lucida 10°) with Kirill Platonkin Guitar and effect 44 Psilocybe (Explorations of the Unconscious 46°) 45 Wisdom Without Eyes (Tales of Millennial Trees 29°) with seetyca Synth and Drones 46 Gamma Grain (Granular Day in the Blue 47°) 47 Expansions of ….. (Chimera of a New World, session two 42°) with Rocco Savino guitar, Gianluca Manfredonia drums, Henrik Meierkord cello 48 Fusion of Soul (Fusion of Soul 18°) 49 The Crystal Staircase (The Morning Star 30°) 50 Domino (-.-.-.- 50°) |
BIO
jarguna is Italian sonic-alchemist Marco Billi. He creates organic-ambient-electronic music in mandala-like hymns of richly enveloping ritual music. Since his first recordings in 1998, jarguna’s work has been an exploration of sounds, feelings, contrasts, passion, acoustics and electronics.
Reviews Editor –
From Exposé
The prolific Italian sound sculptor Marco Billi (a.k.a. Jarguna) began recording his soundtracks back in 2006, and with Retrospective of Deep Days he celebrates 50 releases by offering listeners an archive that includes a piece from each one of those 50 recordings over the years. Many of his pieces are album length, so some of those pieces are excerpted as necessary — as it is this archival release is seven and a half hours in length, so this serves as a sampler of everything he has done thus far, both solo and in collaboration with other like-minded travellers, and offers the listener an entry point into his soundworld. His music is by and large floating ambient, though like his countryman and sometimes-collaborator Alio Die, this can take all kinds of forms using a variety of acoustic and electronic instrumentation; at its core these are sounds of imagination and mysticism, what one might consider suitable for meditation, relaxation, or slumber.
Some of the pieces could be considered dark ambient or industrial endeavors, menacing but inviting, some featuring found sounds and other field recordings, even voice samples, while others offer elements of world music (the bansuri flute of collaborator Lorenzo Squillari on “Soul of Ganga” is one such case in point, while Jarguna offers a world of electronic and percussive sounds to the mix). “Ceremony of the Ayahuasca” exemplifies a tribal sound with mysterious vocalizations all within a seeming jungle setting, while other pieces feature a tribal beat in the form of a steady cadence using hand drums, “Shuar Tales” from Animas-k being a superb example, or “Mound Builders” from Transmissions from Serpent Mound with Chris Russell. The 50 cuts are ordered end-to-end in such a way to create a smooth transition through the various styles presented, and not necessarily any sort of chronological considerations, although every track is documented with an indicator of where it fell chronologically within Jarguna’s works thus far. One needs to understand it’s a lot of music to absorb, and probably best taken in smaller doses of maybe an hour or two, maybe ten tracks at a time, shorter immersions until familiarity ensues but everything in this seven-plus hour program of Retrospective of Deep Days is certainly essential listening to ubderstand the full panorama of Jarguna’s soundworld. -Peter Thelen