Genre: Meditation, New Age, Relaxation

jarguna is Italian sonic-alchemist Marco Billi. HANAMI's shimmering, luminous electronic ambience captivates with pleasant elegance. Floating and relaxing, meditative and bright, the mandala-like hymns of the four long-form tracks unfold in sweet splendor. Through a pure flow of spontaneity and simplicity of execution, the minimalism mixes with sonic radiance to send the mind airborne upon a fragrant spring breeze. Like observing a large tree in flower with all the majestic light shining from a single petal, repeated thousands and thousands of times like a fractal. It is the bloom, the blossoming, the potency of sound which gives HANAMI its inviting charm.


jarguna writes:

Let's start immediately with the term hanami, which in Japanese means flower viewing, and it is precisely at the beginning of spring when all the cherry trees come into bloom and create an intoxicating and entrancing spectacle in the Japanese streets. The light that filters through the petals creates a fairy-tale atmosphere: most surreal. From this I took inspiration for the creation of a perfume called Hanami. Sparkling, spicy, it is not only the evocation of the cherry blossom but rather spring, the awakening from the long hibernation, metaphorically speaking youth.

Therefore this album is the distillation of a colored image (composition), to a perfume, from a perfume (olfactory composition) to a sound composition. Some of you will know my great passion for botany, especially for aromatic plants. In this case it is an attempt to approach two senses that are practically never associated, perhaps because the two perceptions affect two different points of our brain? Smell is deeply connected to our deepest brain, often hidden from the ordinary state of consciousness, but when you smell an aroma it can evoke memories hidden in our unconscious. Old experiences and forgotten situations can resurface. I have seen people cry or otherwise get emotional when smelling a perfume or an essential oil. Just as a key can open completely removed meanders, this is why it is also possible to do therapy with an aroma as with music, even if the sound vibrations affect our receptors and the emotional sphere in a different way.

Furthermore in this project there is a second experiment. Each track is made with a different intonation; normally instruments are all tuned to 440 Hz or as in the case of synthesizers they have the default setting in this precise frequency, i.e. the conventional standard all over the world. In my case, having used my modular synthesizer for 70-80% of the album, the oscillators (the part of the module that generates the basic waveform) must always be tuned manually or use other modules with quantizer. Instead of using this default parameter I let myself go to simple sensations. In fact, for each title you will find the pitch frequency in brackets.

432 Hz seems to be the true frequency where instruments were once tuned, beginning with a tuning fork. Obviously all this is an international convention to standardize the tuning with all the instruments of the world and of all cultures. Perhaps in ancient times every territory and civilization had its own way of tuning and possibly with different frequencies.

Here I decided to "free myself" from this grid and only follow perceptions which is not easy and not perfect to tune all the other instruments just by ear.

HANAMI is a pure flow of spontaneity, simplicity of execution, minimalism is often dominant. Like observing a large tree in flower, all that majestic light comes from a single petal, repeated thousands and thousands of times like a fractal.

With this album I am starting a journey dedicated to cymatics, that is, those frequencies that influence matter. The term cymatics designates a pseudoscientific theory created by the Swiss scholar Hans Jenny, who attempts to demonstrate a morphogenetic effect of sound waves. The name cymatics was coined by Jenny himself and derives from the Greek kymatika (κυματικά) meaning "study concerning waves" (from kyma (κΰμα) meaning "wave").

Normally these experiments are performed with static frequencies or alternating them between each other to see materials such as sand move. For some of these experiments the spores (seeds) of lycopodium were used, being microspheres in the shape of sponge, therefore very light and easy to react to sound waves.

I would like to transform all this into something pleasantly catchy but which perhaps can no longer be called music.