Genres: Electronic, granular ambient, drone


After sonic explorations in the jungles and the deserts, Italian sound-artist jarguna dives beneath the oceany blue for his 48th release. Utilizing a sampling technique known as granular synthesis, the album is an ambient creation that plays with minute and lengthy loops to create textures from natural and synthetic recordings. It is jarguna’s second album born in this style, a continuation upon 2021’s A PEACEFUL GRANULAR DAY.


jarguna explains:


My daily walks in fields and woods are always my first source of inspiration. Contact with nature allows me to sink into inner places that no other condition allows me; here I open my senses, or rather I also try to abandon them, but I don’t want to go into the usual philosophical discourses, instead the theme today is lightness.


Have you ever considered that our reality, in addition to the conditioned one, is only thanks to our senses? And our senses are calibrated like an antenna to be able to pick up certain waves, but what if this radar could change frequencies? What would reality look like?


A continuation of A PEACEFUL GRANULAR DAY, this time I sink into submerged worlds, submerged above all by water, perhaps it is the main element and theme.


Have you ever gone to the beach and snorkeled? Diving even at low depths to observe the world submerged by the waters, just go one or two meters below with the mask you hear the air bubbles coming out of the snorkel, the bubbling of the waves, the sand rolling on the seabed. All these sounds have inspired me to this new sound project.


In fact, the first track opens with a recording made in the Canary Islands near the shore of the beach, the glitches, small distortions, the saturations that make the sound of this work rather …wrinkled.


The granulometry of the sand is much as the single grain of the sampling used in the granular synthesis. In order not to bore I will not describe this technique at length but you can find numerous sites that describe this system of managing a sound, obviously all digital.


A carefree, cheerful, perhaps retro-ambient, at times reflective or mysterious, with a stratification of the tracks based more on instinct than on reason and the desire to articulate pieces aimed at creating ambiguity and acoustic “disorientation,” a word that wants to be more a provocation than anything else. When I say “disorientation” I mean that the listener is no longer able to understand the origin of the sound, if it is acoustic, synthetic, of natural but manipulated origin. This sort of auditory confusion can help to immerse oneself in new worlds. I first started to face this exploration consciously in the album PAREIDOLIA.


After all, as they say “art is a method to deceive the senses.” And so what a deception it is!


BIO:


jarguna is 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.