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Aglaia — Darkness Meets Red
(Projekt no#, 2024, DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2024-10-07

Darkness Meets Red Cover art

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.

Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): Aglaia

More info
http://projektrecords.bandcamp.com/album/darkness-meets-red

 

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