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Jarguna & Ryuzen — Kitsune
(Projekt no#, 2021, DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2021-09-06

Kitsune Cover art

Jarguna (Italian electronic musician Marco Billi) has countless albums to his credit (I believe 40 is the magic number at this moment in time), a lot of those are interesting collaborations with other musicians that are following a like-minded path. Ryuzen (Alcvin Ramos) is a Japanese-born master of the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese vertical bamboo flute, now resident in western Canada. He also has a love for traditional stringed instruments and percussion, as well as electronic music, and brings all of that to the table on Kitsume. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds into the opening track, “Kubinodanza,” for the shakuhachi to make its first appearance along with the shamisen, a Japanese traditional three-stringed lute, with electronic textures and sounds flowing all around. The follow-up, “After Sunset,” is a textural exploration involving electronics and echoing studio effects with subtle highlights of the shakuhachi across its sprawling eleven-minute duration, a truly beautiful and calming experience. Throughout the album’s ten tracks we find powerful spaces of placid calm, dreamy integrations of texture and tradition, and the breath of life in many subtle forms as it proceeds. There are no steady beats or cadence to be found, the percussive elements (wood sticks, bells, and such) drift in and out of the everflowing textures that encompass the scope of what these two master musicians create within this ten-part meditation. Each piece varies in length, from around six to some nearly eighteen minutes in length, but the listener won’t be concerned with time as they float through this fluid universe, drifting into timeless spaces, flowing down the eternal spiral. I reckon one reason that this is available as a download only is because the total time of all the pieces added together is a full 99 minutes, considerably longer than the capacity of a compact disc. Those who seek beautiful and deep meditative sounds will find plenty of both herein.

Filed under: New releases, 2021 releases

Related artist(s): Jarguna (Marco Billi), Alcvin Ryuzen Ramos

More info
http://projektrecords.bandcamp.com/album/jarguna-ryuzen-kitsune

 

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