Argento

Argento is a new project by the composer and producer David August, and Miraggi is its first record, released by Music From Memory. The pieces were written between Berlin and the Tuscan coast, starting from sketches made during long stays along the Tyrrhenian sea: the light changing through the day, the vegetation, the constant presence of the water.

The album is built as a soundtrack to a film that does not exist. Synthesizers and electronics talk with acoustic percussion and environmental recordings, and behind them you can hear August's immersion in Italian library music of the 1970s and 1980s, with faint traces of jazz fusion and Balearic ambient that never become quotation. Drummer and percussionist Lorenzo Setti joined the sessions and ended up co-writing much of the rhythmic material, through long improvisations that August then shaped into short, cinematic pieces.

Ten tracks, most of them between three and four minutes, with Italian titles taken from the coast: Vento Del Sud, Mare Arcaico, Circeo, Salsedine, Vela d'Argento. The title means "mirages", something seen and longed for that stays out of reach, and the record keeps that suspended quality between movement and stillness, between a place remembered and a place imagined.