Blak Saagan

 In an age that demands hyper acceleration, kinetic flashes and byte voracity, Blak Saagan sticks out like a sore thumb with a sprawling body of work that requires attention and unlocks profound symbols and meaning with every passage. After a 5 year gap, the Venetian composer returns with his most personal and openly political statement yet, ‘Un Sequestro Lungo 10.000 Anni’, a staggering 108 minute triple album soundtracking a dystopian city through flashes of futuristic fourth world visions, warehouse 80s rave-ups, meditative trance and dark rumblings.

Following his acclaimed ‘Se Ci Fosse La Luce Sarebbe Bellissimo’ was never going to be an easy feat but Samuele Gottardello (Blak Saagan) approached the fresh canvas with a renewed sense of commitment sparking a dense parallel world inhabited by paranoia, control and repression. A world that is relieved by the figure of a woman with the body of a bird emerging from the asphalt and freeing humanity from the “sequestro” (kidnapping) to which it has long been subjected. Dystopia pushed to the limits and sadly close to our current affairs.

Stemming from a collaboration with Iranian illustrator Majid Bita, ‘Un Sequestro Lungo 10.000 Anni’ narrates a city populated with imaginary creatures bustling to the rhythms of Iranian punk, rebels with mullets sweating through Middle Eastern hallucinatory disco beats, propaganda VHS tapes and Saagan’s usual atmospheric celestiality built on library music, kosmische architectures and industrial serenity.

Referencing the ecosystem that Marija Gimbutas and Philip K. Dick handed down to us, Blak Saagan’s music threads the needle hypnotically moving from Carpenter synth worship, the anxiogenic cyber-pulsating ‘The Blak Fire’ or the persian EDM of ‘Idoli Rotti fatti di Paura ed Oro’, to metaphysical experimentations that recall the work of legendary Italian sound architects Egisto Macchi and Nora Orlandi, the bouncing astral esoteric ‘La Dama con il Corpo di Uccello’ and the spiritual cadence of ‘Mila nel bosco’. The authoritarian climax of the album is fully delivered on tracks like ‘Il Giorno di Zaha'kol’ and ‘Daēvā - Falso Dio’ where pounding severity reaches the textural punishment of heavy-hitters like Godflesh and Ramleh, industrial malaise for the masses.

‘Un Sequestro Lungo 10.000 Anni’ is also the first Blak Saagan album to feature vocal contributions, heightening the cinematic experience and carrying it spiritually. Ambient-folk goddess Julinko brings an elysian quality to ‘Il Giorno di Zaha'kol’, the submerged vocals of techno producer Annalisa Iembo (Jerome) are printed on the drugged out coldwave hit ‘Benzocrazia’, Italian illustrator Liz Van Der Nüll posse-raps on the synth-punk siren blaring ‘FRREPa’ while cosmic loner James Jonathan Clancy ethereally closes ‘Idoli Rotti fatti di Paura ed Oro’.

‘Un Sequestro Lungo 10.000 Anni’ plays like a puzzle where every piece eerily discloses a historical metaphor, a captivating voyage where Blak Saagan’s time machine crosses 10,000 years of patriarchy, monotheism, colonialism and capitalism, denouncing a cruel present, while remembering a gloomy past. Some might call it conscious escapism or spiritual socialism, some might see it as evoking a new realm and some might hail , a path trailblazed by outsiders like David Sylvian, Muslimgauze and Chrome… painting a black horizon from which, perhaps, hope can still emerge.