Not all of us can afford beachfront property with a convertible Bugatti to match, but thanks to the new album by Argento, we no longer need to. Inspired by the riches of the Tuscan coast, Miraggi is as sultry as music tagged “Balearic” gets. Breathy flutes wisp up and down, casting their ocean spray as they pass. Lithe basslines sway against windswept chimes, beckoning you to leave it all behind. New age, downtempo, and jazz fusion shimmer and swirl together like crisp white wine. That’s right, don’t resist. Summer never has to end.
If this all seems like fantasy, it’s just as much of one for Argento. The side project was conceived by German-Italian producer David August, who spends most of his time hovering between the orbits of neoclassical ambience and brainy, headphone-ready dance music. He’s performed his work at the Barbican, been interpreted by the likes of Flora Yin-Wong, Valentina Magaletti, and Claire Rousay, and operates his own experimentally minded 99CHANTS label. Basically, he’s a serious artist, the kind who works with symphony orchestras in Berlin and gets commissioned to do audiovisual installations at MUTEK. He certainly doesn’t make music that you’d expect to hear sweaty and sea-soaked between salty bites of focaccia genovese.
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But for August, Miraggi is actually a homecoming of sorts. Born in Hamburg but having spent part of his childhood in a small mountainside town outside Rome, August pieced Miraggi together between Berlin and the Tyrrhenian coast alongside percussionist Lorenzo Setti while submerged in a haze of Italian library music from the ’70s and ’80s. The results are a kind of idealized version of Mediterranean chill-out music—the same idyllic landscape producer Young Marco envisioned in what he christened “Italian dream house” on his classic 2017 compilation, only less explicitly oriented toward the club here. These tracks ooze kitsch, but get all the details just right, reaching a swagged out nirvana as August crystalizes this luxurious and extremely specific aesthetic.
Though August doesn’t completely abandon his dancefloor instincts, he primarily channels them through his continuous sense of forward motion, as Miraggi’s undulating rhythms are more likely to produce stoney-eyed nods than anything close to an Ibiza-ready drop. Together the duo share more in common with new-agey ’90s groovers like Robert Rich and Davol, or As Falls Wichita-era Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays reimagined with a more digital sound font. Each tone arrives as if it were already on the tip of your tongue: chimes and rain sticks seductively circle the thumping beat of “Sabbia Su Sabbia” (translation: “Sand on Sand”), pulling the track deeper into a jazzy whirlpool of brushed cymbals and endlessly spiraling Rhodes. “Mare Arcaico” (“Archaic Sea”) ups the tempo as heaving breaths and sustained high strings straight out of vintage trance massage Setti’s propulsive drums and marimbas. A minute into the slow-simmering “Tramonto” (“Sunset”), the duo’s rumble of shakers and guitar harmonics is pierced by the kind of noirish muted trumpet that immediately makes it clear nighttime has fallen upon the villa.
