Sunday again, ambient it is! I do not have a lot of time to describe my track of the day, so today will be a short post, but significant nonetheless as it introduces one of my favorite drone artists: Oophoï.

Oophoï - Space Forest Part 2 (1996)

This 30 minutes long track has stayed buried within me since the first day I listened to it. Deeply magical, almost transcendental, it rings like a rite of passage to another world of light and wisdom. The overwhelming bird chirping sounds, the low hertzian humming synth droning in the background, the occasional distant singing… the whole is so intimately nostalgic. It is one of my first drone discoveries back in 2015, and I have been religiously listening to it at least once a month since then.

I sincerely hope you dig it as much as I do, it’s not a track to focus to though; like many ambient works, it is best experienced when lying down or trying to work out a problem. Peace out.

EDIT: the next few days after writing this article, I found the time to go ahead and read about Oöphoi; and I thought I’d come back and say a few more things about this artist. First and foremost, the magazine Exposé has a great interview with him. This is where I learned that Oöphoi is the mythological Egg of Creation, i.e. the very spring of the Universe. This symbol can be found in many ancient legends: the Cosmic Egg whose blast gave birth to the Universe, with a sound/vibration igniting material life. What I found even more interesting though is, coincidence or not, how Oöphoi describes his desire for music with deeper spiritual and ritualistic meaning. Better than paraphrasing; here is his answer to Alessandro Michelucci’s question: what do you mean to express with your music?

The mysteries of our lives, the sound behind everything, that sound we can no longer perceive, since we are distracted by this civilization of noise and unawareness, by self-destructing speed, by inner nothingness. I make music to retrieve a kind of silence we lost, to retrieve my inner center. In ancient civilizations music was linked to rituals and sacred events, it was a way to attain altered states of conscience or to get in touch with parallel realities. As time went by this got lost: music was depleted of her ritual power. Some kinds of today’s ambient music is going back to the roots, to the core of sound, and is tightly linked to a ritual dimension.

I also unfortunately learned that Oöphoi; Gianluigi Gasparetti, passed away in 2013 after a very prolific life. May he rest in peace, and I would like to extend to him my sincere gratitude for the timeless and borderless soundscapes he has created along the years.