AMON’s seminal 1996 debut Dark Ambient album augmented with 3 tracks from the same sessions.

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Since the mid '90s Andrea Marutti has been crafting his own blend of mind-expanding soundscapes, creating a strong sense of ancient mysticism and time travel with his Amon project. His mesmerizing recordings of drones and tones, presented as a careful
form of resonant minimalism pregnant with cavernous sounds and slow movements, reverberations and drifting elements, have always been intimately distant from the aesthetic form of Dark Ambient music which they have often been hastily associated with.

Taking inspiration from the mysteries and rites of Ancient Egypt, along with the vivid suggestions offered by Peter Kolosimo and other writers of the so-called Pseudoarcheology current, after his debut on Murder Release in 1996, a few CD albums - mostly released by Eibon Records in Italy - and a 7" on the German cult label Drone Records, were enough to consolidate Amon as a pillar among deep listeners. Finally reuniting all the music Marutti spontaneously created in a short period during the very first Amon recording sessions, and bringing it to vinyl for the first time, "Akh" is a ticket for a trip back in time, a musical universe rich with impenetrable scenarios, a driving, grey space of ever-increasing numbness resounding all around and inside the listener.

Mostly lacking any flash of light, the tracks featured on this collection open a subtly esoteric universe, which rises up out of the
desert, leading through a profound and introspective path with their sonic stimuli, plumbing the depths of the unconscious with a hypnotic, mystical and arcane flavor.

Perfect to listen to during the late hours when distracting factors are few and the music may join forces with the night itself. Will appeal to fans of Roland Kayn, Thomas Köner, Éliane Radigue, Deep Listening, Minimalism and Isolationism alike.

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I recorded all the music featured on "Akh" at home in just ten days during September 1995. I was 25 then and I must admit I don't remember much about those days, except that I used to spend most of my evenings watching movies and reading books. A lot of them. And making music, of course. Social life didn't mean much to me at the time. I was in a period of transition in which I had decided to change my acquaintances, I had been working for a few years and I was starting to build my own music studio.

The only proper instrument I used on these tracks is a Roland JD-800 synthesizer, sequenced with Cubase and mostly recorded on an ADAT machine along with a few samples courtesy of a primitive sampling application which I used to run on a 386 Personal Computer. Since I still didn't own a DAT machine back in the days, the tracks were mastered to DAT tape for release with the help of a friend of mine.

The following chart shows the chronology of the recordings of these very first "Amon sessions":

Regula #1 - 05.09.1995
Uhura Photons - 07.09.1995
Time Is Waiting - 08.09.1995
Mopula - 10.09.1995
Tanit Zerga - 12.09.1995
Darkside Return - 13.09.1995
She Touched the Stone - 14.09.1995
Hiram Roi - 14.09.1995
Wasted - 15.09.1995

Six of these nine tracks were chosen for the "Amon" CD, while the other three, namely "Darkside Return", "She Touched the Stone" and "Wasted", were later used on the second Amon CD entitled "El Khela" in 1997. Of course they were not 'second choice', it was just a matter of creating the right flow as the label could not afford the release of a double CD.

All the pieces were created in a very spontaneous way. I didn't have exactly this type of sound on my mind when I began recording, and I didn't take inspiration from other similar experimental / deep ambient artists simply because I was mostly unaware of any of them in those days. This just happened. I discovered that my machine - the JD-800, which I'm still fond of after all these years - could create these beautiful and profound layers of sound and I simply explored them for the first time. During the following years I tried to expand and improve this type of sounds / drones and the general concept of the Amon project, also using different techniques and instruments, but when I recorded these original nine tracks I was somewhat a 'virgin'. For me it was like some sort of a sudden miracle / magic happening for the very first time.

Andrea Marutti
Milano, ITALY
November 2022