Blak Saagan’s (Samuele Gottardello) monolithic Un Sequestro Lungo 10,000 Anni is one of 2026’s most audacious projects. Five years on from his last album, the Venetian composer delivers a 108-minute, triple-album opus, complete with an illustrated book featuring over 180 drawings by Iranian artist Majid Bita. This is an intensely personal work, creating a dystopian city where 10,000 years of patriarchy, capitalism, monotheism, and colonialism have ravaged the world.
Sonically, it covers endless ground, pulling motorik rhythms into decaying clubs where neon is breathed instead of seen. Industrial soundscapes char kosmische memories into intricate dust patterns, fused with ambient warehouse raves and Carpenter-esque synth tones. For the first time as Blak Saagan, he incorporates vocals (from Julinko, Annalisa Iembo, Liz Van Der Nüll, and James Jonathan Clancy), adding new atmospheres into the mix. The only escapism here is intentional, needed. It’s a space to stand while we figure out how and where to fight back.
Within this interview is the premiere of the video for “Dentro un Bus Proiettato nel Vuoto.” Majid’s drawings animate the true story at the heart of the album’s book: a group of poets, actors, illustrators, and comedians loaded onto a bus in the 1990s and blown up by the regime. The video carries the fire and urgency of Un Sequestro Lungo 10,000 Anni while letting the images do what the music can’t say outright. It hits differently.
Un Sequestro Lungo 10,000 Anni is a lot to take in, but the work to find its center is worth the effort. This is an album of endless possibility still existing even in the densest, harshest environments. Blak Saagan pushes us to keep digging until we find it.
Un Sequestro Lungo 10,000 Anni is OUT NOW on Maple Death Records.
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What are some of your earliest sound memories? And how did you first find your way to making music?
My father loved classical music, so every week he would buy a new record and the next Sunday he’d wake up the whole family with it. It was beautiful, the whole house filled with music. I spent hours reading the liner notes, fantasizing while looking at the illustrations on the gatefold covers, turning the music into stories in my head. I think that’s one of my fondest early memories of myself, daydreaming movie scenes while the music plays. Probably this is also why I didn’t produce much when I was younger. I think I believed that without the skills of the classical musicians, without their classical instruments, I couldn’t make music worth listening to. But of course I made it anyway; the urge was impossible to restrain. It was music just for me and maybe a few close friends.
Blak Saagan began that way, more or less ten years ago. Me, making songs in the night, out of insomnia, bored and stressed by a daytime job. Putting them aside for a while, then sending the tape to Jonathan, a new friend from Bologna I’d recently met. He liked the tracks, he wanted to publish them, he was starting a new label: Maple Death Records.
The name Blak Saagan carries a lot of weight. It’s cosmological, cinematic, it’s slightly ominous. Where did it come from, and what does it allow you to do that your own name wouldn’t?
Well, you said it. Cosmological, cinematic, slightly ominous. Also, I would like to add, positivist and occult at the same time. Like a scientific discipline where atoms are sentient beings. A humanistic but non-anthropocentric vision. A soothing darkness. A space to think, to have doubts, to wander. Would Samuele Gottardello have the same effect?
Five years passed between this new record, Un Sequestro Lungo 10.000 Anni, and Se Ci Fosse La Luce Sarebbe Bellissimo. What were those years like, and what finally broke the silence?
I lived those years in serenity, playing my previous album around, working for other projects (check my documentary Panorami Sommersi, about the Roman origins of Venice), changing priorities in my life, studying and sketching ideas for a new concept.
Then came a call from Jonathan: Maple Death Records joined Canicola Edizioni (a cool publishing house, also from Bologna) to create Opale, a project that brings music and illustration through a collaborative creative process. They thought that Majid and I would work well together. I knew Majid’s stuff and loved it, so I couldn’t help but answer: yes, of course, let’s do it.
Un Sequestro Lungo 10.000 Anni is described as your most personal and openly political statement. What made this the moment for that kind of directness? What specific things or events have pushed your work here?
After my previous album Se Ci Fosse La Luce Sarebbe Bellissimo, which was about the political kidnapping of a single person, I started reflecting on the concept of kidnapping in general and how far it could be extended. To all of humanity, across all of history.
Kidnapping means depriving someone of their individual freedom for a shorter or longer period of time. That’s what the terrorists did to Aldo Moro, the protagonist of the dark political episode I portrayed in my previous record. While I was working on it, I often asked myself: why did they kidnap Aldo Moro? Wasn’t it perhaps because they felt themselves prisoners of a system, capitalism, they couldn’t escape? And that system, which was not remotely shaken by Moro’s kidnapping and murder: who decided it? Why? Since when does it exist? And above all: is capitalism really the only possible way to live?
It took me some time to answer those questions. It was a journey, cultural, personal, a time of crisis and questioning, of things being born and dying. And as I studied, Un Sequestro Lungo 10.000 Anni took shape. Which in turn began to offer my own interpretation of what surrounds us today: how deeply connected patriarchal power and capitalism are. Religious monotheism and the genocide in Gaza. The replacement of matrilineal society with repression in Iran. The invisible system we all live inside, unaware of it, like the fish in David Foster Wallace’s speech, who asks the other fish, what’s water. A kind of continuous poisoning. A kind of Regime that controls us through Benzocrazia (Benzocracy in English), the exercise of power through benzodiazepines, or – stepping outside the metaphor of the album’s world – through the passive acceptance of the system we live in. The political dimension of the record was born alongside the record itself, gradually, together with the artistic one, as it should be.
Art looks at the world and interprets it. That is a political act.
The album builds an entire dystopian city with creatures, rebels, propaganda, a woman with the body of a bird rising from the asphalt – there’s so much detail and worldbuilding. It’s incredible. How did that world first appear to you? Did you have the narrative before the music, or did they arrive together?
It was a constant process of exchange between the two dimensions, step after step. I would say maybe a little more influenced by the narrative, but just slightly more. In fact, there are some parts of the novel that are not covered by music, because paper costs less than vinyl. For this reason, I’ll carve the next quadruple album in stone.
The collaboration with Iranian illustrator Majid Bita is central to everything here, right? I mean, it’s not just the artwork, but it’s the whole imaginative framework of the album. How did that relationship begin, and how did his visual world shape the music?
I read his first graphic novel, “Nato in Iran” (Born in Iran), and I remember this monstrous and anthropomorphic bomber fighter jet in the sky, illuminated by anti-aircraft lights. To me, it was like a kid’s memory brought to life. I feel very close to that approach, giving life to inanimate objects that, to me too, have a soul. Or giving shape to emotions, like sadness, melancholy, hope, boredom. It’s a specific and intriguing world-building that overlaps with mine. So we influenced each other, exchanging stuff and ideas back and forth: music, sketches, references – and this process was to me exciting but at the same time not free from obstacles and misunderstandings. But I managed it, at last, and I survived to see the object taking shape and becoming real. And for ‘object’ I mean writing a story, word by word, page after page, something I had never done before. To me, this is one of the most demanding things I’ve ever done, and also the most rewarding.
The video we’re premiering here, “Dentro un Bus Proiettato nel Vuoto,” draws on Majid’s drawings to tell the true story of poets, illustrators, actors, and comedians put on a bus in the 1990s to be killed by the regime. That’s an almost unbearable story to hold. What did it mean to you to make something out of it, and what did you want the music to carry that the images couldn’t?
Yes, it’s the only part of the album that really happened, but – if you want – it’s so unbelievable and grotesque that it seems the only part invented. While I was working on the video, I cut out the windows from the buses Majid drew and animated the background the old way, literally sliding the layer from right to left to imitate the movement. And that fast movement, pixels rushing and blurring, worked perfectly with the initial and final arpeggio of the song. Not just perfectly – it was the musical version of the landscape slipping past the windows, the hypnotic blur, the rhythm that puts you to sleep.
And it came to me: aren’t we all, asleep, inside a driverless bus launched into the void? And how many people will need to wake up to stop it in time?
The album comes with an illustrated book of over 180 drawings by Majid, with a story co-written by both of you. What does the book do that the album alone can’t? And what was it like to write a narrative together?
I don’t exactly know where one ends and the other begins. Together they do something that neither does alone: to me they are inseparable. Writing with Majid was a back-and-forth that never really had a clear beginning or end. I would put down some notes, he would draw a scene, then I would write a before and an after the scene, the names of the people portrayed, their meanings and purposes. Then would come another drawing connected to that first scene; the drawing would change how I understood it, and I would revise. It was the closest I’ve come to genuine co-authorship; also, it was the closest call I’ve had to a nervous breakdown, literally. And yet, when I was a teenager, I dreamt of being a comic book writer: so I’m talking about a dream come true. Hence, I would say it was a challenging and rewarding journey; I’d do it again in the future. I’m available to hire!
This is the first Blak Saagan album to feature vocals. What made this time to open the music up to other voices, and how did you choose who to bring in?
It’s because the story needed precise characters. I did some mental casting and then wrote to some of them asking for a collaboration. Annalisa Iembo – a techno producer who records as Jerome, active in the Bristol underground scene – recorded some wordless vocals for a different song, but I ended up using them on Benzocrazia, and they worked: I trapped her voice into a liturgy without identity, which is exactly what the track required. On FRREPa, Liz, from Bologna, sings a text she wrote when I told her the background of the song. Her interpretation of her own lyrics is just perfect, from the point of view of a girl caught inside a street protest that doesn’t end well. The same happened with Julinko, a beautiful ambient doom voice I figured was perfect to portray an ancient pagan ode to the Mother Goddess. And there’s a reason I asked Jonathan to sing Idoli Rotti Fatti di Paura ed Oro: he’s a close friend, and into Blak Saagan since the beginning, he knows me so well – so I simply sent him the song and asked him to sing. That’s it. The first take was perfect. His is the voice of a quiet and hopeless narrator, don’t ask me why, but that’s what comes to mind every time I listen Jon singing that part of the song, and that’s exactly what that moment in the story needed, when the Regime violently wins, when the demonstration, any demonstration in the history of demonstrations, ends and on the ground there is only rubbish, and among the dirt there are bodies that were once alive. It worked in this for all the collaborations for this album; no one was chosen for their technique but was either a friend or a person I believed would naturally fit into the world of the song.
You’ve cited Marija Gimbutas and Philip K. Dick as reference points for this record. That’s such an interesting and unusual pairing of prehistoric matriarchal archaeology and paranoid science fiction. What connects them for you?
They work at different levels. Gimbutas provides the foundation, the historical and mythological architecture underneath the album. She was anti-androcentric in the same way Carl Sagan was anti-anthropocentric: both were saying that the dominant narrative is not the only one, and not the original one. She reconstructed the evidence of what existed before patriarchy declared itself inevitable.
I’m a huge fan of Philip K. Dick: the obsessive-compulsive paranoia he implanted in every page he wrote, the unstable boundary between what’s real and what isn’t, the drugged air, the dreams trespassing into reality. Together, Gimbutas and Dick form something like the intellectual spine of this project: deep time and present anxiety, archaeology and hallucination. I would also mention two other authors who were very influential for this work. Dino Buzzati, an Italian writer I worship – for inspiring a fearful protagonist in a world that overwhelms him, who observes more than acts, who survives without fully understanding. Also, he wrote a lot of magical – realistic narrative, an intriguing antinomy. Finally, I would like to mention Ursula K. Le Guin — for the mythical structure underneath a political but at the same time entertaining novel. The way her stories carry thousands of years of history inside a contemporary narrative, without ever feeling like an essay disguised as fiction.
The album ends somewhere close to hope; a black horizon from which something might still emerge. Given everything the album moves through, was that ending hard to find?
I’m glad you found some hope in it. To me, the story of the album ends with something unresolved, a black horizon looming, a tiny warm spot in the dirt from which something might still emerge, but you’re right, hope is possible since nothing is guaranteed.
My generation has lost a lot of social battles; the fight against global capitalism after Seattle 1999 and Genova 2001 was lost too. Nowadays capitalism is stronger than ever, and we who resist are weak and divided. I don’t see any bright future. The protagonist survives the story, but he is beaten. The Regime is maybe shaken but certainly not destroyed.
BUT.
What remains – here, in our reality, and there, in the reality of the story – is the knowledge that the system we live inside had a precise beginning and was built by people who wanted to dominate other people. This, to me, is something more demanding than hope. It’s the refusal of inevitability. It’s that warm spot where the story of the book and the album ends. Anything can happen to that spot: it can be temporarily swept away, the people who believe in it eliminated, the memory of it can even be erased for a while, maybe for 10.000 more years. Or, maybe, not.
And, as always to close… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
The other day I was in the garden, under the flowering privet, full of bees, hundreds of them working on little white flowers, whose tiny petals fell on the grass. Wonderful. So this would be my top five sounds in the world:
1 – the buzzing of bees as they forage from a blossoming tree;
2 – the rustling of a thousand leaves in a grove;
3 – the chirping of cicadas;
4 – the murmur of a freezing mountain stream over stones;
5 – the lapping of the calm sea on a pebble beach.
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