Blak Saagan’s ‘Un Sequestro Lungo 10,000 Anni’ Extends a 10,000-Year Nightmare Across Sound and Page

Samuele Gottardello’s project Blak Saagan has delivered one of the year’s most physically and conceptually overgrown releases: a triple-LP boxed set, complete with a book containing a short story and 180 illustrations by Iranian artist Majid Bita. Issued through Maple Death Records and Canicola Edizioni’s Opale Editions, Un Sequestro Lungo 10,000 Anni builds a world overrun by monsters and armed repression, where citizens cower, smoke, or document their own eradication.

The music maps a trajectory from metallic, propulsive electronics—tinged with 1980s horror soundtrack unease—toward longer, slower-burning pieces that stretch past ten minutes. Guitars growl, drums stomp, and saxophone swells through bewildered passages before brightening at the close. Vocals arrive sparingly; Julinko’s warning that “everything will be swept away” is one of the few verbal anchors.

Bita’s dual-tone illustrations fill every page with surveillance, collapse, and resilience. The visual parallels to Iran’s current devastation are deliberate—bombs from above, repression below—but the album’s imagery refuses a single geographic reading. Instead, the package insists that dystopia is already here, in many places, for many people. The book’s final sentence—“Start dreaming again”—is less naïveté than a lifeline thrown from inside the wreckage.