Giancarlo Erra
The Nosound man opts for a minimalist classical sound on his first solo album.
“I liked starting with more of a blank slate, because if you just do something as Nosound, there is an expectation.”
Nosound’s main man goes into classical, minimalist mode on his first solo record. Giancarlo Erra tells Prog about finding the confidence to release music under his own name, the art of electronic improvisation, and why he wants his music to be more inclusive.
“Most of all this is a different kind of music, it’s radically different even though I am the writer,” says Giancarlo Erra. The founder and frontman of Nosound, those purveyors of a blend of prog, post-rock, and ambient music, is stepping out with his solo debut, Ends. While the title might be loaded with portent, Erra’s new release doesn’t mark the demise of Nosound, but he had music that simply didn’t fit under his band’s umbrella. “I liked starting with more of a blank slate, because if you just do something as Nosound, there is an expectation,” says Erra. “There’s an expectation it’s going to be a band album, or a songs album, things like that. That’s fair enough, but in this case because there is no band, I felt it’s fair enough to have it under my own name.”
Nosound’s most recent release, 2018’s Allow Yourself, brought Erra’s electronic influences to the fore, but Ends sees him fully embracing his contemporary classical and minimalist inclinations. It’s an album without lyrics and the songs are numbered, rather than named. “I just thought it was about time to actually let the music grow in its own direction,” says Erra, who didn’t want to try to shoehorn this material into Nosound. “I thought whatever isn’t electronic is going to be Nosound, but this other material, I’m going to keep it aside. I decided at the last moment it was going to be an album. I was listening to it, I realised there was a theme, there was an album there. That’s when I realised, ‘Okay, this is finally going to be my solo album.’ I always wanted to do that, but I was lacking the confidence. This time I thought I was ready to do it.”
Many of the ingredients that listeners would expect to hear from Nosound – vocals, guitars, bass, drums – are absent from Ends. “Nosound is raw and direct, with lots of voice,” says Erra. “With my solo album I wanted to go completely the other way, and it was a challenge. Without the voice, you have to develop other stuff, but then there is a string quartet which is something I always loved since I worked with a string quartet on A Sense Of Loss. I decided just to use synthesisers or the string quartet, in particular the viola because that’s my favourite instrument. I wanted that to be the voice of the album.”
Rather than hiring an existing string quartet, Erra assembled one from scratch, bringing together a group of Danish, Icelandic and Vietnamese musicians to record in Denmark. “It’s very minimalist, it’s very much about the texture of the string quartet,” says Erra about venturing into arranging for classical instruments. “At the demo stage
I was trying to express as much as I could in terms of what kind of sound I wanted. I just told them, ‘Right, here I want more noise, here I want more Rachmaninov,’ so we worked with the textures. On a few things I just told them, ‘This is the key of this song, I want you to create some ambience.’ So, there was a type of improvisation in there, but it was surprisingly smooth. I really loved it.”
Erra has only performed two solo shows with the material from
Ends. And it’s a solo show in the truest sense – he’s the only one on the stage. As much as he’d love to take the string quartet out with him, at the moment the cost is prohibitive. Instead, he goes out by himself and rearranges the music from the album in the moment and on the fly. He calls the concept the ‘De Constructing Files’. “I’m experimenting with the electronic side,” he says. “It’s a very unique way of playing live. I’m playing with a computer, but mostly I’m looping live all the parts from the album, then I’m rearranging the track and on top I’m playing some of the synthesisers I’ve used on the album. Basically, I’m rearranging and replaying the whole album on my own. This is why it is called the De Constructing Files, because I’ve got all the multi-tracks, deconstructed them and then I build them back up again, always in a different way when I’m onstage. I really enjoy it because it allows me to add all sorts of sampled beats, all the things that live make music a bit more alive. I did specific visuals for each song, so you have an audio-visual show. I’m working to play again possibly in London and around Europe, so I’m really looking forward to that.”
The De Constructing Files shows are certainly a very different experience to performing with Nosound. “With the band, I’m the singer and guitarist, so I’m onstage, playing guitar, playing solos, singing, it’s all fantastic, I love it,” he says. “We’re still doing that, we have more gigs lined up with Nosound, but then I was thinking I really wanted to do something different.
There’s no guitars, no classic instruments,
even the synthesisers are all peculiar ones, very weird machines, and I’m playing with all these weird electronics onstage. It’s improvising with myself. I think that when you play live, you need to play live, you need to improvise. If you’re on your own then yeah, you end up improvising with yourself.”
Furthermore, he’s hoping that the change in style will allow the music to pull in listeners that he can’t reach with Nosound. “When you go to a rock gig, most people are not casual listeners,” he says. “They’re people committed to music or to a specific music genre. With this music I’m doing now, which is more contemporary classical electronic, I can see it’s much easier for people who listen to music only in the background or on the radio. Because it’s not a full band, it’s not too loud, there are no vocals, it’s a simpler way for people to tune into the feelings of the music. This is what I really love. I think music should be really inclusive, not just for a small group of people that really like music.”
As much as Ends shines a light on a different side of Erra’s songwriting, the album still has that unmistakeable sense of melancholy found in Nosound. Asked if that mood comes from using lots of minor keys, Erra replies, “Actually, I used to write much more in minor keys, now I always have some major chords, but I find a way to make them melancholic. I have my own way of writing, I don’t know what it is, but there’s obviously something because people say,
‘Oh, this song is so Nosound,’ or about my solo album, ‘This is definitely you.’ I’m probably like every musician, it’s the way musicians arrange chords or develop songs. There is a language I tend to use and that definitely leans more towards melancholy than happiness. I’m not really into happy music.”
That’s not to say that every song has a doleful heart. “I think it’s more intense when it’s about not necessarily sad things. It can be about difficult things, introspective things, even eerie or unsettling things,” says Erra. “On the solo album there are a couple of songs that are not happy, not sad – just a couple of them are sad – the other ones are a bit unsettling. This is what I really like, something where you don’t know what it’s telling you. It leaves you questioning. I like the way music can generate a thought or an interest in the listener, challenging the listener to find what’s inside the music.”
Ends is out now via Kscope. See www.giancarloerra.com for more information.
“Nosound is raw and direct, with lots of voice. With my solo album I wanted to go completely the other way and it was a challenge.”