GIANCARLO ERRA
Departure Tapes KSCOPE
THIS IS MUSIC TO INHABIT AS MUCH AS TO LISTEN TO.
Nosound man’s ambient meditation on the death of his father.
It’s fascinating the way in which instrumental music can evoke specific feelings and sensations despite lacking the cues and signposts of vocal/lyric-led songs. Rather than being guided by a singer, instrumental music requires the listener to bring their own interpretations and experiences to bear, which often leads to deeper, more personal connections. This is something that Italian-born, UK-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Giancarlo Erra clearly understands, with the haunting ambient suite of Departure Tapes suffused with a sense of time and place, a slow-motion film running backwards into the past. This is music to inhabit as much as to listen to.
Erra describes the album as being written almost unconsciously during a period when he was looking after his terminally ill father and rebuilding a relationship that had been fractured for many years. Throughout, the music is treated and processed, made blurry and allusive like memory, but illuminated by the gradual reconciliation between father and son, and ultimately by a feeling of catharsis. It’s as though Erra has taken the symphonic emo-prog of his Nosound project and smeared its colours together to create the aural equivalent of a Turner painting.
Dawn Tape opens with a looping piano phrase gradually subsumed by a deep drone that creaks like a sitar heard from fathoms deep, before being joined by a trembling choir of strings. It’s reminiscent of similar ambient classical work such as Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking Of The Titanic or Michael Nyman’s score for The Piano. It’s like a tracking shot of nature, where nothing and everything is happening at the same time.
The quiet, dancing violin and lonely horn of Previous Tape is mildewed and decayed, while the surging orchestral heartbeat of 169th Tape is the past pushing into the present, recalling the hauntological sound manipulations of The Caretaker, aka Leyland James Kirby. Unwound Tape is a wave of arpeggiated keys and bass stabs, like somebody knocking on the inside of a sarcophagus, but the extended centrepiece of the album is Departure Tape itself. A wordless female vocal sounds from the edge of some otherworldly precipice. An organ moves centre stage but soon dissolves into a ghost of itself. Not for the first time, the space and tonal purity of Talk Talk come to mind. Starting with stark bass notes, a piano spirals upwards and blossoms into an elegiac requiem as the female voice returns. Finally, A Blues For My Father feels like a place for the listener to rest their head, the drone of harmonium and soft horns entwined. This is a beautiful, powerful meditation on healing and loss – no words required.