On his first album, "Ends", released in 2019, Giancarlo Erra tried to charm his audience with an economy of means both in terms of the few instruments used and the minimalist character of the melodies, all bathed in a most melancholic atmosphere. Just recorded, Giancarlo Erra already thinks about the next one, that he wants more experimental. It is at this moment that he learns that his father is suffering from a cancer of which he will die some months later. Renewing ties that had been distended for many years, Giancarlo Erra will find in music the valve allowing him to evacuate his emotions during the period spent accompanying his father in this terrible ordeal.
If "Ends" was full of melancholy, "Departure Tapes" is even darker. The tracks are mostly improvised and recorded in live conditions, Giancarlo Erra proceeding afterwards to add samples or orchestrations from his synthesizers. Most often starting with an ostinato of a few notes of acoustic or electric piano, Erra weaves a web of stretched chords or long strokes of synthetic strings on a mostly slow tempo. The melodies are minimalist when they are not completely absent, leaving room for evanescent and contemplative music.
But if the process used is always the same, the result varies according to the mood of the composer. Each track, although built on a similar scheme, has its own atmosphere and plunges the listener in different universes, but always dark: feeling of loneliness, sadness and coldness, impression of ebb and flow, feeling of urgency, of an imminent and inescapable danger created by a simple crescendo, rains crashing on a window, so many melancholic landscapes traced by an impressionist music The record ends with the only track with a less dark tone, 'A Blues For My Father', an "optimistic" requiem evoking, still on a minimalist framework, a sunrise on a sleeping countryside or, to stick to the theme of the album, the departure of the father's soul towards a luminous and peaceful elsewhere.
Entirely instrumental, practically improvised and very experimental, "Departure Tapes" gives off a poignant sadness that will leave the listener in a deep melancholy, if he is sensitive to this kind of exercise. But all those who will not be impregnated by these repetitive and minimalist tracks will be deeply bored. To be reserved for a well-informed public.