On his debut solo album Ends, Giancarlo Erra ably demonstrates a masterful gift for producing timelessly intimate and profoundly affecting music.
"I decided to call the album 'Ends', because each end is in actuality the possible start for something new (in both music and life). This isn't always easy to accept, and it's something I often struggle with. The album title is a reminder and an encouragement, plus it's an appropriate name for my solo debut which explores a different kind of music for me."
Comprising a suite of eight thematically linked instrumentals, Ends deploys sparse piano patterns, synth textures, eerily beautiful string quartet performances, and subtle electronic pulses to create a compelling whole that establishes Erra as a composer of rare sensitivity and singular purpose.
Recalling the tonal contemporary classical miniatures of Arvo Pärt and Max Richter, the soundtracks of Nils Frahm and Clint Mansell, and the early electronica of the likes of Roedelius and Schulze, Ends presents a connected series of suspended sonic reveries that shift and build in unexpected and frequently heartbreaking ways.
Produced and performed by Erra - along with a Danish / Icelandic quartet comprising Elis Marteinsson (violin), Krista Sverrisdóttir (violin), Nicolaj Nielsen (viola) and Quynh Lephan (cello) - some of the album's vividly cinematic soundscapes will be used in a forthcoming documentary film by Australian film-maker Dion Johnson.
Freed from the constraints of writing songs and creating frameworks for his long-running post-rock collective Nosound, with Ends Erra has delivered the purest distillation of his musical vision.
In abandoning his voice, Giancarlo Erra has discovered a new one.
"From the first note it is game over" (Clash)
Giancarlo Erra, piano, synthesizer, keyboards
Elis Marteinsson, violin
Krista Sverrisdóttir, violin
Nicolaj Nielsen, viola
Quynh Lephan, cello