GIANCARLO ERRA

Nosound's mastermind and melancholic soundtracker on rediscovering the heart of his music, playing the Marillion Weekend in Italy and accidentally gathering enough material to make a mini-album.

- Dom Lawson

Giancarlo Erra is one of modern prog’s most fastidious creatives. Over the last 23 years, he’s become a staple fixture in a vibrant scene, initially with Nosound, but now with the addition of a solo career and occasional collaborations with Tim Bowness. Erra’s records are almost always beautiful, elegant and lush with melancholic warmth, even when he’s gleefully meddling with his own formulae.

The last time Nosound released a full-length album, they sounded hell-bent on redefining themselves, eschewing the languorous post-rock epics of previous, celebrated albums A Sense Of Loss and Afterthoughts, and opting for an eclectic, electronic-based approach, albeit still with Erra’s songwriting at its tender core. Broadly acknowledged as a convincing evolutionary step, Allow Yourself was swiftly followed by deafening silence, as Nosound retreated into the shadows. Since then, Erra has been an intermittent presence. Two gorgeous solo albums – Ends I-VII and Departure Tapes – revealed a new, more experimental side to his music, while an updated, remixed version of his 2011 team-up with Bowness (formerly Warm Winter, but now titled Memories Of Machines) emerged in 2022. Meanwhile, Nosound have been conspicuous by their absence, one polarising Floyd cover aside.

As Erra tells Prog from his immaculate studio in sunny Norfolk, the long wait for a new Nosound record ends right now. It might seem like a paltry return after seven years of silence, but new mini-album To The Core is 20 minutes of the most absorbing and emotional music that anyone will hear this year. Nosound appeared to be done with guitars when