GIGANTE - Himalaya

A recent trend, especially among younger generations, is the search for the world's remotest, most fertile places, in the hope of finding landscapes not yet colonized by the excesses of our age. It's a hunt for a purity and simplicity far removed from the urbanized West, where everything is normalized and ridiculously sped up, but also the hope of reliving an era in which it was possible to look at the world without the mediation of a smartphone screen.

It's from exactly this impulse that the project Gigante was born, formed in the Valle d'Itria in Puglia, offering on this debut half an hour of folk songs tuned to the strings of his ukulele. The curious but fitting contrast lies in Gigante's choice of the mountainous landscape of the Himalaya range as his inspiration, an environment that, thanks to its extreme altitude, can claim an almost total absence of human trace.

Although he's made authenticity and spontaneity his personal trademark, Gigante is by no means new to the Italian music scene. Having already two albums behind him from his experience with the solid Moustache Prawn, the young musician has decided to set aside the electric bass and pick up the ukulele, trading the electric jolts of British rock for a more relaxed, comforting landscape.

The folk music played by Gigante is open to contamination, but never seeks the sterile, forced virtuosity that would undermine the meaning of the album and its music. An acoustic framework runs through the whole record nonetheless, from the drums-and-didgeridoo opening of the opening-track "Guerra" to the tex-mex-flavored touches à-la Calexico of "Zaino", passing through "Siberia" too, with a fitting falsetto that dances, oscillating between harpsichord and distant strings.

Gigante seems to come from a place where time has stopped altogether. An era in which temperatures and photographs of warm, comforting corners of the heart have been frozen in place. It's hard not to notice the resemblance to Fleet Foxes in the atmosphere he manages to conjure up. But while the Seattle band dive headfirst into the most radical folk-rock, this young musician from Puglia wants to build a thick base of more varied sounds, never closing the door to the electric contamination found throughout the record's tracks. The ukulele rarely gives way to guitar, yet still manages to shape a number of more synthetic moments built around keyboard and drum machine. The talent is there, and it shows above all on the singles "Frank" and, even more so, "Sopravvissuti", which have a slightly more classic feel but sound fresh from the very first listen.

Though it falls a bit short on consistency in terms of length – strip away the interludes and the actual running time barely tops twenty minutes – the record deserves praise for how clearly Gigante has managed to define his own sonic identity. This young man from Puglia, ukulele in hand, leads us into a world of gentle hope, where there are still beasts and animals to play with, trees and landscapes to glimpse and be seduced by. A world where it's still possible to believe in the beauty of simplicity. And finding the courage to pull off something like this is never easy, especially when aiming at a music scene that increasingly chases the contradictions of the present, both in how it's distributed and in what it has to say. Gigante wants us to discover the secret charm of small things, softly spoken but with a genuine courage that's growing ever rarer.

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10/05/2018