"Erva de ientu" means "wind grass" in the Salento dialect, the slang term used by elders to refer to the spontaneous vegetation that grows on the shore, or rather on the dunes a stone's throw from the sea, and which manages to take root in the sand despite its apparent fragility, resisting the northern wind (on the Adriatic side), the salt air, and man.
This is the title of Airportman's new work with Egidio Marullo.
A meeting of music and painting, each influencing the other, a work of research and resistance, "an apparent fragility resistant to the north wind, the salt air, and man."
"The Airportman project, born in Roata, has deep roots—tenacious like those plants that manage to grow in the most unlikely places.
A music that moves between evocative minimalism, rarefied chamber atmospheres, and intimate, almost whispered post-rock, where every note seems to carve out more space than sound.
From this encounter comes a collaboration in which the six tracks correspond to six paintings, collected in a beautiful oversized 18×18 cm cardboard sleeve—an object meant to be looked at and touched, as much as listened to.
Erva De Lentu is all this, and something more: an album-cluster of subtle emotions, a slow traversal in which every sound holds a fragment of landscape, a movement of air, a memory resurfacing without warning. It is an intimate dialogue between images and music, a space where the listener is not asked to understand, but to let themselves be crossed—by nuances, by silences, by those vibrations that resist definition.
There is a delicacy here that is not fragility, but intention. A form of care that does not impose itself, but accompanies. Each track is a half-open door onto a small world—a world made of shadows, breaths, gestures barely hinted at. And yet, it is precisely within this apparent simplicity that the strength of the work emerges: a quiet form of poetic resistance that doesn’t need to raise its voice, because its truth lives in the details, in the shade, in the sand that—despite the wind—still finds a way to hold its roots.
Erva De Ientu is a place to inhabit, more than an album to consume. A small emotional outpost resting on the thin line between land and sea, reminding us that even what seems most ephemeral can become home."
(Luca Paoli - Redapolis Music)
