For his self titled debut, Alberto Boccardi presents an album of sparse instrumental and electronic soundscapes.  The album has 5 tracks, and is over in a brief 27 minutes.

The opener "Laying On Before" is rich with the sunbleached shimmer of distorted rock organ, and immediately makes a good impression on me.  With funereal pacing, Boccardi explores the inherent melancholy and disoriented sedation of the shoegaze chordal palette.  His soundspaces have the sort of open, occasionally disturbed stillness of the field in the cover image, and the glassy rhythmic warble of the processed organ is soothing.

The second track, "Desolate Red Fingers" is an odd and emotionally naked 2 minutes.  A soft, repetitious Gamelan chime provides a haunting reference point for a yearning female vocal, sung in English with a heavy accent.  The emotion of this is quite potent but seems out of place, or unresolved, on the rest of the album, as it marks the only appearance of sung vocals.

"Unexpected Places, We Saw" is the longest piece on the album at 9 minutes.  It is led for its first few minutes by a clean guitar echoing on the distant horizon, percolated with brief spits and shards of noise.  Boccardi strums synergistically into the delay, builds momentum, and a chord progression begins to solidify ('solid' moments are rare on this album).  From this solidness, the track dissolves into absolute stillness, and finally a few muffled notes drift to the surface, and lay placid, dissolving all memory of the former momentum in a lethargic blur, seeming to slow deeper and deeper into the blank, not unlike drifting to sleep at the end of an eventful day.  A beat formed from rounded clicks and pops catches the hidden pulse of this ambience, and momentum is restored.

"You Told Me You Were Lying" takes the album into cold, digital synthetic realms, an understated IDM broken beat rhythm encircled by the submerged whirring of motors and chittering of fragmented hi hats.  All manner of digital DSP can be heard, though it never takes on the mechanized, generative feel of mathematical composers like Ryoji Ikeda and Autechre.  A solitary, deeply reverberated piano melody enters, and continues even after the beat dissolves.  The female vocalist from the second track can be heard faintly speaking in the background, but her words are not really audible.  This is a pleasant, if unoriginal, armchair reverie.

The closer "Clocking the Time" is perhaps the most 'empty' piece, essentially the warning bleats of a saxophone sounding out against a thoroughly compressed grey mud that pumps and breathes with its reverberations.  A restless muffled rhythm maintains a bubbling murmer at the edge of the mix.  The saxophone's bleats intensify until shrieking aggressively into the red, splitting fiercely into digital clipping.  It's loud but not absurdly so, and it certainly works as a dramatic device to close the album.

In conclusion, I enjoy the pleasant faded melodic palette of this album, though it seems to be over very quick, and there's not as much substance here as there could be.  I get the impression that Alberto Boccardi is quite capable of creating a unified, extended emotional narrative with these kinds of sounds, but has instead opted for something rather meandering with this recording, with heavy use of space.  It's quality understated music that grows on one over time, though I hope to hear a bit more focus and ambition in his future works.  Recommended to any soundscape or ambient post rock listener who is familiar with the pre-requisite Stars of the Lid, Brian Eno, Steve Roach, etc.