When Riccardo Pietri sat down to record “Pas de Danse”, I suspect the air in the room was heavier than usual. Marking his return to the sonic landscape after a two-year silence, this single feels less like a fanfare and more like a profound exhalation—the kind you make when you finally drop your bags after a long, confusing journey through a strange city.
The track is an acoustic piano solo, but describing it strictly by its instrumentation misses the point of the vibration. The recording is terrifyingly intimate; you can almost hear the felt hammers deciding exactly how gently to strike the strings. It falls comfortably into the lap of contemporary minimalism, sharing a melancholic DNA with Einaudi or Tiersen, yet it captures a specific “freshness” reminiscent of Gibran Alcocer.
Pietri titles it “dance step,” referencing the structure of ballet, yet listening to it feels oddly like watching dust motes swirling in a shaft of sunlight—chaotic physics pretending to be choreography. It brings to mind the smell of ozone right before a storm breaks, that electrically charged stillness that sits heavy in the chest. Why does a specific sequence of piano keys smell like rain and ozone? The neurology of it escapes me, but the feeling is undeniable.
The rhythm rolls with an Andante pace that suggests walking, or perhaps pacing. It creates a space for introspection that is clean, poignant, and surprisingly weighty. It doesn’t ask for your attention; it waits patiently for you to give it, like a cat staring at you from across the room.
There is a heaviness here, but it is the comfortable heaviness of a wool blanket rather than a burden. As the final notes decay, one has to wonder: was the silence of the last two years empty, or was it full of this exact music, waiting to be let out?
