Bleep

Vince Clarke has been ubiquitous in the past forty plus years of British electronic music: from beginnings in Depeche Mode and his longtime duo Erasure with Andy Bell, to collaborations with Alison Moyet as Yazoo and more recently Paul Hartnoll of Orbital. Yet, it has taken him his whole career to arrive at his solo debut. Perhaps fitting, then, for someone with such a bulk and breadth of credits most artists couldn’t claim, that Clarke continues to make his stamp on territory previously unexplored.

Songs of Silence allows enchanting evolutions to arise from simple limitations. Stripping away the lyrics, dance propulsion, and general grandeur of pop music, Clarke lands at Eurorack meditations on one single note that are loaded with detail. These ambient études have a cinematic air to them, working through tension to create enveloping atmospheres. Dust clouds of synths collect overtones, buzzing with energy previously untapped, as the stillness is separated into scattered arpeggios, splashes of guitar, and thudding, lumbering footfalls.

‘White Rabbit’ spirals restlessly with bursts of guitar and epic rhythmic conclusion, leading into the icy ‘Passage’ where operatic vocals sing wordlessly of coming change, and snaps of fire whip through electrified air. ‘The Lamentations of Jeremiah’ is a cathartic centrepiece filled with mythos and longing: theatrical cello cuts through background oscillations, dancing and spinning wildly while silent stormclouds gather. The album’s sole lyrical track ‘Blackleg’ takes a 19th century English folksong with an uncompromising stance on strikebreakers, giving voice to metallic clangs and spewing smoke.

Building on his legacy of synthpop and dance music would have been an obvious, and no doubt celebrated, choice, but with Songs of Silence, Vince Clarke opts to crystallise a wholly different, captivating feeling.