Ambient: the Depeche Mode and Erasure founder with his first solo album.
You have to give Vince Clarke one thing: As a co-founder of commercially very successful bands like Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure, he never lost his desire for musical experiments. This is reflected in dozens of collaborations, including the duo VCMG with ex-colleague Martin Gore, which released the superb minimal techno album SSSS in 2012. Now, at the age of 63, Clarke is releasing his solo debut album SONGS OF SILENCE, the title of which doesn’t quite tell the truth.
There are no songs to be heard on it, nor is there silence. The tracks are at least on the edge of the inaudible. Clarke, who is not necessarily seen as the personification of the zeitgeist, takes up a zeitgeisty theme – the revival of ambient, which has been quietly taking place underground in recent years.
Each of the ten tracks, recorded using a Eurorack modular synthesizer system, is based on a single note and maintains a constant key. This creates soundscapes similar to classic Brian Eno ambient and tracks made of dark gray drones. This is reminiscent of the Berlin School and electro-acoustic works by contemporary composers. The wordless singing of opera singer Caroline Joy gives some of the tracks a pastoral character. And in “The Lamentations Of Jeremiah,” which is based on “Blackleg Miner,” a 19th-century English folk song, Clarke shows how varied the often misunderstood ambient genre can be.