Review Summary: Who ever thought silence would be good enough to eat?
Burial’s
Untrue was the dark and melancholy soundtrack of cities filled with the living corpses of yesterdays lost life. It portrayed exactly what it was like to be human in a labyrinth of eight million and yet still feel utterly alone.
Silence, on the other hand, is a journey through entirely dead cities overgrown by vegetation, yet still bearing the hallmarks of human existence – abandoned yet functioning computers, scattered belongings, and echoes of voices emanating from the darkest corners. It is the book of sound dripping with both the dark ink of cities and the verdant sap of forests.
Both man and nature contribute to the chapters making up this work – synths splatter across thunderstorms like lightning whilst somnolent beats melt below; the heartbeat of a weary earth embracing the ethereal sky. What’s astonishing is the comfort that can be found in the emptiness. Far from being a soundtrack to desolation and loneliness, it is filled with exquisite warmth throughout. Drops of rainwater fall in myriad splashes onto sine waves that lap against shorelines and slowly erode the imprints of footsteps still echoing with maudlin menace. Soft synths drift like bubbles before bursting asunder, glimmering rainbows in the otherworldly darkness.
So it’s no surprise that, contrary to the name,
Silence is all about sound in its infinite forms. Meticulously mapped out beats, fragmented voices overheard purely by chance and the gorgeously chaotic sounds of nature all combine to form a delicious musical banquet, a veritable feast for the ears. Paradoxically, it brings to mind a pitch black noiseless room in which one can see and hear perfectly, if only one
listens.
But why waste words when a single breath will do;
It is in the depths of
Silence that the most profound beauty lurks.
