Songs of Silence Vince Clarke

• 1 Cathedral 04:21
• 2 White Rabbit 04:40
• 3 Passage 03:10
• 4 Imminent 04:56
• 5 Red Planet 04:40
• 6 The Lamentations of Jeremiah 04:23
• 7 Mitosis 04:51
• 8 Blackleg 03:06
• 9 Scarper 03:47
• 10 Last Transmission 04:46
• Total Runtime 42:40

Info for Songs of Silence

Vince Clarke presents, unbelievably, his first ever solo album, Songs of Silence. As the album title suggests, Songs of Silence is a lyric-less, instrumental album, and is hugely evocative for that. Unlike anything you’ve previously heard from Vince Clarke, as an artisan of dynamic electropop, (Erasure, Depeche Mode, Yazoo), Songs of Silence has about it a more sober ambient electronic beauty, its unique characteristics put it in a category of its own.

For the creation of the record Vince set himself two rules – first that the sounds he himself generated for the album would come solely from Eurorack (a modular synthesizer format introduced in the mid-90s) and secondly that each track would be based around one note, maintaining a single key throughout. The resultant pieces, with the Eurorack sound clay then manipulated on Logic Pro, amount to wordless narratives, in which a sense of synth-generated, cosmic remoteness is often jolted by stark interventions, reminders of the human hand at work amid this machinery.

This album sees Vince Clarke not content to rest on his considerable pop legacy, and instead open up for himself, and for the rest of us, exciting new electronic vistas in which the permutations and possibilities are limitless.

Recorded in his home studio in New York, and featuring photography and artwork by the award-winning Magnum photojournalist Eugene Richards, work on the album began as a distraction during lockdown, a chance to finally get his head around the possibilities of Eurorack, a modular synthesiser format famed for its addictive and limitless configurations. “I could have gone on forever, I could have not stopped,” explains Vince, “I was enjoying the process so much and wasn’t thinking about anyone else hearing it. But hearing it develop in my studio, in my head, learning new tricks – that’s been the best thing about this. I was in a state of shock, actually, when Mute said they wanted to release this album.”

Alone in the studio, Clarke set himself two rules: first, that the sounds he generated for the album would come solely from Eurorack, and second, that each track would be based around one note, maintaining a single key throughout. “Nobody in my household is particularly interested in what I get up to in the studio” says Vince. “Even the cat used to leave after an hour or so of listening to drones.”

The resultant album’s mood of synth-generated, cosmic remoteness is interrupted by stark interventions, reminders of the human hand at work amid this machinery – a scrambled sample like a distressed transmission from a fighter pilot, the wordless operatic contributions of Caroline Joy, the sawing brimstone of composer Reed Hays’ cello on ‘The Lamentations of Jeremiah’, and the album’s centrepiece which builds around the 1844 anti-scab folk song ‘Blackleg Miner’, glowing with resonance and relevance. Elsewhere on the album Clarke manifests relentless sequencer patterns, gradual accelerations, Moog-style drones, glistening droplets of synth, and burgeoning swells of processed guitars, with Clarke describing the tracks as “having a sense of sadness, of things going bad, things crumbling”.

Vince Clarke

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