#Caroline Shaw

[dustedmagazine]

Vince Clarke — Songs of Silence (Mute)

Photo by Eugene Richards

Vince Clarke has certainly been in some storied synth bands. He wrote “Just Can’t Get Enough” (and eight other songs) for Depeche Mode’s 1981 debut, Speak & Spell, before leaving that band over creative differences. From there, he headed to Yazoo with Alison Moyet and The Assembly with Eric Radcliffe, and finally to the boppiest, poppiest synth outfit of them all, Erasure, where he played stoically as all manner of frivolity unfolded around him.  If you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s and watched any MTV at all, Clarke’s songs are burned into your cortex, and quite possibly unwelcomely, but there’s no denying he was in the thick of a certain kind of dance-y, celebratory, machine-age pop.

The critical thing to understand is that Songs of Silence is nothing at all like that.

This brooding, looming suite of songs was recorded during COVID and reflects Clarke’s sorrow and isolation as friends fell ill. He channels a haunted vibe through modular synth, building each track around a single sustained tone that runs from beginning to end. Lots of things happen around those tones, fluttery arpeggios, slashes of stringed instruments, even, in one instance, a sepulchral folk tune about a “black legged miner.” Still, these tunes are constructed around static, meditational sonic atmospheres that fluctuate in volume and timbre but do not fundamentally change. There’s a sense of the eternal in them, even when as in “Scarper” they twitch into propulsion with percolating electronic rhythms.

Consider the opening “Cathedral” with its crescendoing drones, its altered, inhuman voice sounds, its cavernous sonic space. It unfolds in one long blast of sound after another, a rumbling fog horn, a tremulous string vibration, an unearthly space voyaging organ. You can’t really participate. There’s no melody to hum, no rhythm to tap, and so the best way to experience it is through stillness. You allow it to surround you, to envelop you, to subsume you, like a mystical experience.

These cuts are mostly solitary endeavors, but Clarke invites in a few collaborators to fill out his visions. Caroline Shaw’s pristine soprano arcs through interleaved shimmers of synthesized tones in “Passage,” sounding like the dream of a dream of a dream of an angel. Cellist Reed Hays scrawls a wild, passionate signature over the hushed immanence of “The Lamentations of Jeremiah.” Warmth and anguish flare from his instrument, spilling something baroque and organic into Clarke’s ominous atmospheres.

The disc’s most affecting cut is its oddest. “Blackleg Miner” sets a old labor protest song in a desolate post-industrial landscape. The air hums and trembles around the song’s brutal simplicity, surging to obscure it, at intervals, with sounds like bells shivering in sympathetic vibration. It’s a folk song launched into deep space, hurting through black voids, carrying a faint futile message about what it meant to be human.  

Jennifer Kelly

[nofatclips]

Raze II by Benoît Pioulard featuring Caroline Adelaide Shaw

[doppleganger-rental]

Wanna have goosebumps for days? Wanna see an artist who has such command of her art and vulnerability to share emotion freely that she can stand in place and lock all eyes and ears with just the sound of her voice? This is sublime. This is great.

[justanotherstudyblrrrr]

"To play a wrong note

is insignificant.

To play without passion

is inexcusable."

- L. V. Beethoven.

[musicwithoutborders]

Caroline Shaw · Sō Percussion, Some Bright Morning I Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, 2021

[las-microfisuras]

Lay All Your Love On Me

[formerbogbody]

Me when i’m a fag

[caviarsonoro]

Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion - Lay All Your Love on Me (Live)

[jgthirlwell]

03.23.23 String Orchestra of Brooklyn and Andrew Yee play Caroline Shaw at Roulette Intermedium.

[nonesuchrecords]

Happy birthday, Caroline Shaw!

[nofatclips]

La fama by Rosalía featuring The Weeknd - Directed by Julien Christian Lutz

[gaubert]

the detail of the pattern is movement

[postambientlux]

• caroline shaw + attacca quartet • evergreen • bit.ly/cSaQ-eEn

[justanotherstudyblrrrr]

Teach me

this music that

flows beneath

your skin.