Today Vince Clarke has announced details of a one-off performance in Brooklyn, NY of his recently-released, critically-heralded debut solo album Songs of Silence. The performance will take place on May 4th, 2024 at National Sawdust and tickets are on sale now. During the singular event, Clarke will perform the album in its entirety, alongside a few extra tracks from the same project. Cellist and composer Reed Hays (who is featured on Songs of Silence) will perform alongside Vince, with the opener yet to be announced, in what is surely to be a truly standout and memorable evening.
Purchase or stream Songs of Silence HERE.
As the Ivor Novello-winning songwriter behind countless chart-topping pop songs as the co-founder of Erasure, Yazoo and Depeche Mode, Clarke has, unbelievably, waited until now to embark on a solo release.
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 synthesizer 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.
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 "Blackleg", the album’s centerpiece 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”.
Not content to rest on his considerable pop legacy, Vince Clarke has instead opened up exciting new electronic vistas for himself and for the rest of us, in which the permutations and possibilities are limitless, Clarke declaring “The infinite shades of sounds you can create with just the tiniest tweak of a knob or slider continues to fascinate me.”
RECENT PRAISE FOR SONGS OF SILENCE:
“…moves between moody, declarative melodic phrases and strenuous arpeggios, as if it’s wrestling with looming dread." – The New York Times
"… a series of mood pieces with each one glowing from within as if energized by a core of molten rock or radioactive material." - Paste
“… yet another side of Vince Clarke - sound and mood manipulated by a master” - MOJO
“Compellingly moody synth drone… …conjures interstellar space in all its sublime beauty and ominous unknowability” - Uncut
“…a record unlike any music he’s ever made. It’s still epic yet intensely human in mood – as his music has been often throughout his career – but here it’s ambient and purely instrumental.” - The Quietus
“A profound and transcendent listening experience from start to finish” - Electronic Sound
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