As the title of the album suggests, “Songs Of Silence” is a lyric-less instrumental album that is all the more impressive for it. Unlike anything you’ve heard from Vince Clarke before, who is a master of dynamic electropop (Erasure, Depeche Mode, Yazoo), “Songs Of Silence” has a sober electronic beauty whose unique qualities put it in its own category
For the creation of the album, Vince set two rules – first, that the sounds he generated himself for the album should come exclusively from Eurorack (a modular synthesizer format introduced in the mid-90s), and second, that each track should be based on a single note and maintain a single key. The resulting pieces, with the Eurorack sound processed using Logic Pro, are wordless narratives in which a sense of synth-generated cosmic isolation is often punctuated by strong interventions reminiscent of the human hand in the midst of this machinery.
On this album, Vince Clarke does not rest on his considerable pop heritage, but opens up exciting new electronic possibilities for himself and the rest of us, whose permutations and possibilities are limitless.
