We have some new artists on our roster whose releases will be coming out in the next few months. They are:
Heller Mason – a singer-songwriter recommended to us by Rivulets. He’s got kind of a Neil Young ala Harvest vibe.
Black Happy Day – a collaboration between Tara VanFlower & Timothy Renner (Stone Breath). If you know both of these artists already, it sounds exactly like you might think. It’s a bit hard to describe, maybe ambient roots music?
Alan Sparhawk – solo-guitarscapes from Alan of Low. Minimalist guitar drone in the style of Aarktica & Remora.
Plumerai – bliss-pop from Boston. We’ve been friends with these guys since they formed. So it was just a matter of time before it happened. They’re musical influences are pretty shoegazery, but they have a style all of their own.
There’s a recent interview with Brian John Mitchell at Lallabbau about Silber Records, Remora, & Lost Kisses.
We have two new releases shipping out on pre-orders. You can order both discs as a bundled discount for a limited time at our sale page. Below are the press releases:
GODDAKK: MONUMENT TO A RUINED AGE
Goddakk was started while Martin Newman was struggling to piece together the band Plumerai. It started as a project he had intended to form into a band that would take on dark, oppressive songs ala The Cure’s Pornography. Seeing theremin player Pamelia Kurstin and the guitar works done by Silber head Brian John Mitchell as Remora impressed Newman with both of these artists ability to create huge soundscapes without other musicians. The appeal of not having to rely on anyone else as he’d been forced to do with his “normal” bands (burMonter, December Sundays) made him decide to keep Goddakk a solo project. The looping “theremin orchestra” of Pamelia was a big influence on how he worked the songs together with the reverse delay and later elements of his more traditional songwriting creeped in with more songlike structures. That fused with his desire for rhythm and structure (as opposed to noise for the sake of noise) led to the adding of Tricky inspired flow vocals run through a tremelo pedal giving tracks like “One Hundreds,” “Unfortunates,” & “Crucify You” more song-like qualities.
On Goddakk’s debut album Monument to a Ruined Age, the dominant instrument is a Fender VI bass run through loops & effects sounding like anything from a normal bass to breaking glass to a freight train. The final results end up sounding like a cross between Colin Newman, Coil, & The Legendary Pink Dots. An aggressive ambient music that could as easily fit the soundtrack to a David Lynch film as a car ride smuggling a dead body to Florida.
LYCIA: THE BURNING CIRCLE AND THEN DUST
Here at Silber we’ve been fans of Lycia since around 1992. In fact, we started Silber always hoping to put out Lycia records & now we’re re-releasing the five Lycia studio albums re-mastered by Lycia frontman Mike VanPortfleet. The darkwave classic The Burning Circle And Then Dust is our second installment.
The Burning Circle And Then Dust was a groundbreaking point in Lycia’s career. It marked a shift from more atmospheric music towards song-oriented music with tracks like “Pray” & “Slip Away.” It marked the first collaborations between Mike VanPortfleet & Lycia members David Galas & Tara Vanflower. It marked the transformation of Lycia into a honed out live touring machine.
Originally released as a double disc, VanPortfleet himself explained the truncation for the re-mastered The Burning Circle And Then Dust to a single disc. “Shortly after recording what would become disc one of the album David Galas & I were doing so well in the studio that we went on to record another ten songs with the intent of them possibly being used for compilation appearances. Though I thought most of the songs were stylistically different from the initial songs, when offered the possibility of releasing a double disc including the more recently recorded material I decided to go ahead & release the whole lot. Hindsight being 20/20 I have opted to hone the disc back down to my original vision.”