Senking - Silencer
It's not very often that I have the luxury of listening to a record several times in a single sitting; there is usually too much to do and too much to music to hear. But Senking Silencer has been on repeat in the CD player for most of the afternoon. It helps that it's a short record -- six tracks clocking in at just over thirty minutes -- but the real appeal is that Silencer is a subtle, sub-aquatic sponge movement of a record. Silencer is Pole meets Pan Sonic at three thousand feet below sea level as recorded through a trailing VLF sonar array.
While my all-time favorite aquatic record is the Porter Ricks/Techno Animal collaboration Symbiotics, Silencer fills that space when I want deep water echoes without the lumbering, suffering atmospheres of Porter Ricks and Techno Animal trying to out-crush one another. Silencer swims in the deep water as if the massive weight of the ocean doesn't matter. Sound moves slowly down here and the tiny chirps and pops of creatures imploding are distant and miniscule notes against the delicate motion of the heavy water and the thermal thread of luminous melodies which your brain hallucinates.
"Upbeat" hums for thirty seconds before the VLF beats begin. Single tones swims through your speakers, chasing after a school of tiny static cracklings as if there are very large fish out there in the darkness who are conducting a slow-tone symphony of sonar pulses. "Bateau" moves a bit quicker; the vanishing bass is an insistent pulse against your spine. Tiny glitches percolate beside a rising melody as if we are witnessing the passage of a large boat through black sea, the trailing sound of its engines and bulk echoing through the water.
"Rachel" is the least silent of the tracks on Silencer. A rumbling, tumbling track, "Rachel" moans with the decaying sound of stringed instruments, wan melodies which surf over the resolute bass line and the thin chatter of electrons vaporizing. Jens Massel has been recording under a number of monikers for Karaoke Kalk (Senking, Kandis, Fumble) and each record displays his growing mastery of the minimal sonic aesthetic. While "Cups" is even more melody driven than "Rachel," the song still exists in an open space, the notes and melodies echoing off one another as they free-float through the aquatic atmosphere of Silencer. "Run" begins with a tapping, as if someone were banging against the hull of your bathysphere. The tapping continues as glistening tones begin to coruscate around this patterned repetition. The low-end beats have become just a single long pulse for the final track, "Scatt," a slow drone that continually vibrates the floor. Tones pouring out of large metal bowls catch on the edge of thin static pops. For all the movement we've experienced to this point, in the end, we just hover, floating in the water, surrounded by the weight and echo of the sea.
The record isn't very silent when you get right down to it. But what Massel accomplishes on Silencer is that he induces you into a quieter frame of mind, a state of heightened attentiveness. Whatever you are doing, whatever you are thinking: these things fade away under the calming echoes of Silencer. Just put your arms out and float in the deep waters of Senking. This is wonderful.
Senking
Karaoke Kalk [2001]
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