Silva

Deep, fragile, rhythmic, dubby and funny - the album Tremor by Silva is a collaboration between Moa Franzen, artist and performer, and Magnus Dahl, artist and music producer. With clarinet as the leading instrument, backed by cello, synths and drum machines, they build a world at the intersection of different genres, influenced by dance music, jazz and ambient.

"Silva has created what could perhaps best be described as “ambient jazz”. That in itself seems like a contradiction, ambient being at odds with the spontaneity of jazz, and jazz being so vivid. But here we are. It’s partly the texture of the musical sounds that merits comparisons with jazz - far from the purely electronic soundscapes of Eno, early Tangerine Dream etcetera. Rather than tone and atmosphere over musical structure and rhythm, this is tone, atmosphere, musical structure and rhythm.

If most ambient music has evoked images of cities, industrial structures, buildings and architecture, just hearing the sounds contained on Tremor feels like getting lost in a forest and discovering new worlds there. Abaxial and Refuge both set the tone, and the texture on both echoes the way one imagines sounds travelling huge distances in the wild would.

There’s an animated feeling that emanates from all the eight tracks of Tremor. Communion for instance sounds like what it says, music for rituals, from a time before recorded history, with percussion coming across like muffled heartbeats, and textured horns rolling over. Primeval Forest sounds like a walk through woods where curiosity and caution start out equally strong, but where curiosity wins out in the end. On Low June, the album takes confident strides out of the mostly ambient soundscape, it’s an invitation to dance in the midst of an otherwise atmospheric affair.

Oda Sleeping could be seen as a temporal misnomer - it sounds like an instrumental bedtime story, told before sleep, but surely giving rise to sweet dreams. The whole album is so evocative of sagas, but nowhere is that as clear as on Trollslända (“Dragonfly”). It’s a fitting finale, but when it unfurls the seven tracks that precede appear as a prelude all of a sudden, as if they were just exposition opening up for an adventure.

An alternative title for Silva’s quite majestic album would be “Instrumental Sagas for All Ages”. Give a listen if you’re up for lullabies that both soothes your mind and rouses your imagination." - Nathan Hamelberg