SILIM! - SILIM!

 

Released: March 21

SILIM! Is an album that is comprised of equal parts subtlety and obscurity. There’s a rather unique combination of things going on from track to track, but it all shares this oddly mystical feeling about it. The vagaries of the album manifest in ways that are either obvious or obscure and there’s a lot of these fleeting moments in which something feels much like a vocalization, but there are no true words and only a weird semblance of echolalia that come across as broken chants. I find this album to be one of those situations in which its visual accompaniment does kind of prepare you for what is about to happen, although it still undersells the experience. 

The album opens up with “The marsh,” which is a rather slow moving track as it builds up. But once those strangle vocalizations I mentioned earlier arrive, the character of the experience shifts dramatically. What began as a very mild drone effect suddenly becomes colored by the strange repeated and recycle gibberish voices. It is chopped and flipped in was that seem to destroy all original intent and replaces it with disembodied phonemes that serve to advance the sensation of auditory hallucination. There are several other tracks that take such an approach but I found a particular affinity for “Yell,” whose actual sound contradicts its name. It is a rather quiet and sparse affair, one that seems to stop intermittently in the middle of the tack multiple times. The sounds on this track are not exactly creepy or unnerving, but there is something strange about the whisper-like sounds and voices that define this track. It feels very much like an auditory representation of an uncomfortable, though not menacing, shadow realm. 

I believe the closest this album really comes to drone is “ Don’t drain the marsh” which comes nearer the end of the album. For much of the track, it is just slowly rising and oscillating tones that quietly grow in intensity. It feels rather engulfing, as though the tones were a gently swishing sea that threaten to swallow you in. But then these tones subside and the broken vocalizations return sounding like very faint chants from a distance. I thought it was a rather nice touch as it first kind of subverted the expectation that such vocal effect would be there by drowning me in the tones, only for that connecting motif to return. Overall, I really like this use of vaguely vocal sounds. It makes for something that feels human in origin, but something else entirely in its final manifestation.