US CD Beta-Lactam Ring Records MT 096a
US LP Beta-Lactam Ring Records MT 096b/MT097
The Silver Man (Phil Knight)
One of the truest indications of a good record is when it sounds like something is starting to go wrong with the car while listening to it. The latest Silverman sounds at turns like the breaks are going, the belts are slipping, the timing needs adjusting, the drive shaft has a shot bearing and the clutch is failing. Perhaps this is the very nature of illusion bespoke in the title. NOI is a much more amorphous excursion than some of Silverman's previous slow trance explorations, though it does display his trademark fondness for going to very quiet places. Through a polar silence comes a ringing metallic that fades off into contrapuntal, subsonic drones. A brief essay of percussives trails back into the liquid void. The album is a series of such interlocked and subtle sonic, largely non-melodic shape shifts whose darkness is not so much morose as it is simply casting shadows of and off the unknown. Silverman has carved an abstract chasm of distant, organic electronics that is best first opened away from one's car.