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Electronic Substance Abuse
The Sea and the Silence

Tympanik Audio

Posted: Monday, July 06, 2009
By: Matthew Johnson
Features Editor

ESA just keeps getting better. After last year’s masterful collection of dark, religiously-themed rhythmic noise, How Pure Would Your Utopia Be?, Jamie Blacker returns with a new magnum opus that is by turns aggressive and contemplative, but always intense. Hints of Blacker’s religious preoccupations make themselves known once again from the get-go, with “Tasting Nails” opening the album with soft ratchets and creaks and a panning sample from Roman Catholic liturgy, and “It’s Hard to Sleep, in Hell” waxes philosophical on human nature and the corrupting influence of evil with a single phrase – “The devil is inside me and I am inside you” – looped over a clanking power noise rhythm laced with choir pads and sprinkled with piano. Largely, though, The Sea and the Silence is concerned less with theological matters than with personal ones, ranging from rage, as on the energized “Your Anger is a Gift” with its staccato spoken duet (featuring guest vocals from Jacqueline Curd), to melancholy, as on a reprise of “Randomly Selected Drawbacks of the Human Condition,” which originally appeared on ESA’s previous album. The new version features mournful acoustic guitars keyboard phrases over a down-tempo beat that’s melodic but bleak, forming a perfect backdrop for the ethereal vocals of Mabh Savage. The album’s real centerpiece is its two-part title track. “The Sea” begins on a literal note with the gentle crash of waves on a shore, eventually joined by British voiceover actress Lesley Lafferty reciting a spoken-word piece that pays homage to the peace of the ocean as well as its darker symbolic connotations of drowning, depression, and mortality. As the intensity of Lafferty’s performance builds, so do the beats behind it, and the song evolves into a driving force of tsunami beats undulating behind a loop of Lafferty’s invocation: “I am the sea and the silence!” The second part of the piece, “The Silence” takes a drastically different approach, with harmonic Eastern drones, dulcimers, strings, and hand percussion backing loops of sunrise chanting, it’s like a darker take on Delerium’s work, unexpected on a rhythmic noise album but gorgeous and exotic nonetheless. It highlights the thoughtful and atmospheric approach Blacker takes with his music, a subtlety that might be overlooked by fans who only hear his more club-oriented tracks like “Absolute Fury (In its Very Fabric).” Blacker has no problem delivering the beat, but more impressively, he’s rivaled perhaps only by Manufactura’s Karloz M. in his ability to use seemingly simple loops and distorted beats to explore a rich, though bleak, tapestry of emotions.