- Featuring a 16-voice choir, the dub techno pioneer's latest album reveals yet another wrinkle in the well-worn genre.
- Silencio is Moritz von Oswald's first album not credited to a group or a collaborator. But it's hardly a solo record. For this one, the German artist worked with a 16-voice choir to explore yet another facet of electroacoustic music, after of a decade of experiments with his trio (which at points has featured the likes of Laurel Halo and Ricardo Villalobos). Inspired by 20th-century composers like Iannis Xenakis and informed by the legacy of the dub techno that von Oswald helped invent back in the '90s, Silencio is an in-between album that bridges the gap between many extremes—voice and machine, electro and acoustic, classical and electronic. These contrasts, and their commonalities, have been enduring themes across his catalogue.
I'll get it out of the way: the first time the voices show up on the opening track, after nine minutes of melancholic electronics, they sound a bit goofy. The repeating notes sound out of place with the music, as if von Oswald accidentally opened an interdimensional portal to a Pentatonix rehearsal. But that clashing feels purposeful. von Oswald spends the rest of the album feeding the choir in and out of the ether, until the elements blur into one pulsating dub heartbeat, the same alchemical sound blending heard on records like Vertical Ascent.
Like von Oswald's other recent projects, Silencio takes its time to build, revelling in repetition, sometimes adding more detail or bolder lines with each go round. The genius of this one are the "(Versions)" sprinkled throughout the tracklist. The original "Infinito" is a bottomless chasm of reverb and low-end, but "Infinito (Version)" resembles a dub techno track, the voices turned into little bleeps. We hear "Volta (Version)" before we even get the original, which appears towards the end of the album. And the crashing waves of the climactic "Opaco" turn into a crumbling ambient outro by the time it gets versioned.
Presenting the versions before the originals lends Silencio a liminal feel that goes well with its vocal choir, who despite standing out like a sore thumb at the beginning, settle into another texture for von Oswald to daub across the drums and yawning soundscapes as the album goes on. The merging is a result of von Oswald's unique approach this time around, writing his tracks on classic synthesizers and then transcribing them (via the composer Jarkko Riihimäki) for the choir and running them back into the tracks. But it's never as simple or straightforward as it seems, and there are times when the choir seems to recede from earshot entirely, only for the voices to rub up against the sandpapery feel of the synths once again. Like any von Oswald record, it's constantly shifting, doubling up on itself and taking itself apart. So much writing on dub techno focuses on the genre's rigid formula, but three decades later, its co-inventor is still finding new ways to dub techno and everything else around him.
Tracklist01. Silencio
02. Luminoso
03. Librarsi
04. Infinito
05. Colpo
06. Volta (Version)
07. Infinito (Version)
08. Luminoso (Version)
09. Volta
10. Opaco
11. Opaco (Version)