REWIEW ON WWW.THISISULL.COM
Silence Kit - Pieonear
By Michelle Dee
Imagine my surprise when I received a disc from Moscow to review. It was attractively packaged with what I think may be a crude representation of a pangolin; possibly a polar bear but I favour the pangolin idea, constructed from snow and ice.
The cover folds out to reveal a wealth of information I can tell you there are three tracks of varying length on Pieonear and that it was recorded at Parastudio and Home Studios in Moscow from the months of June 2003 to May 2004.
Including the pangolin there are nineteen other colour shots in this well thought out and informative inlay card. Why am I so het up on this topic you may well be asking? Well I find that so many bands and musical outfits don't take any time and effort over their packaging. You are lucky if you get a hastily scribbled title in indelible ink on the Cd itself. So once more well done to Silence Kit for producing a reviewer friendly package.
So what mystery and intrigue awaits the one fortunate enough to purchase a copy of this light and dark creation of mammoth proportions. First of all you get three uncompromising tracks that blend seamlessly from one to the next. Okay you say. But there is a most pleasant surprise this Cd is of album length and quality.
Whilst whispering the name of Angelo Badalamenti, I thought I heard an echo of Vangelis tempered with the opulence and ethereal feel of Orbital. It is a very hard task to try and categorize this multi-layered, expansive composition. Ice and ghost guitars float around snow laden castle walls looking out over empty wastelands of tundra. Spoken word seeps in eerily, amongst cello and flute, resonating with the horrors of 9.11. Ravens swoop overhead cawing with ominous menace. This is the memory of an epic movie soundtrack for a re-awakened dream.
There are moments of such intensity that the pain and suffering of mother Russia can almost be heard. This pain is tempered with a piano precariously picking a way through percussion and random guitar noise. Among the clacks, hums, taps and whirring wheels of samples, a double bass can be heard.
Meanwhile a flute, possibly called Jupiter charms your very soul. There is also a brief vocal arrangement with a convergence of Eastern and Western sounds and styles.
Whilst listening to this audacious offering from Moscow it is impossible not to think back to the popular images of Russia's past. The K.G.B.held within secret corridors of power, long black limousines, stealthily creeping by in the dead of a winter's night on the way to a secret rendezvous.
The darker more foreboding side to the incredible composition suggests the shadowy underworld still operating today where reporters and artists alike one day just vanish with no clues left as to there demise.
The spectre of the Red army, Hammer and sickle aloft marching forever onward to an uncertain future echoes the very tangible feeling of a people trying to create something new from the ashes of old Russia. The phoenix can be plainly heard rising from the flames on Pieonear. The very title is indicative of an exploration of un-chartered territory.
About fourteen minutes into track two Psychoparasite the most sublime chiming sound rings out which is just so breathtakingly beautiful. I cannot stress enough how bold Silence Kit have been in creating and producing an absolute masterpiece of huge proportion both musically and technically. Then to sustain this sheer genius for at least an hour is quite honestly beyond the realms of normal creative endurance.
Pieonear has to be heard to be believed an absolutely earth-shattering acoustic experience.
I don't know whether they do live shows I for one would be thrilled to see the cinematic majesty and menace recreated before my disbelieving eyes.
REWIEW ON WWW.WHISPERINANDHOLLERIN.COM
'SILENCE KIT'
'PIEONEAR'
- Label: 'LEMONSMELLSTREET (silencekit@mail.ru)'
- Genre: 'Post-Rock' - Release Date: 'SEPTEMBER 2004'
Muscovites SILENCE KIT don't do things by halves. Their eponymous debut was one of the most fascinating albums we reviewed during 2003 and this new three-tracker is once the again the sound of a band who make a mockery of terms like 'the sky's the limit' in terms of ambition.
Actually, when first confronted by "Pieonear", your reviewer assumed it was an EP. It's only got three tracks, after all. However, precious few EPs last 75 minutes, feature music of the scope contained within and gleefully rip up the rule book of acceptability the way these driven Russian boys do. Get acquainted with Silence Kit and you find time and space realigning to suit their grand designs.
So what's changed in the SK world since their debut album? Well, original drummer Gregoriy Alexanyan has departed, to be replaced by the equally talented Sergey Ledovski and cellist/ double bassist Yaroslav Kovalev has also come on board. Both acquisitions are clearly wise moves and both make their presence felt during the course of this slowburning epic.
The simple fact that "Pieonear" took almost a year to make gives you an idea of the dedication involved. But the end results suggest the sweat and toil was worth it. Opening track "Lemonsmellstreet" alone is breathtaking in scope. It kicks off with a jaunty piano intro before giving way to a more typical SK math-rock attack driven by Force 10 guitars and tornado-riding drumming from Ledovski. It's quite a statement of intent, but only an advance warning really. Silence Kit play with a neo-classical ambition and all these tracks work in terms of movements. "Lemonsmellstreet" continues on through squalls of white noise, light-fingered double bass from Kovalev and a brief vocal interlude from guest Helen Fitzpatrick ("we'll wait for the moment the sky finally collapses and falls down on our heads") before Kovalev's cello sweeps the main melodic motif along and the atmosphere recalls the likes of Can and Rest. Finally, they all lock horns and go for the burn , bringing an exhilarating Sonic Youth-style edge along the way, before the sonic avalanche finally dies away and the sound of what could be the Moscow metro leads us out.
"Pieonear" is unrelenting. Second track "Psychoparasite" sweeps in as the FX die away and this one even usurps "Lemonsmellstreet" in terms of single-minded ambition. At over 35 minutes in length, this is massive, tense and organic music stopping at stations marked 'all out Math-rock attack', 'brooding electronica' and 'crushing heaviosity' before it reaches the first of its' destinations. Initially, your reviwer thought it had run its' course when it hits a thunderous maelstrom of white noise midstream, but of course it rises again, with lonely, ringing guitar courting the rhythmic cello and rising like the proverbial phoenix.
Admittedly, the track's final, amorphous phase of shifting ambience may sort the wheat from the chaff, but its' brooding, post-Tangerine Dream moodscape has a looming presence and finally allows a lonely guitar to transmit back from a distant star. Staggering stuff and then some.
After this, final track "Lemon Smell Street" (no it's a separate entity, not a reprise of the opening tune - keep up at the back!) seems a rather cushy and brief 20 minutes, though it again surprises by belching into life via a sludgy, Melvins-style intro with feedback leaking out seemingly uncontrollably.
Then it stops. Whack! Only to come up for air with textural cello and Fyodor and Boris's guitars trading pretty chiming patterns. It develops into a terrible beauty like (I imagine) the wind across the Steppes and again grunges outwards only to finally build an incredible crescendo ending around Ledovski's militaristic pounding and the whole band's disciplined playing. The more you listen, the more you realise only the likes of Muse and Oceansize are attempting music of such gargantuan ambition in the western world at present. Even when it finally dies away, the band don't want to let go entirely, allowing a brief, folky reprise in before silence envelops the room at last.
Silence Kit, then, will not satisfy those who are after quick pop fixes. Theirs is not a disposable world in the way we are conditioned today and their grasp of space, time and wonder is something to behold in the calculating 21st Century. Whether they will 'make it' outside their native land is not really important, though it would be nice to think someone over here would have the guts to release their remarkable music on a wider scale. Whatever, it's available from the band's website (silencekit@mail.ru ) and if you like your post-rock ladled with melody and discipline then you know the way. Let's hope there's more where this comes from in due course, but let's not rush them either.
TIM PEACOCK
REWIEW ON WWW.MUSICINBELGIUM.NET (french)
SILENCE KIT - Pieonear
Composé de Boris B., guitares, ice & ghost guitar, random guitar noise, home made guitar samples and stuff (?), Fedor D., guitares, flying guitar, two-faced guitar, piano, Sergey Ledovski, batterie, percussions, Sergey Bogatov, basse, Yaroslav Kovalev, violoncelle et contrebasse, le groupe russe Silence Kit a sorti cet album fin de l’année dernière.
« lemonsmellstreet », la rue à l’odeur de citron, commence comme une sonate pour piano et se divise en quatre parties : une merveilleuse minute d’inspiration classique, deux minutes trente d’excitation frénétique sans objet, histoire de dire : « Nous, on sait tout faire », puis une remarquable partie expérimentale de sept minutes trente, en partie chantée (Helen Fitzpatrick d’abord, en voix irréelle, Fedor D. ensuite). Les bruitages divers côtoient des effets électroniques. Nul doute que les Russes ne sont pas toujours des barbares et qu’ils sont à l’écoute de ce qui se fait ailleurs. Comme leur technique instrumentale est irréprochable, c’est le résultat de leur sensibilité qu’il nous est donné d’écouter et de juger. Bien que d’une approche différente, elle n’a évidemment rien à envier à celle de la « civilisation » occidentale et on se rend compte combien la musique peut rapprocher les peuples. Ce n’est pas son moindre mérite. Laissez filer votre esprit, la nuit de préférence, bien sûr, car à ce moment les perceptions sont exacerbées, vous m’en direz des nouvelles. Au cours des trois dernières minutes, histoire de mettre fin à la musique ambient, la musique rock électrique reprend ses prérogatives. Tout à la fin, on entend passer un tram, son irréel qui situe le tout dans son contexte temporel …
Pendant plus de trente-huit minutes, « Psychoparasite » est un amalgame de sonorités magnifiques dominées par les instruments à cordes. Progressivement, ça devient plus électrique, la batterie, les percussions et les guitares surgissent pour donner le tempo. Après huit minutes, ça devient plein d’emphase, puis on simule un dysfonctionnement de la technique. C’est juste un effet surprenant de plus. Tout de suite après, on a droit à un thème plus calme où la contrebasse est utilisée à bon escient, puis à des effets qui jouent sur la résonance, suivis par une attaque classique à la guitare électrique, où les variations sur les thèmes de départ sont retravaillés par le groupe entier. C’est à la fois jazz par les improvisations, rock par le rythme et classique par le jeu rigoureux des instrumentistes. C’est une remarquable très longue pièce mais elle n’est jamais ennuyeuse, tant les coups de théâtre sont nombreux. Après une accalmie, la deuxième moitié génère des sons très éthérés qui s’égrènent en douceur. C’est de l’ambient à la Brian Eno en version russe. C’est le moment de laisser voguer la galère et de se concentrer sur ses propres perceptions. C’est comme un long voyage initiatique parsemé de stimulations intermittentes. Chaque fois que l’on croit être arrivé, on repart pour une destination inconnue encore plus perturbante. Les quatre dernières minutes rendent la main à la musique rock avec guitares. Elle part dans un crescendo ponctué par le son du violoncelle. C’est tout simplement sublime ! Cela se termine sur le mode mineur dans un canevas classique rythmé par la batterie et le violoncelle. Ce n’est pas nouveau ? Le blues non plus. Vous viendrait-il à l’esprit de taxer le grand Johnny Winter de passéiste ? La bonne musique n’a pas d’âge, ne se démode jamais et a toujours sa justification.
« Lemon Smell Street », la rue à l’odeur de citron, s’écrit cette fois en trois mots. Ce n’est pas cela qui fait avancer les choses sur le plan musical mais c’est le nom de la firme de disques. Autant faire sa propre pub. Cela débute par des percussions et des bruitages déroutants, l’homme aux prises avec la machine, en quelque sorte. Après une très courte interruption, la musique se déroule en douceur et le violoncelle fait de nouveau des prouesses. Quel bel instrument, trop peu utilisé. On en écouterait pendant des heures. Il est la vedette de ce début de morceau de plus de dix-huit minutes, bien construit, bien interprété. Cette complainte recueille les fruits de cette élaboration savante très bien préparée. Quelques bruitages subsistent pour faire couleur locale mais vers la moitié, le côté musical reprend le dessus, suivi par les percussions. D’autres bruitages leur succèdent, d’autres battements de tambours empruntent une autre direction pour défricher d’autres méandres inexplorés, plus subtils, plus nombreux, plus déroutants, presque hypnotiques. Le ton monte, le rythme s’accélère, le violon se démarque, les instruments s’ajoutent en couches successives dans un crescendo rageur dont la dynamique s’installe pour parachever le travail à la batterie. On est plongé dans un mélange de sonorités folles, dans un magma de distorsions et de bruits sourds, pour terminer en catimini sur le ton de la confidence, toute tension maîtrisée.
Une vraie découverte !
Pays: RU
lemonsmellstreet autoproduction
Sortie: 2004
Score: ++++
REWIEW ON WWW.ADEQUASY.COM
Silence Kit
Pieonear
Self-released
File Under:Heavy, ethereal, ambient, experimental rock
RIYL:Mogwai, The Standard, Explosions in the Sky
First, a little background on Silence Kit: the band is from Moscow, Russia (I think there’s a band of the same name from the US); it features five core members plus a few friends; its instrumentation includes “ice guitar,” cello, “two-faced guitar,” and “ghost guitar”; its album Pieonear has only three songs and yet its running time is about 81 minutes. Oh, and two of those three songs have almost exactly the same name, differing only in spacing: “Lemonsmellstreet” opens the album and “Lemon Smell Street” closes it. You’re probably thinking this is some sort of put-on, some sort of in-joke shared between some folks who are too clever for their own good.
Honestly, though, this album should be taken seriously. It’s incredibly diverse and accomplished. It’s also almost uncategorizable because it covers so much ground. Easy reference points would be Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky or Godspeed You Black Emperor. Those points will tell you part of the story and give you some idea of where Silence Kit is coming from. It won’t prepare you as much for the times when Silence Kit sounds like Queens of the Stone Age or the Standard, or Tortoise, or maybe Shipping News. And with the cello, sometimes it veers into Rachel’s or Telegraph Melts territory. There are passages that become so ambient and ethereal that they barely exist at all, in the vein of Dry Stone Feed by Main.
These three tracks would probably have been 10 tracks on anyone else’s album. That is, each of these songs could have been divided into a few solid, standalone pieces. In fact, some of the within-song transitions jar you a little, as though the band took separate recordings and just put them back-to-back in the same song – maybe obscuring the transition a little with some guitar laid over top. During “Psychoparasite,” for instance, there is a section of noise (thankfully measured in seconds rather than minutes) that comes from nowhere and joins two otherwise distinct songs into sections of a single, 38-minute opus. The noise sounds a lot like “The Sifter” from Bastro’s Sing the Troubled Beast, if you can remember that “song.”
These pieces are essentially instrumentals, where there are no lyrics but only a few words (some of which are, believe it or not, “lemon smell street” – the basis for two of the song titles). The fact that they are instrumentals makes it easier to see how the band is able to seamlessly mix multiple songs into a single track and have it work this well. “Multiple songs,” yes, and multiple styles and approaches in each.
Everywhere, the musicianship and production excel without calling attention to themselves (remarkably, much or all of Pieonear is reputed to have been recorded in home studios). The band isn’t into flashing its chops, but its players obviously know what they’re doing. The long ambient passage in the middle of “Psychoparasite” seems to give the band a bit of a breather, and if indeed the entire track were actually recorded in one sitting it’s easy to understand why these guys might have needed a break.
At times very heavy, at times completely ambient, at times melodic, at times sounding like familiar indie rock, but at no time ever boring, Silence Kit commands its material always. Silence Kit never gets cheesy and never beats a riff into submission through endless repetition. Quite the opposite is true, in fact; the band plays a melody only once or twice and moves on to the next thing even though you’d love to hear more of it. I’ll bet these guys could write some amazing, lasting post-punk if they were to confine themselves to writing two- or three-minute songs.
The band obviously spent some time on the packaging and presentation as well – it’s very well done. Unfortunately you never get to see pictures of who’s in the band, though, as most of the photographs feature the band’s equipment alone. (You get to see the phalanx of guitar pedals that it must take to wring out some of the amazing sounds recorded here.) If you keep an open mind and just let the music take you where it wants to go, you’ll really enjoy Pieonear. You just have to let it be your pioneer.
- David Smith, 7/22/2005
REWIEW ON WWW.AURAL-INNOVATIONS.COM
Silence Kit - "Pieonear"
(Lemonsmellstreet Music)
From Aural Innovations #31 (June 2005)
Silence Kit is 5 piece experimental rock band from Moscow, Russia. This CD features only 3 tracks (14, 38 and 18 minutes long). This is music to take a long trip with and also very heavy and noisy at times. The opening track, "Lemonsmellstreet", starts quite spacey and then gets very heavy like some stoner rock and then spaces out again before getting a very heavy wall of spaced out sound going again at the end! This stuff is cleary quite improvised but it flows in interesting ways. The sound is quite good considering it was all recorded in home studios in Russia! "Psychoparasite" is the next 38 minute track and again takes you on quite a trip with lots of guitars (Fedor plays flying guitar and two faced guitar, while Boris plays ice and ghost and homemade guitars!). The Cello and double bass playing by Yaraslav is very cool. "Psychoparasite" really builds up into an amazing track. This reminds me of Circle a bit. The last track, "Lemon Smell Street" (yes same title as the first but with the words separated!), is a bit more far out than the others with more random noise thrown into the mix and a heavier bass line (very Sabbath like at times). If you are a patient man or woman, you will be rewarded by this music. I was.
Reviewed by Scott Heller