Vince Clarke – songwriter for bands including Erasure, Yazoo and Depeche Mode – has announced details of his first solo album, ‘Songs Of Silence’. Check out the lead single below.
Set for release on November 17 via Mute, the upcoming instrumental album sees the Ivor Novello-winning songwriter explore the limitless possibilities of Eurorack – a modular synthesiser format famed for its addictive and limitless configurations.
It also allows Clarke to explore the premise of musical genres, and create a more experimental record than with his countless chart-topping releases, and develop “a 10-track lyric-less album of uncategorisable ambient beauty”, according to a press release.
Check out the lead single ‘The Lamentations Of Jeremiah’ below, which comes with a visual accompaniment directed by Turkish-born NY-based portrait photographer Ebru Yildiz.
“I could have gone on forever, I could have not stopped,” Clarke said, explaining his use of Eurorack when creating new material for the album.
“I was enjoying the process so much and wasn’t thinking about anyone else hearing it. But hearing it develop in my studio, in my head, learning new tricks – that’s been the best thing about this. I was in a state of shock, actually, when Mute said they wanted to release this album.”
The album was also recorded in his home studio in New York and began as a creative distraction during the lockdown period. It also saw Clarke follow two rules: the first being that the sounds generated for the album would come sorely from Eurorack, and the second being that each song would be centred around one note, maintaining a single key throughout.
“The resultant album’s mood of synth-generated, cosmic remoteness is interrupted by stark interventions, reminders of the human hand at work amid this machinery,” reads the press release, describing the overall sound of the album. “Clarke manifests relentless sequencer patterns, gradual accelerations, Moog-style drones, glistening droplets of synth, and burgeoning swells of processed guitars, with Clarke describing the tracks as ‘having a sense of sadness, of things going bad, things crumbling’.”
Visit here for pre-orders and check out the album’s tracklisting below.
‘Songs Of Silence’ tracklist
1. ‘Cathedral’
2. ‘White Rabbit’
3. ‘Passage’
4. ‘Imminent’
5. ‘Red Planet’
6. ‘The Lamentations of Jeremiah’
7. ‘Mitosis’
8. ‘Blackleg’
9. ‘Scarper’
10. ‘Last Transmission’
In other Vince Clarke news, back in 2019, the musician shared that he found part of his love for synthesisers when working alongside OMD, who shared a remix of the song ‘Almost’.
“OMD convinced me to switch to synths,” he said at the time “I thought ‘I can do that. I can write songs like that’.”
Additionally, following the release of Depeche Mode‘s 15th studio album ‘Memento Mori’ earlier this year, NME shared a countdown of the band’s best albums.
Here, it was 1990’s ‘Violator’ that came out in top position, which NME described as presenting “a ‘Mode as comfortable in their skin as they’d ever been — still capable of pop corkers like ‘Enjoy The Silence’ and ‘Policy Of Truth’, but honing their eerie, threatening ballads in ‘Halo’ and ‘Sweetest Perfection’.”