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Vince Clarke - Songs of Silence
I’ve been a fan of Vince Clarke ever since the early days of DM. Yazoo were my favourite band in the world. ‘Nobody’s Diary’ one of my favourite songs. I was listening to Wonderland long before ‘Sometimes’ was a hit and Erasure were popular. I thought it sounded more like Yazoo than You and me Both did (Nobody’s diary aside).
And after 40 odd years he’s released his first ever official ‘solo’ album which is drone/ambient/idontunderstandgenres
I rarely if ever listen to this kind of stuff. It’s pretty cool I think. I love some of the sound design. It’s weird listening to VC without a catchy melody (although he’s obviously done lots of stuff that isn’t so melodic such as VCMG with Martin Gore).
I’d be interested in opinions. As I said it’s not my style of music usually (I tend to find ambient stuff tedious to the extreme). It’s only my VC bias that made me curious and want to listen to Songs of Silence ;-)
So what d’ya think?
Comments
He didn’t release any solo albums? Looks like there were a few looking online, but they don’t seem to have made much impact.
Not according to Future Music.
Maybe that’s just wrong. Here’s a site with some photos of album covers for his solo work:
https://www.discogs.com/artist/37365-Vince-Clarke
I read this interview with him recently, quite interesting. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/arts/music/vince-clarke-songs-of-silence.html?mwgrp=c-mbar&hpgrp=k-abar&smid=url-share
There are hints of ambient experimentation in some of his past work, eg (go to 3:13 mark) …
His new album is not bad, maybe a lockdown itch he needed to scratch
The only one I can see that’s just Vince Clarke is ‘Lucky Bastard’.
‘Lucky Bastard’ was a sample CD not an album.
What about ‘Songs of Silence’?
Check out some other sites that list discographies too, as this wasn’t the only one.
Yeah I love this - just discovered it yesterday! Nice mix of ambient, instrumental and some synthpop licks and arps. Recommended!
Yeah that’s exactly what it was according to the Future Music interview. He said he got into Eurorack through Martin Gore and made some random bits and bobs with it which he didn’t think would be released but Daniel Miller loved them and asked him to make them into an album.
I think it’s cool. Not something I’ll listen to often and certainly not up there with Upstairs at Eric’s but what is? ;-)
What about it? That’s literally the album I’m talking about.
I honestly don’t give a flying duck whether he released anything ‘solo’ before. The bloke has been releasing music for over 40 years — it really isn’t an issue.
Do you have an opinion on the actual album or is there anything else I said you’d prefer to pick holes in?
Calm down, I was trying to maybe point out there might be albums you haven’t heard.
I obviously didn’t cross reference with the thread title when I was looking at titles. That’s all.
Thanks for sharing, I didn’t know even know this came out. I’m a big fan of his as well (Yazoo especially) and it’s cool to see him venturing out into other areas.
I absolutely loved Yazoo. So good. Upstairs at Eric’s must have been my most played album of the 80s.
Yeah I’m calm. The LOL emoji wasn’t a red herring.
Synth pop god goes ambient. Who’d a thunk it.
It’s interesting that this is the kind of stuff he was messing about with on his own with (apparently) no intention of releasing it.
What I find interesting when somebody like VC does this kind of ambient-ey stuff is that he clearly knows how to write the catchiest of songs. Pure pop songwriting doesn’t get much better.
So that takes away the argument that ambient is for people that can’t write songs ;-) (joke).
I think ambient is actually really hard. It’s easy to make bad ambient-ish stuff but I have never been able to make this kind of music anywhere near well enough to be anything other than tedious dross hahaha . Or I will end up not knowing when to stop and add way too much stuff until it’s no longer close to being anything approaching what I intended.
I may give it another go one day. I think I should set up my Behringer Pro-1 (I’ll admit to always having wanted a Pro-one because of Yazoo!) with one or two other bits of hardware I still have and just use those for the instrumentation. It Takes away all the options in the box and gives me an excuse to use some stuff I’ve not used in anger for decades…
The thing that I will try and do to keep it within limits is to only use what I can play back ‘live’ via midi. No overdubs. I have an old eps sampler with 1MB RAM which will be fun to use again after all these yeas too…
Just a though :-)
Cool.
I’ll give it a listen at some point.
Absolutely. I’m a child of the 90s and I actually knew Erasure first from their hits. And that first Depeche Mode album of course. Found out about Yaz in my mid-late teens and it completely blew my mind. That and Gary Numan are big parts of why I got into synths in general.
Yes Wonderland is very Yazoo-esque always made me wonder if that’s what it was meant to be for.
Been listening to this since it came out. Great album... right up my street. Ambient, modular with subtle hints of JMJ, Eno, Reich and Vangelis on some tracks. Bit of old school synthpop arps/bass in some but VERY different from his previous 80's and 90's from Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure. Apparently he put it together during lockdown using his (very) extensive modular setup. Definitely worth checking... One of my favourite albums of the year for sure.
I’ve noticed whenever a musician decides to go modular they almost always end up making some cool stuff.
saw him perform it live in London a few weeks ago with Sunroof (Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones) supporting - quite something. Have listened to it a lot since - seems simple on the surface but has hidden depths...
Would have loved to have seen that!
it was cool. there are some videos of it on YouTube but not great quality. There were people there with professional-looking cameras so maybe it'll find it's way out there in better quality...
In the interview with him about this album, VC said that he challenged himself by limiting the kit to just eurorack (which for anybody else wouldn’t be limiting
and all the songs had basically one chord.
Then rather than a verse, bridge, chorus type arrangement he’d change something, bring something in etc at the points he’d usually have a new section to keep the ‘listener’ engaged.
Which is pretty obvious when you think about it and also very simple. Making anything good out of those constrains is a completely different kettle of fish, but I like the premise.
I may try something along those lines myself in the new year. I’m not sure yet what the constraints will be but I have plenty of options from which to narrow it down…
If I post my decision here it might help me stick to my guns and actually try and do something. I’ve got plenty of other projects on the go so it will be more about chilling out and learning to listen to the sounds without worrying so much about song structure. I doubt I’ll make anything I ever feel like sharing but you never know…
Anyway, I’m enjoying the songs of silence album a lot more than I thought I would. I don’t generally like this kind of music that much. I find most ambient stuff fairly tedious and often it sounds pretentious and self indulgent. But then i figured why should I miss out on self indulgence and pretentiousness?
Anyway. The album is really good…
Interview with Daniel Miller and Vince Clarke where they talk about “Vince’s first ever solo album’.