Synthpop master announces LP of dark modular soundcapes
Vince Clarke, the electronic music genius behind Erasure, Yazoo and the first Depeche Mode album, is set to release ‘Songs of Silence’ through Mute on 17 November. The first track to be released from the album is ‘The Lamentations of Jeremiah‘, with a video by Turkish-born NY-based portrait photographer Ebru Yildiz.
Despite over four decades at the sharp end of a career that has seen him clock up 28 million sales with Erasure alone, ‘Songs of Silence’ is Clarke’s first solo outing.
The project started during lockdown and saw Clarke experimenting with Eurorack modular.
“I could have gone on forever, I could have not stopped,” explains Vince. “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 is a marked departure from the bright pop of Erasure, into darker more forboding territory, using drones, with a rule that each track would be based around one note, staying in the same key throughout.
Clarke says the songs have “a sense of sadness, of things going bad, things crumbling”.
Pre-order ‘Songs of Silence’ here.
