It’s hard to believe, but as co-founder of Erasure, Yazoo and Depeche Mode, the Ivor Novello winning and songwriter behind countless chart-topping pop songs, Vince Clarke is only now embarking on a ‘solo career.
Perhaps the closest he got was straight after dissolving Yazoo, when he formed The Assembly – a short-lived project where the Basildon man was joined by Feargal Sharkey on vocals. However, that was also technically a duo, with songwriter and producer E.C. ‘Upstairs at Eric’s’ Radcliffe.
Clarke’s new release, ‘Songs of Silence’, was recorded in his own home studio, in New York, as a distraction during lockdown, as well as a chance to finally get his head around the possibilities of Eurorack, a modular synthesiser format famed for its addictive and limitless configurations.
“I could have gone on forever, I could have not stopped,” Clarke explains. “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.”
Alone in the studio, Clarke set himself two rules: first, that the sounds he generated for the album would come solely from Eurorack, and second, that each track would be based around one note, maintaining a single key throughout. “Nobody in my household is particularly interested in what I get up to in the studio” he says. “Even the cat used to leave after an hour or so of listening to drones.”
The resultant album’s mood of synth-generated, cosmic remoteness is interrupted by wordless operatic contributions from Caroline Joy and cello from composer Reed Hays, but in the main the album employs 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”.
Not content to rest on his considerable pop legacy, Vince Clarke has instead opened up exciting new electronic vistas for himself, and for the rest of us, in which the permutations and possibilities are limitless, Clarke declaring: “The infinite shades of sounds you can create with just the tiniest tweak of a knob or slider continues to fascinate me.”
This article originally appeared in the Edinburgh News.
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