![]() ![]() ![]() We get a sense of grandeur and triumph with no release or climax, contributing to the album’s consistent feeling of being awed by your surroundings but still hopelessly lost. On “Moonlight,” a single synth lead is backed by bass and drums, and it’s hilarious how the hi-hats race madly to the finish line while the melody chases its own tail in circles. “Gattaca,” “Sunrise,” and “Wolves” are based on the robust chord progressions and bright synths associated with anthems, but they circle endlessly instead of building to anything. The melody of “Everlasting Joy” lingers slightly too long on one note until it sounds less like a hook than an unwholesome guffaw. Counterintuitively, it also makes the music sound creepier so does his use of just intonation, which unlocks weird, microtonal harmonies. Silent Cities boasts a sly melodicism that makes it much more interesting than if Vincent was simply holding down minor chords on synth pads. What it certainly does not sound like is dance music-nor does it sound like ambient music, as you’ll learn when “Birds” bleeds into the red in its final moments. Effects are sparse aside from a chilly pall of reverb and the intrusion of dubby chords on “Birds” and “Mother Amazon.” Sometimes this music sounds like trap, as on “Gattaca.” At other times, it sounds like early-2010s producers like Cooly G, CFCF, and Kuedo, who preferred pretty chords and simple synth patches to side-chains and sub-bass. Synth strings meander slowly above a yawning void of bass, accompanied on a few tracks by a tinny artificial piano that sounds like it was ripped out of a Chicago house track and jettisoned in a back alley. Instead, we hear irregular kick drums accompanied by a near-constant tattoo of eighth-note or 16th-note hi-hats. ![]() Like the city in Babe: Pig in the City, which cribs landmarks from all over the world in its skyline, Silent Cities is all cities, distilled into one grander and more mysterious than any that could exist in reality.įour-on-the-floor techno beats are largely absent. #Babe i know chords tvBut while the cover features Berlin’s Fernsehturm TV tower, it also incorporates the Empire State Building from his hometown of New York. It’s easy to connect this sparseness to the depopulation of city streets during COVID-19 lockdown in fact, though Vincent recorded the bulk of the album pre-pandemic, he finalized it in 2020 while looking out at the emptiness of his adopted home of Berlin. This isn’t a crowded thoroughfare but a sleepy industrial hinterland or empty parking garage. While most sonic cityscapes suggest hustle and bustle, Silent Cities is minimal and streamlined in its construction, with tracks that move glacially over long run times. You want to soar over this city, explore its hidden streets and back alleys, discover what every pinprick of light on the horizon belongs to. Among electronic music’s evocations of cities, it’s comparable to Burial’s Untrue, 2814’s Birth of a New Day, Deepchord Presents Echospace’s Liumin, and DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues in its depth, scope, and imagination. Though titles like “Birds,” “Tigers,” and “Mother Amazon” suggest lushness and greenery, the album’s simple construction and sheer scale make it hard to picture anything other than urban vastness and desolation. Vincent’s fourth album, Silent Cities, expands on the basic idea of “Passing Boats” across 78 minutes of grim, architectural, often astonishingly beautiful music. ![]()
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