Latest / HEAVY Music Interviews / Breaking The Silence With TOM. S ENGLUND & VIKRAM SHANKAR From SILENT SKIES

Transcript

Breaking The Silence With TOM. S ENGLUND & VIKRAM SHANKAR From SILENT SKIES · HEAVY Music Interviews

• 0:00
  And Vicum Shanker. This is timing when we're from the band's Silent Skies.
• 0:04
  We have a new album coming out tomorrow September one. It's entitled Dormant,
• 0:09
  and we think that it's our best statement yet. It's a level up in
• 0:12
  pretty much all of the ways that you know characterize will we do so hopefully
• 0:17
  you guys enjoy it. People seem to agree that they do, so we
• 0:25
  know the album is coming out, guys, but how are you is actually
• 0:28
  failing about it? You know, like they've done and dusted, it's waiting
• 0:31
  to come out of the world now, Like, how are you feeling?
• 0:33
  He's confident. I mean, we spent honestly an unhealthy amount of time on
• 0:38
  this album. We've been in every detail because that's something that we really really
• 0:42
  enjoyed doing also production wise, So now it's gonna be nice to sort of
• 0:48
  leave it for the world to enjoy instead of us having to be in it
• 0:51
  and you know, fiddle around with stuff that we no longer can affect.
• 0:57
  So hopefully people will enjoy it. And we're honestly we're super super happy with
• 1:02
  the work you have accomplished as it feels on the so could you dive into
• 1:07
  it a bit deeper musically for us and tell us what you're going forward it.
• 1:11
  So I can say that one more time, so I could you dive
• 1:14
  into it a bit more musically and what you were going for sure? Yeah,
• 1:18
  I mean, basically, you know, there was a willingness to challenge
• 1:22
  some of our preconceived conceptions of what you know is the essential DNA of Silence,
• 1:27
  guys, and if there are any sort of rules that we had set
• 1:30
  up on the first two albums, we wanted to have the willingness to challenge
• 1:34
  those and present new elements if the songs warranted it. So there was a
• 1:38
  lot of experimentation and a lot of new things being done in terms of instrumentation,
• 1:44
  in terms of the sound pallet, and also in terms of the compositional
• 1:49
  approaches. I think the result of that is that the album is by far
• 1:53
  the most varied and diverse one that we've done so far, and I think
• 1:57
  that there's a lot of growth in terms of, you know, who we
• 2:00
  are as composers. Just you know, all the music from the past two
• 2:04
  albums were kind of setting the foundation and then now we're kind of watching this
• 2:07
  thing growing and blossom and seeing where it ends up. I mean, it's
• 2:10
  like being a kid in a sense. We're a young band that's growing up
• 2:15
  and finding our ways and finding what we like and what we don't like,
• 2:19
  and trying to become something that is something that we can stand behind, you
• 2:25
  know, which is a cool experience for me being in a band for thirty
• 2:29
  years with every grade. It's a it's a lovely experience to feel young again.
• 2:35
  So yeah, it's just all good. And you mentioned the new elements
• 2:39
  and the new approaches that you've taken with this album, so it is spend
• 2:43
  on those little bit more like what have you done differently? Well, you
• 2:46
  know, I'd say that there are a lot of different ways to express concepts
• 2:53
  through thought, and you know, as musicians, there are certain ones that
• 2:59
  we're used to exploring. For instance, if you think about chordal language and
• 3:02
  melodic language, these are things that musicians are used to pushing and pushing the
• 3:07
  envelope. And then there's a whole other universe of ways to express ourselves in
• 3:10
  terms of texture and sound, color and ambience. And these are ways that
• 3:15
  for me personally as a classical musician, I didn't start from the very beginning
• 3:21
  Explorer and these things I pushed myself technically and musically, and now I'm starting
• 3:25
  to think a lot about texture and sound design and so whether it's you know,
• 3:30
  mandolin or soprano and alto recorders, or shakuhachi or vote order effects on
• 3:37
  Tom's voice or all these different things that we had never tried to do before,
• 3:40
  including guitars. There's a lot of guitars on this album, and we
• 3:44
  didn't have a note of guitars on our first two albums. And the idea
• 3:47
  behind this is just you know, we asked ourselves, is this a rule?
• 3:53
  Do we have to not have guitars? Why do we have to not
• 3:57
  have guitars? You know, if we want to do it, if it's
• 4:00
  the song, why not. And that's what Silence, Guys should be for
• 4:03
  us. It should be something that allows everything we are by normans. We
• 4:10
  don't we don't have any rules. We don't want to have any rules,
• 4:13
  and we don't have today. Record labels don't have that power over you,
• 4:16
  so they can decide at list not to OVERMI. You know that they can
• 4:21
  decide what you should do and shouldn't do, you know, if they don't
• 4:24
  like it as well too bad exactly. We have to be honest about who
• 4:28
  we are and what we want to do creatively. I think that the more
• 4:31
  honest we are about what's really turning us on musically and lyrically and spiritually,
• 4:36
  the album is going to benefit as a result, and so the listeners ultimately
• 4:41
  get a stronger experience. If sounds exact. So you've been described as a
• 4:47
  cinematic duo. Is that an accurate assessment? I think the assessment is whatever
• 4:56
  you like it to be. We're not chasing a gen we want to become.
• 5:02
  I don't know. I heard dark pop do the other day. That's
• 5:06
  also as accurate as anything else, basically. I mean it's I know that
• 5:11
  people it's important for people to have genres to rely on, but for us,
• 5:15
  it's more important to be whatever it is today. It sounds like this.
• 5:20
  Tomorrow it might sound more ambient or less ambient or more singing songwriting.
• 5:28
  I don't know, we don't know it's today it sounds to me like dark
• 5:31
  ambient pop is a is a and pop not being Britney spears pop, but
• 5:38
  short concise songs get to the point. Yeah, yeah, whichever way you
• 5:45
  look at you know, your music does paint that cinema. It's got a
• 5:48
  cinematic theater, and it paints an oral landscape with atmospheres an ambient. So
• 5:54
  how difficult is it to like a lot of music space around lyrics and the
• 5:59
  way people sing Your music's more by st atmosphere and feel like, how difficult
• 6:02
  is it to create that? It's based on both. I would say,
• 6:06
  I think that the atmospheric thing is in service of a certain kind of emotion
• 6:13
  and vibe and character. And you know, all the experimentation that I talked
• 6:17
  about before, and you know, so many different new ways of expanding our
• 6:20
  palette, it's all in service of that of that essential narrative. And the
• 6:25
  essential narrative is lyrical. It's expressed through vocals and vocal melodies. And you
• 6:30
  know, I would not it's not a concept album, but there are narrative
• 6:33
  concepts that you know, we've throughout everything that we do. So so that
• 6:40
  core narrative quality, whether you think of it as lyrics or concept, is
• 6:45
  what drives the atmosphere as just as much as you know, influences how we
• 6:49
  write our songs and how we write our vocals. You started touch on this
• 6:54
  before, but I want to expand on a little bit, like as a
• 6:58
  band, how much musical price you think there is left in solid skies?
• 7:01
  Oh, I think we just touched the surface of a huge mount everest of
• 7:09
  of you know, inspiration and musicality and we we we don't we don't even
• 7:15
  know where this is going. So sort for us to see an end to
• 7:19
  the inspiration or creativity or I mean if you think we have, like honestly,
• 7:24
  we have like at least ten songs that we haven't even you know,
• 7:29
  we didn't release yet, that are close to being songs already. So it's
• 7:39
  you know, we're faster than the record label world, and maybe that's something
• 7:44
  to take into consideration. And you know, in terms of musical growth,
• 7:47
  it's been growing and developing since the very beginning. The very first things that
• 7:53
  we wrote together in twenty seventeen sound virtually nothing like what we do now because
• 7:57
  the whole process has been self discovery. Yeah, we had to ask ourselves,
• 8:01
  we're going to start this thing, silence, guys, what is that?
• 8:05
  What is silence guys? And very quickly we kind of understood that silence,
• 8:09
  guys, is whatever we wanted to be. So as our musicality grows
• 8:13
  as our taste change, you know, so too does the project of Silence.
• 8:16
  Guys move in various different directions, and as Tom said, it's very
• 8:20
  hard to foresee what's going to be who who we are, you know,
• 8:24
  two months from now, except for the fact that we know that we're going
• 8:28
  to be honest about who we are, and that honesty and emotional character will
• 8:33
  be the through the through line that goes through and everything we do and all
• 8:37
  the different permutations of what we do. Now most people are familiar with the
• 8:43
  H three or all whatever, great, but tell us speak more about yourself
• 8:46
  facer of like what attracted you to work in a project like this with all?
• 8:50
  As I alluded to before, I come from a classical music background.
• 8:54
  I actually didn't listen to or play anything outside of classical music until I was
• 9:00
  over thirteen years old. So the mentality and the physical process of playing the
• 9:05
  piano comes from my classical music and jazz backgrounds. But as far as you
• 9:09
  know, working together with Tom, what I see is that we come from
• 9:13
  very different backgrounds. I'm very much from academia and he has the rock and
• 9:18
  metal background. But we meet in the middle, and that middle intersection point
• 9:22
  is our I would say our shared emotional experiences. You know, it comes
• 9:26
  from very similar places emotionally and spiritually, and so we're able to express common
• 9:35
  ideas, whether it's you know, life experience or the human condition or mental
• 9:39
  health or anything like this. We experienced those things together and we expressed them
• 9:43
  together in a common language. That is kind of a marrying of you know,
• 9:48
  the metal melancholy that Tom has been known for for so long, and
• 9:54
  this kind of what began as a classical upbringing but now has morphed into this
• 10:00
  electronic ambient thing that you know, I've been working towards for the last over
• 10:05
  ten years of my career. So the album is out. Rollment is album
• 10:09
  September the first? But what's next? Fa solids guys up to that?
• 10:11
  Have you got plans the rest of the Yeah, we are, I mean,
• 10:16
  as I said, we're already writing new songs. But me and Mac
• 10:20
  I'm also write a lot of music for video games and the feature films and
• 10:24
  stuff like that. So we have our played full. We just want to
• 10:31
  keep on being creative and in between all of these projects, we sort of
• 10:37
  tried to be masters of the time of management in order to get everything out
• 10:41
  that we want to get out. So yeah, the issue in our lives
• 10:46
  has never been creativity and quantitative creative juices that it's always flowing. And honestly,
• 10:54
  the biggest challenges time mentioned is time management and figuring out how to partition
• 10:58
  our lives to make things happen. But yeah, lots of stuff in the
• 11:01
  works. And first we do our release party tonight, and then we will
• 11:07
  have a lot of business people coming and watching us and enjoying it and listening
• 11:11
  to the album for the first time together with some of our fans, a
• 11:15
  lot of the business and yeah, have a few guys of Champagne up to
• 11:18
  big run. But I what I'm reading this, you can handle my shared
• 11:24
  I what a guy? All right, gentlemen, thanks very much for both
• 11:28
  of your time. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. The album Dormant
• 11:31
  is out September the first day. Best to luck with the guys and enjoy
• 11:33
  your party tonight. Thank you, Thank you very much. Day