(Via Mute)
Vince Clarke has announced details of his debut solo album, Songs of Silence, a 10-track lyric-less album of uncategorisable ambient beauty. The album will be available on vinyl, CD and digitally via Mute on 17 November 2023, and launches today with ‘The Lamentations of Jeremiah’, the first piece of music to be shared from the project.
Listen to the track and watch the moving video – one of the first to be directed by Turkish-born NY-based portrait photographer Ebru Yildiz (Laurie Anderson, Mitski, A Place to Bury Strangers, Algiers) – which finds Clarke in a liminal space:
Ebru Yildiz explains, “When I first heard the song, I felt like it contained a whole lifetime within itself. All of the drama and peace, anxiousness and calmness, tension and hope, and everything in between. I wanted the visuals to feel like all those extremes as well.”
As the Ivor Novello winning songwriter behind countless chart-topping pop songs as co-founder of Erasure, Yazoo and Depeche Mode, Clarke has – unbelievably – waited until now to embark on a solo release.
Recorded in his home studio in New York, and featuring photography and artwork by the award-winning Magnum photojournalist Eugene Richards, work on the album began as a distraction during lockdown, 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,” 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.”
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” says Vince. “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 stark interventions, reminders of the human hand at work amid this machinery – a scrambled sample like a distressed transmission from a fighter pilot, the wordless operatic contributions of Caroline Joy, the sawing brimstone of composer Reed Hays’ cello on ‘The Lamentations of Jeremiah’, and the album’s centrepiece which builds around the 1844 anti-scab folk song ‘Blackleg Miner’, glowing with resonance and relevance. Elsewhere on the album Clarke manifests 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.”
America is the home of several of the world’s most iconic synthesizer manufacturers, but it has failed to produce many world class artists who really put the instrument to work. Many have dabbled, but few have taken the step of replacing guitars with keyboards as European artists did.
Depeche Mode fans will know Rico Conning’s name best from the Blind Mix of “Strangelove” or the Black Tulip Mix of “A Question of Time.” Nick Cash will come to mind first as Fad Gadget’s drummer. Jo Forty’s name is less bound up with the heroes of early electronic music; but, together with Conning, Cash and ex-Alternative TV guitarist Mick Linehan, he formed the core of The Lines, a celebrated post-post incubator.
“White Night” had a long shelf life: besides The Lines’ original, it was covered by both Torch Song and Adult Net. Although Laurie Mayer, the third member of Torch Song, together with Conning and William Orbit, sang the version that appeared on their album, a version also exists with 
Fast forward to 2016, then, and one of the surprises of the year is the release of hull down, the third album from The Lines. Although the original demos had been recorded in 1982-3, and some attempt had been made to improve the recordings in 1987 for a potential release through IRS, the material had to be parked until 2004. That’s when Conning digitised the tracks and started to play with them in Pro Tools; blending the versions to create something new and potent.
Fryer’s work attracted the attention of Trent Reznor, who picked him out for production work on Pretty Hate Machine, the album that launched Nine Inch Nails. Other artists followed, from Vancouver’s Moev (who spawned the Nettwerk label, home to Skinny Puppy and Sarah McLachlan) to Sweden’s Ashbury Heights, looking for a touch of the studio magic that had made Fryer’s previous work so successful.
Born in the suburb of South Woodford and raised in Basildon, Vince Clarke could have ended up as a cab driver or worked at Ford’s Essex plant, but instead he founded three of the world’s most successful pop groups: Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure.
Having settled into the Erasure groove thirty years ago, it is almost forgotten how the ambitious but impatient Clarke left Depeche Mode just as they were on the cusp of world domination, or that his working relationship with Alison Moyet was so difficult that Yazoo’s second album was recorded in separate studio sessions. Of the latter experience, Clarke told an interviewer from Songfacts, “It was sad, but I don’t think we could have continued working together without probably strangling each other.”