Peter Silberman - Impermanence

The Quietus

For human nature, the concept of the void is something so terrifyingly ungraspable that to try and dodge it is the only possible way to even come close to dealing with it. From Aristotle to Mario Praz, the philosophy of horror vacui tells us that we must fill every single inch of empty space to avert facing that which is it both finite and infinite – unexplainable yet so brazenly there before our very eyes that the mind is shocked in its presence. Even the term "avoid" has an inherent etymological link to the obscure concept of emptiness.

Though theorists focused their studies on physics and art, this is also true when it come to sound. If "deafening silence" is one of the most clichéd oxymorons, it is because silence itself is one of the most intolerable noises on Earth: in a soundproof anechoic chamber, the closest on the planet to deep space's cosmic stillness, a human can lose his mind in less than an hour.

But what if silence becomes the only possible way to preserve one's body from an illness? Something one is obliged to seek to allow the physique to heal?

This is the starting point for Peter Silberman's work on Impermanence. Forced by a hearing impairment, which led to a temporary hearing loss and hypersensitivity to sound, the Brooklyn musician was forced to retreat from the throng of the city to a quieter place in upstate New York. There, living through the different stages of his condition, the Antlers' member got in touch with silence and its always-different shapes and possibilities.

But removing all sonorousness from his life, including that of his own voice, didn't prevent tinnitus from constantly resonating in his ears, subtracting the intrinsic emptiness from the hush he was seeking: "Once silence ceased to be available to me, I came to think of it as the luxury of well-calibrated perception. We mistakenly perceive it as nothing, but it’s precious, a profound entity. It became obvious to me why many prayers are silent, performed in immaculately quiet spaces."

It's in the interstices, in the pauses, in the "notes that are not played," that Impermanence's structure is built: after stripping down the world of all the audible, Silberman worked in negative when re-approaching music after getting back sonance in his everyday existence.

A white noise, a hiss, an electrostatic sound: the uninterrupted ringing that haunted the musician's ears echoes all through the album; imperceptible at first, it is essential to support the fragile frame of the six tracks, standing on the singer/songwriter's cleanly picked and sustained electric guitar, and his vibrating voice, free and powerful, easily ranging from a profound speech to open, moving falsettos –– a texture remiscent of Jeff Buckley's most intense and unique moments. Soft drums and choirs add dimension and depth to the basic outline, enhancing it without interfering with the intimate and minimal narrative.

A physical and spiritual journey unravels in the 37 minutes of the record: from the wrenching search for compassion of the opening ‘Karuna’ to the most cinematic song of the album, ‘New York’, the onomatopoeic recounting of the surprise of discovering the sonic sphere of one's own town; paying attention to an often overlooked aspect of living; to the multifaceted, instrumental title track, closing the album with the full sound of a grand piano overseeing stops and reprise of the background noise, before giving way to "real" silence – impermanent, as the human experience.

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Drowned In Sound 80

Impermanence would also be far from an unreasonable description of the group’s stylistic journey in the more recent stages of their career. There was a profound shift in sound between Burst Apart - Drowned in Sound’s album of the year in 2011 - and 2014‘s Familiars, which was met considerably less favourably on this site; well, until the group re-wrote the review in tongue-in-cheek fashion, that is. The former was an intensely introspective and sonically claustrophobic affair, and the latter went in the other direction entirely, with lyrics that felt considerably more abstract than before and a languid, woozy atmosphere, about as close to the other end of the spectrum from Burst Apart’s jittery instability as they could have hoped to have gotten if they’d tried to.

In actual fact, the name of the record seems to be a nod to the circumstances in which it was conceived; towards the end of touring for Familiars, Silberman was diagnosed with a raft of hearing conditions - tinnitus, hyperacusis and cochlear hydrops, which between them are pretty much to the auditory range what the dark triad is to psychology. Accordingly, Silberman - for whom the combination of ailments was initially so severe that he couldn’t bear the sound of his speaking voice - was forced to face the very real possibility that his days as a musician might not have just been numbered, but already over. He threw himself into an enforced period of self-care: wearing earplugs in his day-to-day life, moving from Brooklyn to the more tranquil upstate surrounds of Rosendale, and easing himself back into music by keeping the volume as gentle as possible so as not to aggravate his sensitivity.

The fragility, of course, extended beyond just the sound of these new songs; it applied, too, to Silberman’s outlook, with his previously stable life as the singer in a band suddenly caving in and giving way to considerable uncertainty. That, married to the absence of his fellow Antlers, sets up Impermanence as a beguiling prospect - not least because you have to wonder just what it was about these songs that Silberman felt wouldn’t fly inside the evidently generous creative parameters that the band operate within, notwithstanding his hearing difficulties. The answer to that question seems to be genuine minimalism; if you take Familiars and its soundscapes as a starting point, you can join the dots as to how Silberman got here.

In a lot of ways, this really does feel like a solo record in the most literal terms; it’s as if he’s picking up where he left off with on that last Antlers LP, but with his bandmates - drummer Michael Lerner and multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci - having simply left him to it. Both compositionally and instrumentally, Impermanence is consistently stripped-back; opener ‘Karuna’ sprawls to almost nine minutes and in its gossamer-thin opening stages is never in any rush whatsoever to reach a crescendo, with a long period in which Silberman’s never-more-delicate vocal is punctuated by just two things - the occasional arpeggiated guitar note and, much more strikingly, continued lapses into silence. In the latter respect, the influence of Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk weighs heavily.

That isn’t necessarily the sort of stylistic cue that you’d think would be out-of-bounds on an Antlers record and yet there is a purity of intent about ‘Karuna’ - and Impermanence in general - that brings home the sense that Silberman was fairly bloody-minded about the idea that nobody was going to dilute his ambition or curb any experimental whims during the making of it. That isn’t to say that there aren’t moments that would have comfortably fit within the Antlers framework - ‘New York’, a quietly-tortured treatise on Silberman’s changing relationship with his home state, is a case in point - but it was interesting to note amongst the polarised reaction to Familiars that most of those who didn’t get along with it found their patience tested by its slowly undulating landscapes, by the gradual unfurling of both its musical and thematic flags.

Here, Silberman has taken a similar approach, but pared everything down. In the case of ‘Ahimsa’, he’s accompanied by just a guitar, some carefully-placed reverb and the echo of his own voice, and the simplicity of the lyrics run parallel to that; for much of the track, Silberman merely croons “no violence today” over and over again. In accordance with its title, it’s a beautifully gentle pacifist anthem, but that’s not to say that there’s a lofty concept or impenetrable narrative either on that track or anywhere on Impermanence; anybody alienated by Silberman’s abstruse and varied lyrical approach on Familiars might find a way back into his writing here.

That is, of course, assuming that they can get past the freeform nature of the songwriting here, one that proved divisive on that last Antlers album. Anybody looking for a return either to the thick atmospherics of Burst Apart or the more straightforward pop sensibilities of Hospice is going to be let down, particularly if they aren’t aware of the medical circumstances that were always going to rule that out from the off. For everybody else, Silberman has crafted an enthralling, minimalist mood piece on which the barely-there nature of the instrumentation belies deep nuance and forethought, with tension and insecurity rumbling softly beneath the face-value serenity. Gorgeous.

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Peter Silberman headed upstate for the same reason most New Yorkers do: to get some damn peace and quiet. Problem is that he took all the noise with him. Though his work with the Antlers never had anyone confusing him with J Mascis, years of touring left Silberman with a debilitating hearing ailment that started as piercing tinnitus and evolved into a constant sound of “Niagara Falls in my head.” Even if aural healing was Silberman’s priority during his convalescence, there was no doubt what he was really working towards. His proper solo debut Impermanence is the result of physical, mental and emotional therapy, a man trying to re-enter his own life.

This is a guy who likened romantic failure to cancer and a dead dog, so the possibility of him turning this into a gut-wrenching metaphorical ordeal was very real. It’s almost more understandable that Silberman wouldn’t feel the need to dramatize his situation, given the timing of it all. “I’m disassembling piece by piece,” he moans on the record’s first line, though that describes less his own rehabilitation than affirms Antlers’ M.O. since their 2009 breakthrough. Hospice now stands as the last true exemplar of “2000s indie,” touching on Radiohead’s quasi-prog song structures, Sigur Rós’ amniotic ambiance, and Arcade Fire’s skyscraping crescendos. But since then, they’ve veered more toward the variously fanged and stoned Burst Apart, which turned out to be a tentative step towards the zonked-out laser-Floyd ambiance that defined their most recent work on Undersea and Familiars. And the process of Silberman’s reassembly has resulted in something not too far from what Antlers themselves might have put together in 2017.

“New York” is the most immediately fetching song on Impermanence, something like Interpol’s “NYC” if it was performed like the Grace version of “Hallelujah.” Silberman’s falsetto hovers over a translucent guitar, homesick for a place where he already lives: “When my nerve wore down/I was assailed by simple little sounds/hammer clangs, sirens in the park/like I never heard New York.” While he doesn’t quite have the natural vocal hops of his immediate influences, Silberman is one of the last true believers of the Buckley/Yorke school of operatic angst and he’s become just as effective as a lead instrument. For a lot of listeners, it’s a short step from Radiohead to Talk Talk and Impermanence unsurprisingly evokes Laughing Stock, the gold standard for mid-career, post-rock spiritual cleansing: “Karuna” begins with a few seconds of low amp buzz and a loosely knotted guitar chord that has to be an overt homage to “Myrrhman.”

It’s a spare album that asks for a lot of patience, if only a fraction of what Silberman needed to rehabilitate his ears in isolation. Impermanence isn’t meant to sound lonely, however; there are nearly a dozen contributors if you include Big Sur and Block Island, RI for their provision of field sounds. The most important is engineer and mixer Nicholas Principe, a frequent collaborator whose Port St. Willow project often felt spiritually akin to Silberman's work. Principe is part of a quartet that providing doo-wop vocals during “Gone Beyond,” a supremely stoned jazz riff that ends with a presumptive cue for a vinyl flip. Yet the bulk of Impermanence suggests that burning these songs to a tangible item is a necessarily evil: the credits include Tibetan bowls and ujjayi breath, and the song titles (“Karuna,” “Ahimsa”) themselves are taken from basic principles of eastern philosophy in accordance with Silberman’s continuing desire to atone for the mean-spirited Burst Apart.

Though Impermanence is unmistakably a record about Silberman’s physical ailments, the lyrics attempt to find a balance between being just about that (“I’m listening for you, silence”) and giving the listener something they can apply to their own lives (“Our bodies are temporary”). Likewise, the six songs take a long time to assess whether they’re meant to offer serenity or a path to transcendence and whether Silberman’s self-imposed musical limitations can support his most philosophically ambitious work yet. It’s not a slight to call Impermanence functional music: If it helps someone else simply cut through the noise in their head, Silberman has gotten his point across.