Started in the 80s by Kim Cascone, the San Francisco-based label Silent Records was an important player in the early days of that cities’ burgeoning Industrial scene, as well as Experimental and Ambient music in general. While the label got its name from Cascone’s 1985 PGR effort, Silence, Silent Records’ first release as a label was GX Jupitter-Larsen‘s project The Haters‘ 1986 LP, In the Shade of Fire. Billed as “10 noise compositions made from the sounds of things falling apart,” it fit right in with the West Coast’s experimental Industrial music scene at the time.
As the decade progressed, Cascone would also go on to be an assistant sound editor on David Lynch‘s Twin Peaks, working in the UK with sound editor Jay Boekelheide. This would go on to influence his interest in Ambient music, as well as the label’s future direction. In 1990, after returning to San Francisco, he rededicated himself to Silent Records with the hopes of increasing the prominence of experimental electronic music. Towards that end, Cascone launched the distribution company Pulse Soniq after releasing the Arcane Device/PGR split LP Fetish on CD.
Silent Records would really hit its stride in the early-90s as Techno and Ambient became the soundtrack for a growing Rave scene on the West Coast and worldwide. Receiving an influx of submissions in various electronic genres, the label would go on to form the imprints: Flask (beat-oriented ambient), Furnace (hard industrial, industrial dance), and Sulphur (alternative rock, noise, fusion, experimental electronics, found sound). However, after Cascone left the label to pursue work as a sound designer for Thomas Dolby‘s company Headspace, Silent Records and Pulse Soniq would struggle before shutting down in 1998.
Luckily, though, in 2016 Cascone once again revived his efforts launching Silent Records as a Bandcamp site. Busy in the intervening years, 2019 has seen a slew of releases from the label. Below, you will find six new additions from this past October sure to excite dronenauts and ambienteers alike…
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AUME – “The Tremblings of Atmosphere”
:: Dark subterranean drones with an industrial edge.
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Randy Grief – “Rolling Electrical Storm with Transmissions”
:: Digital manipulation and conjuring of ambient sounds; performed live at Drone Cinema Film Festival Los Angeles February 2019
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Jared Sagar – “Vornths”
:: Three electronic music compositions evoking a time when composers sat hunched over tape recorders armed with razorblades assembling snippets of magnetic tape into wondrous sound poems.
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Don Haugen/AUME/Kris Force – “Dronesmuir – an evening of ethereal drones”
:: Live laptop mangling of acoustic sound, time stretched drones trapped in Amber.
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V/A – “Dark Indicator” (collection of slow, low, tube-death induced guitar drones)
:: Low, slow distorted guitars firehosed through tube amps on the brink of heat death.
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V/A – “From Here to Tranquility (tonic immobility) Volume 11
:: A collection of glowing sound embers under the stars, the smell of woodsmoke and dragons blood incense while herbally gazing up at the sky in a Turrell sky space.
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