Introduction
Silicate Garden by Weldroid
Artist: Weldroid
Title / Release Page: Silicate Garden
Release Date: 2014 Oct 04
Genre: IDM
License: CC BY-NC-ND
Media: MP3 / OGG / FLAC
Pricing: Name Your Price
Label: tonAtom / BandCamp
Rating: ★★★★★★★★
Silicate Garden is Weldroid’s tenth release, and possibly the final for Tamás Zsiros under the guise of this droid… It’s fitting to have a release that combines Weldroid’s unique solo sonicscapes with collaborations with Illl and Nonima.
Silicate Garden
The eleven tracks on this release represent a complete sonic interpretation of a land, including it’s inhabitants, and sometimes strange and foreign features. The Silicate Garden in this release might be seen as the land of the Droid’s,
This release goes through multiple layers of emotion, imagery and environment. For example, we start on the emotional or cerebral side with opening track ‘Introvert’, which is bracketed by the contrasting ‘Extrovert’ track as the second to the last track on the release.
In between there are times of more bleak, darkness in tracks like ‘Dark Winter’ and ‘Answer To Your Letter’. With tracks like ‘Shanghai madmen’ bring a quirky, slightly irregular dance into the setting. It sounds like a processional of droids moving along an assembly line, going joyfully about their work fulfilling their duty.
The title track unfolds gently, with a walking rhythm, allowing us to explore the strange and fascinating lad of the droids. It appears our guide is the new female droid (as pictured on the cover of this release). But it isn’t long before we confronted with the more mysterious parts of this land in the track ‘Fluffy Expedition’.
Throughout all the varying settings, moods and visions, sonically Weldroid has used the tools at his disposal in a way that is both familiar, and yet still makes the listener pay attention to the details. Gorgeous piano lines, with punch analog bass and bitcrushed percussion for a center for these compositions But it’s in the pads, sequences, various noises, and occasional voices (particularly on ‘The Slicer’) that the character of this work is found.
Conclusion
Overall, this is a more fascinating look inside the Silicate Garden, the land where the droids come from, or at least where they live. (I keep wanting to draw a parallel between the Silicate Garden and the Garden of Eden, which I think would be appropriate as both are a place of origin, and to my way of thinking both are mythical places.) I have to say, this is an amazing piece of work. Weldroid has gone further with this release musically than any of his previous works. This is a recording that works a complete single work from beginning to end, while individual piece stands on its own.