Silvania - Watercolors, Spirals and Elephants

Born in Peru, Mario Mendoza and Jorge "Coco" Revilla arrived in Valencia in 1990, and after a couple of demo tapes released their first mini-LP, Miel Nube Hiel, under the name Silvania for the small Experience Records, before landing at the legendary Elefant Records, to which they remained tied for the whole decade. In love with English new wave and especially with Cocteau Twins, they started out from those sounds — rebranded in the early Nineties as shoegaze — before arriving at an electronic pop so rarefied and romantic it could put the most celebrated Anglo-Saxon bands to shame (Boards Of Canada, to name one). "Electronics have always been in our music", Silvania confessed in an interview a few years back. Even so, on their first proper album it's voices and guitars that grab the attention: En Cielo de Oceano (1993) is a collection of deeply romantic songs, drenched in a sea of ethereal, enveloping sounds that closely recall the melancholically joyful wall of sound of the first two masterpieces by Slowdive, "Just For A Day" (1991) and "Souvlaki" (1993). On the following Paisaje III (1994), a sprightly electronic garb is the first sign of a mutation already underway. Ambient-trance had exploded a couple of years earlier, and a handful of bands managed to blend it perfectly with the old structures of new wave: Seefeel, Ecstasy Of St.Theresa and Silvania are among the best at it. The track "Nudo De Cielo Y Delfin" anticipates by at least a year what Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin) would "invent" for the rest of the world on his self-titled album, namely rushing a languid classical melody played on violins and piano with an electronic beat underneath.

From shoegaze to electronics: the disappearance of guitars

The change is even more evident on the 7" Avalovara, which pushes the group 'beyond' rock: the guitars have by now almost completely vanished, buried under layers of liquid percussion and electronic sequences, just as human voices, when present, are reduced to mere sonic wallpaper. "Art is a search for expression" — Silvania again — "guitars had by that point become a symbol of grunge and of that whole scene we'd always hated. We wanted to go as far as possible, and that's how we discovered techno, ambient, Autechre, Seefeel and the rest, and we found our attitude had much more to do with theirs". Words that take shape on the 12" Galax Trax (there's also a later CD released under the name Dj Galax), which partly foreshadows the collaborations on the following album Delay Tambor: the Spanish duo's rapport with the cream of English electronic music of those years is genuinely remarkable (Locust, Scorn, Seefeel, Scanner, Autechre). Here Silvania's sound loses its lightness and turns leaden, heavy: melancholy has turned into anguish.

The following 'long' 7" (actually a 33 rpm), Aero, contains two tracks that perhaps didn't make it onto Delay Tambor because of their mood, given their airy, at times almost playful feel. The electronics remain tight, with rhythms and sequencers chasing each other across fragments of melody, but these are tracks not suited to the crowd at Galax — the club the pair had meanwhile opened in Madrid to play their more techno-leaning material, in step with the rave fad that had exploded across Europe — unlike those on the following 12" Suprematiz, which were.

Maturity: cathedrals of silicon

With 1997's Juniperfin, Silvania's electronics finally find a classic dimension of their own: the sound becomes recognizable, and every element of their music fuses together layer upon layer, from the most torrid to the infinitely ethereal. The long opening track, "Lunik", is a perfect example of this particular layering technique, where emotions pile up rather than follow one another: the result is dynamic, cheerful, sunlit music, though it's not without moments of stellar melancholy, as on the magnificent "Cielo". The alternation between more rhythmic passages and gorgeous ambient sketches is the strength of this long work, followed by the even more astonishing Naves Sin Puertos, beautiful from its title and cover art onward. Silvania themselves agree with this assessment: "Naves Sin Puertos along with Paisaje 3 are our masterpieces. These are the records that have everything we wanted to express. Naves is a truly poetic work because it was made with the most intimate part of our minds/hearts/machines: it was a magical moment". The best of English new wave returns forcefully within the plastic grooves of these sounds: Cabaret Voltaire, Dif Juz and Durutti Column seem to be the most obvious influences among those mentioned by Silvania themselves in the CD booklet. The sound opens up and takes on sea-green hues, the rhythms smooth their edges and splinter apart, and ambient carpets create moods to sink into. The duo's electronics have changed, at times darker and more serious than on the previous work (on "Planitud" you can almost hear the ancestral sonic amalgam of Steve Roach), but even with different means it still reaches the usual heights of stratospheric romanticism, as on "Nave" and "Miniespacial". There would be a follow-up to so much wonder, an album recorded in 1999 and still unreleased to this day, Campo De Espirales Arboles y Secuencias Possibles. Berlin's Alison label released in 2002 Solineide Says, a fine retrospective of the band's early years (1991-1993), including their first 12", their first LP, two tracks from Paisaje III — one of them in demo version — and as many as five unreleased tracks.

The Noughties: the electro-pop of Ciëlo

After a few collaborations with Carlos Ordonez (Prozacks, Gauss) in the Radio project, not far removed from the sun-kissed minimal techno of Juniperfin, Mario and Coco reunited to produce proper songs – for the first time in six years – under the name Ciëlo, with which they released three albums of bright, cheerful electro-pop. Listening to Un Amor Mato Al Futuro brings to mind the synthetic pulses of OMD and Human League. Melody reigns supreme across all thirteen tracks on the album, and the mood is decidedly sunny. In some cases the rhythms are built from dense textures that, on closer inspection, aren't too far removed from the silicon architecture of records like Juniperfin and Naves Sin Puertos. Not every track's machinery runs perfectly, but on first listen the sticky melodies of "Cielo No Futuro", "Vamos A Caminar", "Lineas Rectas" and, above all, "Patricia" – a potential hit single for any season – are utterly hypnotic. Along the same lines, if less striking, are the two albums that followed – Paraiso Vacio and Radio Subterranea – before Coco's tragic death: he was found murdered in his hotel room on 28 September 2008 in Santo Domingo, an event that perhaps brought the band's activity to a definitive end.

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