HAMMOCK - Silencia

As the new decade dawns, Hammock's "trilogy of loss" finally reaches completion: the Nashville duo's tenth LP seals a requiem wrapped in light, whose core was forged in the moving choral rite of “Mysterium”, to which the subsequent “Universalis” and the present “Silencia” act as atmospheric extensions, a wordless song that symbolizes an ascent from earth to sky.

Perhaps the airiest instalment of the series, “Silencia” doesn't just serve as a simple coda but rather closes the circle with a decisive emotional surge: the broad ambient washes of its predecessor often give way to new, cinematically-cut orchestrations, once again indebted to the essential lesson of Jóhann Jóhannsson. The one-two punch of “When It Hurts To Remember” and “Afraid To Forget” is mercy turned into music; the theme for piano, cello and guitar in “We Try To Make Sense Of It All” paves the way for a choir whose warm light pierces through the fog of the heart; the long closer “Without Form And Void” offers one last consoling embrace in the swelling counterpoint between strings and winds, and finally the polyphony of male and female voices crowns the spiritual ascension invoked over the course of three years – and perhaps an entire career.

Consistent with the rest of the trilogy, the cover image of this “prelude to silence” is not a cold, lifeless monochrome: the photographic grain it shares with the previous chapters makes its peaceful glow vibrant and full of life, like the other world Hammock are able to make us imagine and savor in advance through their intense atmospheric songwriting.

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19/11/2019