Vince Clarke, synthpop great and founding member of Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure, has announced his debut solo album, Songs of Silence, which will be out November 17 via Mute. “The infinite shades of sounds you can create with just the tiniest tweak of a knob or slider continues to fascinate me,” he says.
The album was created during the pandemic at Clarke’s home studio in NYC, with him energized by the creative possibilities of the Eurorack modular synthesizer. “I could have gone on forever, I could have not stopped,” says Vince, “I was enjoying the process so much and wasn’t thinking about anyone else hearing it. But hearing it develop in my studio, in my head, learning new tricks – that’s been the best thing about this. I was in a state of shock, actually, when Mute said they wanted to release this album.”
You can check out the dark, somber “The Lamentations Of Jeremiah,” which is built around an 1844 anti-scab folk song. The gorgeous black-and-white video for the song was directed by photographer and BrooklynVegan contributor Ebru Yildiz. “When I first heard the song, I felt like it contained a whole lifetime within itself,” says Ebru. “All of the drama and peace, anxiousness and calmness, tension and hope, and everything in between. I wanted the visuals to feel like all those extremes as well.” Watch the video below.
Songs of Silence Tracklist
1. Cathedral
2. White Rabbit
3. Passage
4. Imminent
5. Red Planet
6. The Lamentations Of Jeremiah
7. Mitosis
8. Blackleg
9. Scarper
10. Last Transmission