alex silver

Listen on Subvert

Tag: experimental folk

  • Quick Update: Streaming Under Construction

    Over the next few months, I’ll be making some changes to where my music is hosted online. For example, Planet Made of Diamonds and Dream Without Detail will no longer be on the array of streaming services. They’ll become records at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library.

    I may reduce the offerings on Bandcamp to focus on music I want to sell. If it’s something more casual that I want easily streamable, I’ll host it elsewhere.

    I don’t think I’ll take this moment to proselytize on my reasoning, but in a word I’m thinking about the future. I’m involved in the early stages of a cooperative music marketplace called Subvert and I’m learning so much about music economies in the process.

    If you’re someone out there that liked an album or song and can’t find it, please email me here. I’m happy to send it to you.

    I’ll chime in here with an update once everything is settled for a while! If you’re curious about some of the dilemmas within music streaming, this is a great interview that took place at SPACE in Portland with Liz Pelly and Damon Krukowski.

    Update: Planet Made of Diamonds Twice the Size of Earth! and Dream Without Detail are now uploaded to Internet Archive.

  • Song Diary: When every dream arises like a problem

    View of upper half of a large apple tree in blossom, taken from below. Deep blue sky and dispersed clouds spread out above the tree. Photo by Maine experimental folk musician Alex Silver for his online hi-fi song diary.

    I’m thinking there might be real value in discussing the merits and flaws I see in a song diary entry. This one, for instance, doesn’t seem to me “ready” in any sense, but it was the final try after nine others—and it took the furthest curve off the trail I’d followed. In other words, I find it interesting.

    I think it’s definitely too “busy” and the slide guitar is full of emotion but also excessive and unfocused. That makes sense, given that it was the first attempt at involving slide, or even another voice, in the recording.

    But one thing that I especially like in this is the vocal. I appreciate its presence. I’m still well at the beginning of developing skill at evoking distances, either through playing or recording. But distance perennially becomes a focal point for me, because I get a lot of feeling from what might be called “spatial emotionality;” really, I suppose, spatial relationships—the sense of how things interact within a scene affects us/me.

    I want things to pop and recede, as if they were entering my mind strongly then moving back into the background to wait. This is an element of perception that excites me. The play of foreground and background, how we can’t look at two planes at one time. I think a vocal “treatment” like this could support work with distance.

    This recording lacks a body. There are a few moments that pull me, but it’s difficult to pay attention to discrete moments because of my general disorientation. A better version would give more “reason” to the body, to the structure, just a little bit more sense of footing. Of how to run one’s hand along the contours of the thing.

    When every dream arises like a problem, from May 31, Song Diary

  • Essai: Staring at a tree without looking

    This is an excerpt from a longer arrangement of words. It’s a meditation on the recurring overwhelm of living in the Information Age:

    I’m overwhelmed by information
    like staring at a tree
    without looking

    just preparing
    the mind’s eye for meaning.

  • Essai: I see you when I’m not thinking straight . . .

  • In retrospect: West Olive, Michigan, Collage 3 (May 2019)

    Recording equipment setup at a cottage on Lake Michigan, used by Alex Silver for the making of Five Collages (2019). View of pink, purple, and blue sunset from the living room.

    I stayed for a month or two at a cottage on Lake Michigan in 2019. I’d just moved from New Mexico and was hoping to go to France and teach. I’m grateful for this time and the generosity of Tom, who has had the cottage in his family a long time. Pretty much made of concrete blocks, it was a refreshing place in the spring that I turned 30. Somewhat lonely, somewhat stimulated, I recorded a lot, compiled a lot, released a lot, and had a real opportunity to go deep into the less-effable zones.

    Listen on Soundcloud (@alexsilver_sketches)

    This is from Five Collages, available on Bandcamp here.