ow many moments, each in their infinite difference, an object with limitless sides, can repeat the same impression, again and without recourse? Is it ever possible for a mirror to be held and the perfect reflection to be seen? Or can the perfect simulacra—a dream, even, a memory—only be held as the potential for the remapping of the silver fibers that smooth out the flat plane of the refraction? Supersilent—less than silent, yet abounding in the excess of silence—are here silent as to their origins and superunconstructed as to their directions: horror music, an alternate universe mix of the Stalker soundtrack, a psychedelic garage sale tinted by the ghosts of jazz and the vibratory quantum spectralities of an early electronic heritage. Picking up from 5 , Supersilent skip three steps to the left in exploring the farther, resonant reaches of the psychedelia inherent to not only post-rock, but the teutonic vistas of a vast sheet of time, where temporalities themselves are splayed across a jugular of proper-names skimming the limits of electronic composition: Tortoise, Sigur Ros, Godspeed You Black Emperor!—but also Tim Hecker, Edvard Artemiev, Morton Subotnick, Brian Eno.


Yet this is no composition. Each track is improvised, and the mythical status of Supersilent attributes their success to a constituent silence—never talking to each other, a whisper, even, a plan, or just desire, carefully acted upon, falling the wandering & dangerous paths, those minor keys of a Lovecraftian time-shift? Is there not, here, a desire to hear the symphonic repetition of Faust? (Or, The Mirror?)


The impact of Supersilent is such that it grasps, at one and the same, the potency of psychedelia and its projection of fractal vistas, and on the other hand, psychedelia's failure, its predictable structuration, its contextual habitude that drains most post-rock and avant-jazz today to a minimum level of excitation. Up-down, up-down: but there are so many other directions! Supersilent rewires the compass: the truth of magnetism is dispelled.


Percussion, jazz drumming, brass, guitar, analogue organ, shimmering synthesizer—all these elements play off the other, through each other, in a mix that at every moment attests to the hearing and listening abilities of the collaboration. To play the highest reaches of improvisation, to fall neither into a trap of up-down verticality or meandering, meaningless horizontality, one must learn to hear the other, the other notes, their expectation and anticipation, and the space in-between. If this is a geometry, it is one where the numbers themselves shift as such, where the space of a single note and its singularity—"1"—shifts to 6.


From 1 to 6. For every note played, there are a mirrored refraction of aspects and responses, none the same as the others, yet each nonetheless shifting phases over a particular angle, a standout ridge, or a defining subtlety—insofar as it defines its own definition. Exponential music that clings to its minimalism. With each response there is an act of silencing, of pairing down the possibility of responses to the potential expression of that singular, shifting note or series of sounds.


Is this improvisational jazz? Free electronic? Post-rock experimentalism? Sentimental soundtracking? Blur, mix—we talk here as Supersilent maintain their stoic shadows behind the curtain. (Although we say as little as they tend to say of us: we say here only what can be traced in the fragments of a clean, dark grey cover, without explanation, an album devoted entirely to its disc). We hear their ghostly shapes walking the ramparts. Afraid, trembling before what awaits as each song erupts to focus upon a shimmering. A shimmering synthesizer, analogue, the particularities of those rippled sounds, a note, joined in harmony, answered in disharmony, the potential of cacophony, the limit of the song's structure tested—reigned in, returned—and tested again: "solo" moments given from one to the other, the jazz tag-team occurring unexpected (the "bars" of a jazz solo are here removed from the program completely)—again, the shimmering, this time of the entire track, shimmering through the others on the album, the first few a jubilant expression of topologies, visions of landscapes and the infinite, the last few a dark and microscopic exploration of minerals, of the invisible weight of the earth, the finality of our split consciousness, the impossibility of that finality in and of itself, and now: the entire album shimmering, through other albums, and we are led to ask ourselves: is there not, every ten, maybe twenty years, a shimmering, a moment when the refraction of the mirror is turned to itself, when certain ghosts receive their chance to channel through the present a variation of the forgotten past as inspiration to the future? Like a pact with the Devil, Cornelius Agrippa to John Dee, Dee to Dr. Faustus, and on through the pantheon...