by Selina Yang (@y_aniles)
Frost sinks into loamy soil, but spring is yet to come. Darkness stretches long into the noon, and sunset is a dying candle flicker. Warm Dust, the sophomore album of Silt (previously Cold Clod), takes place in the liminal season where blossoms have yet to defrost. It must be the earliest day of spring. Ben Currotto’s initial vision of stripped, acoustic focus – metaphorically, the aftermath of the 2018 album Cold Clod Breaks Up, was transformed into a dynamic gathering of this new five-piece band. In unspoken synergy, each player is as dynamic as the very sunlight that flits between branches. Trickling hi-hats slip over keening guitars to form a chromatic stream. Ben Currotto’s soulful, Gira-esque baritone holds its confidence in a spoken word lilt. Multiple melodies change hands from meditative jangles into saw-edged harmonies. Combining both the original acoustic vision, and the fateful result, Warm Dust ended up a portrait of shadowy emotional ambiance.
Whispered wishes reach newfound clarity as the album progresses, shifting between acoustic contemplation to post-rock. Warm Dust is bittersweet, tinged with optimistic realism. With each swelling of the silvery guitar strumming, the triumphant heartache of “This Feeling” wells up in the listener’s chest. In the contemplative sketch of “More Waves,” Currotto longs for a place with endless bliss – “give me anything, rolling eternally… in moonlight, another rising sea.” But just as easily as this peace is stitched together, Jesse Moy’s drumming rips it back open to its unearthed rawness. “Summit” has the band beginning with a coursing rhythm, pummeling forward head first, until Moy’s sparkling timekeeping explodes into a gauzy density. A star is collapsing. In a vertigo-inducing halt, all instruments silence. “Summit” ends with birdsong. Throughout the album, there is no static texture. Rather, the sense of constant motion feels watery and chromatic.
Some would define rhythm as the separation between music and ambient, day to day noise. However, Silt interweaves accents of nature with the tracks themselves. Water rushes in a stream of white noise, and even wind whistles in tune. With guitar, plucked by human hand, and water presented as parallels, Warm Dust encourages listeners to recognize the rhythm within nature itself. The intimacy in which the external world is treated results in a record that feels vulnerable to one’s own emotionality as well. One can choreograph and calculate all they want, but at the end of the day, we’re still part of nature’s noise all the same.