IN PASSING: SILAS

This series of blogs is called IN PASSING, and in it I'll be interviewing bands/artists I love and trying to shed further light (in the small ways I can) on their music and give anyone who may come across this a reason to listen to them. I want to focus on smaller music that deserves more attention than it gets. All blogs in this series will include unabridged (yet slightly edited) interviews with the artists and a small write-up from me.

In December of 2023, I was given the opportunity to interview Benjamin of Silas, the moniker under which he released dark, creaking, experimental, and heartfelt pieces. His music is wrought with the despair of existential mourning and born of the release of these complicated, bottled emotions.

I've made a companion playlist for this post featuring some bands and artists that Benjamin and I discussed below. If you'd like to listen to it as you read you can do so here.

pictures courtesy of Silas.

When did you first start making music under the Silas moniker? 

Not very long before that first album [The Void is Dead (Long Live the Void)] came out--I think that was 2018. That was my first endeavor musically and it kind of came off like a shotgun. Just a couple months probably. 

What experience did you have with music before that? 

I grew up playing classical piano. I took classical lessons and that's still primarily what I do. That was my first exposure, then I did band and choir and all of the classic things. I was a huge Radiohead fan, probably like many people--really big into Pink Floyd and stuff. So, I loved music for a really long time but I'd never kind of thought to do anything like that. I was living with my cousin at the time and he makes music--very talented person. I heard his process and had him show me the software and then I just kind of went for it. 

When did you start playing piano?

Quite young. I have a couple older sisters. They went to lessons and we had a piano in the house. I always wanted to be older than I was, so I started piddling around after they finished practicing. Formally, I started taking lessons at eight. I was probably just doodling around before then for a little while. 

Do you record on a real piano? 

The first album was recorded on a really lovely upright grand that my cousin had done--have you ever heard of a prepared piano? I think John Cage might have invented it or something. You basically stick all of this random shit into your piano onto the strings to mute some of them and change their sound. That's what I recorded the first one on--beautiful piano but really a lot of quirks and that same piano I also used for the second album [The Great He-Goat]. I have a studio here that I record on as well. I love it to death and tune it myself and try to take care. 

Did you record those albums yourself?

Yeah. I did every aspect of both, which is probably obvious because they're pretty amateur when it comes to production stuff like that. I was just really trying to get it off the ground with no money as you can imagine--that was second year of university or maybe third. I did the recording myself in just where I was living and then all the production and mixing as well. What little is there I have done. 

What do you think your music is about?

It's just delightful to have someone interested. Thank you. My first album, especially, was a kind of coming out of my religious upbringing to a large degree and I was really sad about it. I kind of became quite a virulent atheist at some point growing up and it was very devastating to me. I liked religion. I still do. I have a deep fascination and kind of love of religious and spiritual themes but at that point I was very cold, atheistic, and pretty nihilistic as a person which again comes across. Some of those songs are pretty straightforwardly mourning the death of god in my mind. There's a lot of a lot of self loathing in both of those albums. There's a sense of hubris that comes with atheism where you're repositioned as the center of the world, and I guess I found it a pretty disgusting, feeble center. It's sort of a sad, you know, there's a lot of sadness around that as well.

How did you land on your sound?

I definitely liked a lot of--I don't know if they'd be called neoclassical, but there's a group of really fascinating classical musicians out of Iceland and they all play together. It's fascinating and excellent, really dark scary stuff. Hildur Guðnadóttir is an Icelandic cellist and there are a couple other people that I was listening to at the time--Arve Henriksen is a trumpet player. Anyways, they all play together and have this deep, dark feel to them despite the fact that their music tends to be quite pretty. I think that I really admired that in terms of the experimental elements. I was just in a weird place so I didn't have a lot of intentionality about it. I just sort of was trying to get things off my chest, so a lot of the really weird shit in there is related to that. 

I will say, one of the things that I was kind of excited about with that album at times and then also in the second album that I was really wanting to work with was not grounding a song. Often in pieces you start with the base of some kind of percussion and build up from there like a structure. What I was trying to do, because again I was feeling very lost at the time, was to start from an instrument that doesn't have any frets and not ground that on any tone and then follow its wavering line so that you have a shifting structure that doesn't really ever land. That was my goal, at least, and that's why I used a lot of theremin and vocals. I started off with some of those things in my pieces and then try to build down from there. 

What has inspired you?

I'm in philosophy. That's always been a huge part of my life, even when I wasn't formally kind of studying it. And that's definitely the weirdly kind of the, that's kind of been where a lot of my inner conflicts are played out, if you will. So a lot of the people that I would be exposed to and the thoughts kind of that I'd be exposed to would kind of bleed into music and kind of whatever came out was whatever came out. Also, I imagine I was very influenced by the people that I really love to listen to like Radiohead. 

I've probably listened to thousands and thousands of hours of Pink Floyd. I wasn't really thinking of them, just trying to almost cathartically release something. Put it to bed. All of that was sort of deeply wrapped up in the philosophy I was studying at the time--once you get deep into the philosophy of science that kind of de-structures things and creates a lot of doubt in the scientific methods that we all so depend on. So, it's kind of also a mourning, not only of a loss of religion, but also a loss of even faith in my atheism.

Who are some of your favorite musical artists?

Some people that I feel like have stuck with me in a deep way, even though I don't listen to them that much--Benjamin Clementine. He's a phenomenal artist. He lives in Paris, but he's from London. A beautiful alien of a man, and he does a lot of really strange, really experimental stuff, like very classically inspired, even though I don't think he's classically trained. His lyrics are really weird and jarring. He takes a lot of inspiration from ANOHNI, formerly Anthony and the Johnsons, which is a fantastic, fantastic band. I have a deep love of that group and ANOHNI in general, just kind of this almost ridiculous, over the top emotionality and classical feel that borders into opera--but, somehow they get away with it, even though by all means they shouldn't and no one else can do that kind of thing. I definitely love those kinds of artists that sort of make their own little categories and don't look back. I think that they've probably shaped what I wanted for myself. Not so much a sound. 

What's the story behind the album cover for your first record? 

That is a trip that I took with--I was dating someone at the time. We went over to Vancouver Island. I was living in Vancouver then. Now I'm in Halifax. Vancouver Island is really beautiful and really spooky and we went late--so December, and we kind of did a very murky trip because it's so very broody there, very wild and a lot of mist and just this kind of deep kind of feeling. It's a very magical place. So, that was near Ucluelet. We were walking around and she took that photo and I flipped it, obviously. I think that it speaks to the self-loathing themes in that album and in the next as well of sort of feeling reversed in some way where your reflection is primarily dark and your self, your view of yourself is flipped on its head--kind of living in a world of self-critique and also feeling quite plagued by darkness that would follow you. I like to think I had a version of myself that was lurking around. I was pretty broody at the time.

How do you feel that you've evolved between your first and second records? 

The first record was more confessional--I put it out, but kind of regretted it afterwards. It kind of felt like something that was maybe too personal and kind of an ugly. I'm proud of it in my own way, but it's sort of an unlistenable album in some ways. It doesn't do a lot for you to actually want to be there for it. It doesn't have a lot of percussion. It doesn't have any driving themes that guide it along. It's chaotic and messy and the words are sort of offensive. So, that felt more confessional, more personal, and more ugly, like I was kind of ashamed to have shown that side of myself. 

The second one definitely carried some of those same themes, but I would say it was a bit more refined--not much, but kind of getting a bit more into the emotions that I was trying to get across rather than just blurting out my mind onto a page. A lot of the instrumental stuff in that one carries a bit more of the feeling that I was trying to convey rather than just sort of a Jackson Pollock of my own world. I got a little bit better at production or I backed off a bit and I didn't do as much for it. I kept the instruments fairly separate and kept the sections separate--didn't try to overlay much. It was a more intentional project, I guess.

Do you have any plans for Silas or music moving forward? 

I don't even know how long it's been since I released album number two, like 2019, so maybe four or something. I've been working down different alleys since then, especially in classical, and doing a lot more stuff on guitar. Literally just yesterday I set up my recording equipment for the first time in a really long time, partially inspired by this. But, I don't exactly know where I want to go, but I definitely want to push forward. I also want to take some of the stuff from previous albums that I feel like carried something that I want and refine it because, especially in that first album, it's really rough. I didn't really give a shit and I just was like, "it's out there, it's out of my hands now." I just wanted it off my plate, but there are things I'd like to return to and try to clean up and some of the emotions there that I want to try to capture in higher fidelity. That's where I'm hoping to go. I want to do more instrumental stuff, not just in a tangential way, but like really compose. I've been doing some transcriptions of pieces which I've never done before and I want to try to bring that into some of the writing elements and have them come out on their own steam, not just as interludes.

Yeah. They can exist on their own. 

Yeah, exactly.I'd like to kind of have that be the case--try to have them have themes that make sense and be more intentional about it and have them stand on their own because that's most of the stuff I do is instrumental only.

Did you ever play any of your Silas music live? 

Pretty much not. Honestly, a lot of it I couldn't have replicated. A lot of the songs that I made were really one-offs. I would just sit down for a session--something would come up. I would write stuff for it right then or maybe the night before. I'd get it out, record it and leave it and I wouldn't touch it again. I'm not even sure how to play some of my pieces, which is strange. I mean, it kind of makes sense, too, in terms of the intensely private nature of that stuff. I don't know if I'd have wanted people to see it. 

In Distopic Premonitions, there are a bunch of sounds going on in that--what were they? 

It's almost all a theremin, which is just a cool instrument. I have a cheap one, so it's kind of temperamental, but that's what you're getting is the temperamental-ity. The shrieks and almost like car swerving and stuff in there is just theremin and vocals. Those are the only two instruments in there. They're both really free floating and kind of moving amongst each other. 

Do you feel like you accomplished what you set out to with Silas? 

It depends on the day. On my realistic days, I feel like I did those projects in order to get something out of my head--it's sort of an exorcism, especially since those kind of occult things come up pretty often, but it really felt like that. I felt plagued by this and I just wanted it out. I've been a deeply perfectionistic person in a lot of my life and that wasn't the case for this. I really was like, "whatever ends up being out there, don't take time with it. Just put it out, because if you think about it too long, you're just not going to do it." Which is true. As a kid, I burned all my journals. I feel like I've achieved that--just getting better at putting stuff out and being honest about your own art. 

As a larger scale thing, I don't really know what I wanted from those projects, but I don't really feel like they went anywhere. You were the first person I've ever talked to about them and to be honest, it really astonished me that you reached out. I think I have like three listens on most of the pieces. But, in so far as actually being an artist present in the world that that makes stuff and interacts with that group, I'm not--so in that way I feel like it's probably failed. I don't know, it leads somewhere. I still feel really positively about it and I'm proud of them in my own way, despite the fact that they're strangely shame-oriented pieces.

What have you been listening to lately? 

I've been into a lot of instrumental stuff lately. My friend got me into John Fahey--specifically an album that's relatively late in Fahey's long career called Red Cross. It's very, very, very good. I've been listening to some of my neoclassical artists that I love. There's an album called The Height of the Reeds. That's Arve Henriksen, Eivind Aarset, and some other people. It's just epically cool--very dark, kind of swampcore. Other than that, like classical artists. I've been into Mendelssohn lately, been getting a bit into Prokofiev, uh, specifically the Visions fugitives series--they're beautiful pieces. I've been deeply, deeply dedicated to Rachmaninoff for several years now. There are definitely other artists that like aren't dead that I listen to but I can't think of them right now.

What is your favorite Silas song? 

I'm really attached to some of them, even though I don't actually like them very much. I think Warhorns is up there from the second album. I don't know why, but I just feel like it got across what I wanted. I liked The Old War from the second album. I liked Aria from the first--the more pensive and plaintive pieces have always been some of my favorites. I was so, again, it's the self-loathing, but I was so pretentious in my names for the first album. I think it's called Extended Objection to Decadence--what a bougie bastard name, but it's really like cacophonous and terrifying on the piano. That's something I want to move towards. I like that feeling. I don't know what is going on in that piece, but it made me happy.

That's one of the things that made me really like your first album--there's a scary darkness to it that I really like. I'm really connected with it.

It takes a specific kind of person to connect. I appreciate that. I think when I released that first album, I got a comment on one of the songs on Facebook, "I don't think I've ever heard stillborn smiling written into a song." I was like, "yeah, that's fair."

I apologize for the late post, I was out of town over the weekend. But, I'm so excited to share this with you all--Silas is an artist I've been listening to for years, and another one that I think more people need to know. Thank you all for reading. I'll try to get another blog out this week.

-Foster