St. Silva Releases 'Forager'
by Scott Osgood
“primarily bucolic and peaceful, with a pervading sense of sun-drenched nostalgia”
The Letter
“evokes the ancestral mode of gathering from naturally available sources, holding a tidy mirror to the artist’s creative practice and the emotional landscape of the work itself” Stonewashed
“music that exists somewhere between the organic and the synthetic” Essex Reporter
Forager from St. Silva is out today digitally and on limited run cassette. A warm collection of looping mediations that blur the line between electronic and the natural, Forager merges formless exploration with found sounds in an unlikely collaboration of time and space.
Crafted during a year-long process of documenting, sorting, and re-collaging sonic material, Forager is a composite of sounds recorded months prior to their recontextualization. “Time creates distance, sometimes a healthy distance, between the art and the artist,” shares St. Silva. “This is a document, a marker of where I was during a moment of time and the sounds that inspired me.”
To forage is to search for, gather, or collect food or resources from the natural environment. “Sometimes playing music feels like that, more an act of discovering something than creating something.” By employing time to relinquish the source material from its time and place, St. Silva finds new context for the collected moments, and in the process discovers a whole new environment.
Using a combination of tape loops, modular synthesis, field recording, and melodic synth lines, St. Silva offers a sun-drenched nostalgia where faded memories waft over analog-saturated synthetic forests.
All songs composed, recorded, and mixed by Ben Dexter Cooley
Mastering and engineering help from Jake Wright
Cover artwork and cassette designed by Nate Hicks
AKP051
