St. Silva

photo by Maggie Cooley

Announcing Forager from St. Silva, a warm collection of looping mediations that blur the line between electronic and the natural, merging 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 material 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.”

From the outset Japanese environmental music has been a guiding light for the St. Silva project. Fans of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Kankyō Ongaku and Shiho Yabuki will find a kindred spirit in Forager, as well as the reflected inspiration of Ann Annie, Marcus Fischer and other artists working with tape as a primary medium. “There's something about the tactile nature of working with tape, manually splicing loops and taping them together,” says St. Silva, “the sonic quality of tape as a texture and the imperfections that it introduces give the music a more unpredictable and natural quality.”

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.

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