Album Review: Supersilent’s 13. Is Batman Meets The Matrix In Music
Supersilent is a Norwegian band that has left the globe in awe, since1997, through their texturized music that has the ability to make you feel earthbound through its cultural musical influence and intergalactic through its synthetic noises. This mixture of earth and cosmos is what has given the band longevity as musicians, and inspired them to record their newest album, 13, live. This record is a single magnificent take into the Oslo-based band’s goal to feel their music as if it were before all on stage. For Supersilent, it is the physicality of performance that moves them, but is the virtuality of music that will move their listeners.
Supersilient have taken the world of sound and made a labyrinth of music on 13. From the start, the record feels like you have laid down in a sonic vortex, where abstract images of the world flash around you. It is as if you have entered the Matrix, and in 9 tracks you have to discover whether you are “the one” and what blue or red pill you will take. Hence, 13 is an invitation to be musically weird, and frankly you want to accept it.
An invite to be musically weird sounds strange, in itself, but 13 is not a record that can be boxed into “normal” or “cookie-cutter”. Yet, that has never been Supersilent’s goal. This band wants to challenge listener’s with how they absorb music and define it as “good” or “bad”. Their usage of various cultural, natural, and digital sounds is kind of a sociological experiment, where you must decipher what it is that is making this musical anarchy oddly pleasing. “How can different be good? ” is question you will ask as you enjoy 13.
I love sci-fi fantasy films. I love the idea of jumping into new worlds and seeming invincible to both others and yourself. It explains my comic-book addiction. Yet, I only make this claim about myself so that you the reader can understand the effects of Supersilent’s 13. The record manages to make you feel as if earth, the very planet we live on, is its own distant universe. From Indonesian ritual music heard from a Scandinavian mountaintop on the opening track “13.1” or the compressed digital rhythms of “13.9″, you cannot help but admire how this band has managed to digitize the globe for all its cultural worth. For me, culture is what moves people. It is what, in part, makes them feel invincible because, in some ways things like fantasy films and comic books are culture. Thus, when you hear 13 you feel enthralled to discover that world you know can, musically, be transformed into its own comic-book. This is not say that the album “kitchy and colorful”. On the contrary, if there is one comic book world I would relate to this album, it is Gotham. A hefty compliment as I LIVE for Batman. Yet, 13 captures the darkness of the world, and how light can come through it in pockets of sound.
The synth heavy record beautifully interweaves surprising elemental/ nature- reflective sounds to make you feel that no matter how much of a virtual world we may live in: the human heart beats though flesh and blood. It is fascinating to hear this statement, which may sound weird to say, but, 13 is a fluid album that allows you to conclude, through music, that no amount of technologically infused rhythms can cut the spiritual creativity that inspired them. Yes. Supersilent may have used synth-boards, along with instruments, to make beats, but they used their minds and hearts to artfully deduce where each and every sonic would fall upon your ear. It is quite lovely. Click Here for more information on Supersilent, and to buy 13 on September 30.
