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disease · 3 months

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SILENT SERVANT

HYPNOSIS IN THE MODERN AGE: V2 | 2016 HARM IN HAND | 2018

#RIP #SILENT SERVANT #EBM #industrial #album art #hands #hospital productions #techno #music #u

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aleprouswitch · 3 months

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Silent Servant, his girlfriend, AND The Soft Moon all passed away. Oh my god. This is horrible.

#silent servant #the soft moon #no words #rip

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ourladyofomega · 3 months

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I’d never expect for both Luis Vasquez / The Soft Moon and Juan Mendez / Silent Servant (and his wife Simone Ling) to be taken from us, all at the exact same time.

I’m stunned…

#Silent Servant #The Soft Moon #Simone Ling #techno #industrial #r.i.p.

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btaut · 1 month

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#silent servant

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omegaremix · 23 days

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April 3, 2022.

It takes a good two months before a year starts to pick up for me. The first big win was in the final frigid day of February when I decided to take the train to Greenpoint’s Academy Annex for some records; the first stop of what would be an amazing record-store victory tour. Then arrived March. I drove four miles to the shopping mall to look for leather jackets when I discovered a new retro- video arcade opened up. Within a few days I walk in and spent the entire day re-living my Atari / Nintendo / SNES youth. Those eight hours were a thoroughly exhaustive one. I saw games which I threw many rolls of quarters into, to others I only read about and fantasized even seeing up until then. The original Super Mario Bros. cabinet, The Neo Geo MVS, Outrun, R-Type, Taito’s Superman, Atari’s Star Wars. Most of every great moment of my youth spent in delis, card stores, ice cream parlors, long-gone restaurants, and amusement parks were now all in one room.

Good thing I went because my all-time favorite ginger April* made a rare appearance in my store and I had to tell her about it. She came in to buy some A/V components like she always does and we spent a good ten minutes catching up on everything. April was a fangirl and a hardcore gamer of all formats so I had to share the wealth of news with her. Too late. She already went. Still, every visit from her counted as she was the cutest thing of pale skin, glasses, and Irish ancestry I ever seen.

I had another holiday spent with my Coney Island family. My aunt invited me to her daughter’s house in East Meadow for Easter where they, her aggressive right-wing country-music loving Trump supporter sons, her sister, and all the offspring you could think of would be there. A great four hours were had coloring eggs, watching Disney’s Encanto on the big screen, and an endless feast of Italian food were laid out for all to gorge ourselves to death. Blessings were counted and they were enough to cash them in for a bright sunny Sunday. I also enjoyed the hour-long drive from East Meadow through Rt. 27 all the way home.

In between all this was a major event I was chasing for a while. It would be nice to attend a Boy Harsher show and they’ve been making the rounds in New York City quite often. I jumped at the opportunity to purchase tickets after their Halloween show and ultimately got them - only for January show to be postponed. Blame the COVID- omicron for it. But Jae & Augustus pushed it back to April and this time nothing was stopping them from performing nor anyone attending The Music Hall Of Williamsburg.

I learned that it was a two-hour ride each way from my line to Penn Station and back due to transfers at the Jamaica Station. Not good as I had to work a 10AM shift. This time, I opted to drive out to the Babylon stop for a direct line to Manhattan and back for fifty-five minutes each. I went up the stairs and waited only a few minutes before the train arrived on an elevated platform. Nothing special about the train ride on a cloudy mid-50* weather. The show, however, was a whole other story. Everyone enjoyed the opener Twin Tribes and the headlining Boy Harsher hands-down to great fanfare. I couldn’t have waited in line to get some merch- as, once again, someone had to ride home for tomorrow’s payday.

I reversed the path from The Music Hall- by taking the L and ½/3 line back to Penn Station. It just so happened that I missed my train home by three minutes and it cost me an hour more before the next one came in. As I mentioned before, no transfers. Just a direct line from Penn Station back to Babylon where the double-decker cars awaited us. A nice surprise for me sitting in the seats above to contemplate my next major win: Sacred Bones’ 15th anniversary show. It could only get better.

Fifteen years ago from this month, a new concept was born. I purchased a 30GB iPod Classic through a ‘friend’ of mine at WUSB. Since then, I loaded all of my music into it and took it through many train rides. The iPod Classic has retired in favor of my iPhone SE. What once became a distraction has now been an auditioning process for future Omega WUSB shows and seasonal personal playlists. Nothing is off limits. Noise, backpacker, jazz, fusion, shoegaze, noise rock, post-punk, electronics, hardcore - everything. Everything I discover gets played in hopes of either being featured or forever a part of me. With a near endless plethora of outlets, mutuals, and other ways of obtaining music, there’s almost never a moment of silence outside of work or sleep.

Congotronics International: “Where’s The One”

MoE: “Beautiful Stranger”

Silent Servant: “Slasher”

Doc Hammer: “Commanche Crew Cut”

Visit0r: “God Of All Flesh”

People’s Choice, The: “Here We Go Again”

Ride: “1,000 Miles”

Thurston Moore: “The Station”

Sunrot: 21%

Joucous: “Rivers Pt. 1”

Exek: “ID’ed”

Legss: “Hyde Park Coroner”

Alice Glass: “Suffer And Swallow”

Totally Unicorn: “Daddy’s Stabby Surprise”

Aeges: “Who Are You”

Benny The Butcher & J. Cole: “Johnny P.’s Caddy”

Maneskin: “Moriro Da Re”

Broken Vow: “Expiation”

Exek: “(I’m After) Your Best Interest”

Smash Your Enemies: “Faithless”

Death Strider: “Cardinal Sin”

Letting Up Despite Great Faults: “Gemini”

Dead Leaf Echo: “Milk.Blue.Kisses (Foil In Motion)”

Offset: Spectacles, The: “Stomp”

Caparezza: “Eyes Wide Shut”

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fallimentiquotidiani · 3 months

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#Quanto #Mi #Piaceva #Silent Servant #💔#Spotify

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asvividasadream · 3 months

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Don't you know that I've been compromised, become the lies?

Won't be long, you know, son Once I'm gone, you'll know Won't be long, you know, son Once I'm gone, you'll know

#the soft moon #luis vasquez #become the lies #silent servant #juan mendez #rip #rip luis vasquez

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electronicka · 5 months

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Silent Servant - M-87

#Techno #Electro #Silent Servant

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saisons-en-enfer · 2 months

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#my theme song #silent servant #negative fascination #Bandcamp

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dustedmagazine · 2 months

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Sandwell District — Where Next? (The Point of Departure Recording Co.)

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It should have been a question. The transcontinental collective known as Sandwell District had been defunct and assumed shuttered for years, its fax machine disconnected, its Situationist International Tumblr since overtaken, when the sudden, unexpected announcement in early 2023 of a reissue effort for 2010’s celebrated Feed-Forward revived interest among the techno faithful. Its key members had been operating independently for long enough that the prospect of a return was sufficiently dim, yet here was proof of life — that the mark of anonymous, forward-thinking dance music from these corners hadn’t yet been buried. Half a year on from the reissue, another curious missive in the form of a compilation and the announcement of a Primavera Sound gig. Something was afoot. “Where next?” should’ve been appended directly with “Why now?”

Instead, it’s an elegy.

Juan Mendez (aka Silent Servant) died alongside fellow Los Angeles artist Luis Vasquez (The Soft Moon) and Mendez’s partner Simone Ling January 18th at the age of 46. Every review of Where Next? you read will address this, so it’s not necessary to belabor its circumstances or the outpouring of grief in its wake, but suffice to say that Mendez was beloved in L.A. and beyond for his work both as a producer — which he was still a master of, as his (ill-)fittingly titled In Memoriam EP out in November on Tresor confirms — and, crucially to Sandwell, its visual language. One of the key components of Sandwell District was its resolute anonymity; for years, if you were buying music off these guys, it was white label 12s with no identification save a stamp of the name and a fax number. Mendez was the one who gave the group that Situationist-inspired aesthetic, lent depth and a difficult but still discernible additional dimension that otherwise may not have been there. In retrospect, it feels like no accident that the zine, the music and the “moment” all collided at the same time; four protagonists with years of experience behind them peaking in simpatico is an exceedingly rare thing in the dance world, and to have it happen as it did was both carefully orchestrated and worth all the praise. Dusted was no exception.

Without Mendez, Sandwell District’s revival now feels precarious, uncomfortable, indeterminate. The remaining core members — Karl O’Connor (aka Regis), Dave Sumner (Function) and Peter Sutton (Female) — must return to and reassess the question of this very compilation, whose existence initially struck me as a cynical money grab but, more charitably and with more consideration, could also have been intended as a siren for something new en route, a way of reminding those who were there and a slap in the face to those who weren’t that this group wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill Tuesday night Berghain residents, this was something else.

And what was that? Take a listen: From 2002 to 2012, a dozen tracks assembled for this comp mine Sandwell District (the label) for a retrospective that graphically displays the production talent at work while still leaving something on the table. The credits here all say “Sandwell District &,” but it’s superfluous; regardless of liner notes, however, the music holds up and you know what you’re getting right from the off with Function’s “Reykjavik,” originally from 2007’s “Isolation” 12”. A wobbling, heavy low end and the lightest touch of hi-hat establish the pulse, with a twinkling alien transmission straight from a 1950s sci-fi movie offering counterweight. It’s the crashing handclap and subsequent, seemingly endless decay at 30 seconds that really wakes you up, though — like the uneasy ambiance, a familiar trope of the group’s oeuvre but one forever deployed with the deftest of touches.

“Reykjavik” is one of the two earliest songs from this compilation; the other, CH-Signal Laboratories (8003 Lucerne)’s “Hypnotica Scale (Original Mix),” preceded it in ‘07 and was originally titled simply as “Scale 1 (Original Mix).” It’s a rolling IDM number that feels more primitive, less cognizant than the productions that would follow in its use of space in your headphones. It’s also arguably the thinnest track here from one of the few names in Sandwell’s history that was never fully declassified but to my ears sounds like Sumner’s work.

As the most prominent faces of the collective (Mendez was reticent and Sutton all but invisible at the group’s peak), O’Connor and Sumner often seemed to be the ones with the heaviest hands in final output, too — consider Sumner did the final Fabric mixdown, for instance. The balance gets partly redressed here: O’Connor gets credit for two songs and two edits; Sumner gets five songs (six if you count CH-Signal); Mendez gets four; and Sutton gets a song and a remix under the Kalon alias, which he shared alongside Karl Meier, a fellow member of O’Connor’s Birmingham-based Downwards posse. It works to great effect; if you hadn’t known this was a compilation spanning half a decade and not a cohesive album from a single set of sessions, nothing gives it away. Both sequencing and pace are thoughtfully examined as the album obliterates your speakers at the proper volume and eventually rolls into the station after some 70 minutes with the only song that really lets you up for air, “Inter.”

Still, questions remain. Timing aside, foremost among them is why this comp starts with tracks from 2007 and not 2002; that’s scything half of the label’s existence out of the picture, and it’s not like “Untergang” or “Cally 2” are much the worse for wear at this remove. More pointedly, why are any singles missing at all? A double or triple LP either mixed to its constituents’ satisfaction or arranged chronologically would’ve been equally potent.

Another question: Wherefore art thou, Rrose? Like Meier, Yves de May and Bob Ostertag, Seth Horvitz existed on the outskirts of the District, only entering the frame in Feed-Forward’s wake — but it feels grossly unjust to neglect Rrose’s contributions in particular as the label wound down and its members moved on. What I said at the time of “Merchant of Salt” stands: Sandwell’s methods were perhaps best executed by an outsider who subsequently struck out into more experimental lands, extending the spirit of the collective’s reach beyond the vision of its original members; in a way, Rrose alone best answered the question posed by this compilation, which only makes their absence more conspicuous.

As with everything else swirling about Sandwell District, explanations will trickle out as glyphs or remain scant, incomplete, perhaps even contradictory. Maybe we won’t know for weeks or months; maybe we will never know. This is all part and parcel of the operation, which remains fun for the sake of intrigue but as listeners can only really leave us to trust our ears and hearts. Scrape away the calcified grayscale complexion, then, and you have what lies beyond the questions — you have the real answer, the one that matters most. Did I say elegy? Sorry, I meant panegyric. Long may it be heard.

Patrick Masterson

#sandwell district #where next? the point of departure recording co.#patrick masterson #albumreview #dusted magazine #silent servant #downwards #techno #regis #female #function #house #dub

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disease · 5 months

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SILENT SERVANT // M-00 [IN MEMORIAM EP, NOV 2023]

#RELEASE RADAR #audio #silent servant #EBM #dub techno #electro #in memoriam #tresor records #techno #electronic #music

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aleprouswitch · 3 months

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