#psilb

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Impermanence will be released February 24th 2017, on Anti- & Transgressive.

You can pre-order it here.

You can hear the album’s first piece, “Karuna” here, courtesy of NPR.

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Karuna translates as “compassion”, but the song speaks to its absence, calling out to a kindness just out of earshot.

It’s my disoriented plea for inaudible protection from the audibly merciless,

My vertigo at the cliff of unprecedented change, bracing for suffering in light of receding hope.

“Karuna” is my voice, inundated with emptiness, reiterating compassion,

Throwing a coin down a deep well, waiting for a reassuring splash to interrupt an alarmingly long fall.

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Written & performed by Peter Silberman

Featuring Nicholas Principe on percussion & Peter Tullio practicing Ujjayi breath

Produced by Peter Silberman & Nicholas Principe

Engineered by Nicholas Principe at People Teeth in Saugerties, NY

Mixed by Andrew Dunn

Mastered by Joe Lambert

Artwork by Zan Goodman & Justin Hollar

Listen here.

Alan Watts wrote, “The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.”

Like nearly everyone I know, I contend with this daily - to accept the transitory and experience shifting tectonic plates as passing clouds. I’ve dedicated much of the last few years’ creative effort to embracing this unflinching force of nature. Change is a heartbeat, evidencing life.

And so "Slips Away" is my preliminary meditation on this idea. The piece was written and recorded earlier this fall, largely in a secluded cabin upstate, surrounded by talkative crickets and tall old trees losing leaves.  

I now recognize a bit of a paradox in attempting to capture transience in song, freezing a passing moment in space and time, preserving impermanence… so the best I can reconcile this is to think of Slips Away as a most basic reminder.

Written & performed by Peter Silberman

Recorded September 2016 at Watcher’s Woods in Spring Glen, NY and People Teeth in Saugerties, NY

Engineered by Peter Silberman and Nicholas Principe

Mixed by Andrew Dunn

Transcendless Summer is an ambient instrumental piece written and recorded over the course of one afternoon, back in August of 2013.

You can listen to it here. You can download it here. People Teeth made a limited run of cassettes. You can order yours here.

Some context...

I’d been spending the better part of that summer in Portland, OR, during a pause midway through the Brooklyn-based Familiars sessions. One evening, as an extension of a thought-experiment, Nicholas Principe match-made engineer Tim Shrout and me, and we chose a date to track something.

Biking across town to the session a few days later, I had no agenda. When I encountered the studio’s vivid arsenal of vintage gear, I didn’t have any concrete ideas. And when Tim (who had so generously donated his time, space, and expertise) asked me what I wanted to do, I didn’t really have an answer. I only hoped to liberate the pent-up potential energy of the moment.  

Listening to its twenty minutes now, I experience a fleeting era distilled into a single day. I hear the first few miles of a long ride, hands released from handlebars’ grip, arms splayed out to the sides, coasting with abandon, rounding a blind corner without worry for what might slam into me beyond the immediately visible.

In the three years since Transcendless Summer’s spontaneous birth, the color’s bled and faded some, filled in with a wiser vibrance only time could provide. These tracks have felt three summers melt away, relearning the same cruelty each year: that summer’s start initiates a countdown to its end, that the first day’s light stretches infinitely outward before shrinking back from a dilating night.

Written & performed by Peter Silberman

Engineered by Tim Shrout at Jalopy in Portland, OR

Mixed & mastered by Andrew Dunn in Brooklyn, NY

Cover photograph by Peter Silberman

Additional 2013 photography by Hana Tajima