Does someone still write the news anymore? Or, do the sites and TV stations just shuffle through old articles and reports and just change pictures and names? All these words that once had so much power just feel like they’ve been drained of it. We’re so trained to recognise them that, usually, one picture will be enough to get our brains to recite what we’ve heard a million times before.
Artists tend to feel these kinds of things more acutely. Many of them would like to hack off some of the words, to get us all to speak less, to teach us to live with silence. Gavriel Micah has a solution, or a way of easing you into it. The songs found on the EP “Between The Letters” are the last sounds that you hear before everything’s covered in beautiful, plentiful silence.
An endless number of movies can start playing in your head anytime. But will the projector even be switched on without a proper soundtrack? Think of the title track and the EP’s opener as a piece of music that helps complete the cinematic experience.
Or, think of “Saffron,” a Middle-Eastern jazz piece featuring Nick Daniels, as your meditation task for the day. You can follow each lead line, or the rhythms like a child traces back a piece of colored yarn.
Meanwhile, the repetitive bass grooves of “The Fire Between Us” suggest places where the mind can travel. The music glides over sand dunes and into ancient cities. It takes only a moment for the traveller to make the route back.
There’s no need for new words or old news clippings. What’s this world without a bit of mystery? And what’s a mystery if every part of it is described in its finest details?
Where does it all leave us? The final track on the EP, “Layla ve’Or”, uses silence as an instrument that’s as important as the trumpet or the electric bass. And that silence has plenty to say for those who will listen closely. What do words have to do with it, and how could they possibly tell more?
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