Violet Nox makes music like they’re patching radio transmissions from a planet that shouldn’t exist. Their fascinating new record, Silvae, hums with frequencies that feel like they’ve been left out in the cosmic rain too long: warped, warm, and weird. There’s a pulse throughout the album that beats beneath bark, under soil, where roots gossip with ghosts and the air tastes of ozone and wet stone.
You can hear Dez DeCarlo and Andrew Abrahamson soldering starlight into rhythm, machines chattering like they’ve just discovered prayer. Noell Dorsey’s exquisite, arrives as the human signal in the static, calling out to something nameless, half in love, half in orbit.
The trio makes a racket that feels at once alien and familiar, like hearing your own reflection talk back. Jazz phantoms and motorik blips alike drift through the mix; afro percussion patterns curl around synthesized vines. The beat is never in a hurry – it glides, it drifts, it waits for you to catch up. There’s no cheap climax here, no sugar-rush dopamine drop. This is an album that asks you to listen as if you’re eavesdropping on the Earth itself.
The trance Violet Nox slips into feels almost biological: alive, breathing, pulsing with hidden instinct. When they drift toward dub, time itself seems to stretch and exhale. There’s a pagan futurism at work here, a faith in the notion that the future and the past are still tangled together, kissing in some secret field just beyond our hearing. With vocals that echo the spectral grace of Lisa Gerrard, the poise of Annie Lennox, and the cool fire of Claudia Brücken, Silvae conjures forests and satellites, ancient myths and cosmic frequencies…too much beauty for a single breath. Traces of Bruce Haack’s wild invention and Brian Dewan’s eccentric electronic spirit shimmer through, giving the record a strange, synesthetic glow that words can barely contain. Silvae is an attempt to build a new cathedral out of feedback and fern spores – The Wicker Man by way of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Silvae is out now via Somewherecold Records, a label that seems to collect daydreams disguised as albums. But this one feels like an invocation, so spin it when the city’s asleep. Let it breathe through your speakers like mist through a graveyard fence. If you listen close enough, you might just catch the sound of galaxies growing moss, of lost lovers orbiting the same frequency.
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