Silence
Ma Non Troppo

Studio-Album

If you believe silence and music don’t go together, you haven’t heard of SILENCE.SILENCE, that’s the two Slovenians Boris Benko and Primoz Hladnik. Their band is part of a small circle of musicians which formed in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana’s underground scene during the last years. Until that point, electronic music was basically non-existant in Slovenia. In 1994, comic artist Benko and his friend Primoz, who came from classical piano tuition, decided to fill the void.

As Slovenia is a small tradition-conscious country, the two unconventional musicians soon discovered that the local music scene hadn´t exactly been waiting for them. On the opposite: From their very first performances on the band was confronted with massive displeasure at their purely electronic arrangements. To silence the upset audience, the band placed an electric guitarist on stage, who, unplugged, just pretended to play. Nevertheless, such pranks were not really what the two musicians would be forever content with.

Lacking the necessary means of production, to produce an album seemed future dreams, so Benko and Primoz mainly concentrated on songwriting. When SILENCE all the sudden were asked to contribute to a Slovenian sampler, consisting of Elvis Presley covers, they had no idea that exactly this would give them international attention. Their curious version of “The girl of my best friend” focused attention on them and finally led to cooperation with Chrom Records.

Produced by Peter Penko (April Nine, Coptic Rain, Laibach), the debut album “Ma Non Troppo” is the first fruit of this cooperation. Held in cool club-tempo, it presents a choice of early material and brandnew songs. And the Slovenians don’t shy away from playing around with the zeitgeist: sounds of the Nineties are used as well as psychedelic analoguesounds meet dancefloor elements. Though being catchy, their music is much too peculiar to be nice. What SILENCE create is a crossover of modern club culture.

What finally makes SILENCE special is not only their richness of ideas and musical talent, they also have their own unique humour, either sarcastic or charming, depending on your point of view. Anyway, a welcome contrast to the slick monotony of the pop scene!