Sil Muir — Self Titled

Sil Muir is a guitar-based ambient/drone collaborative project of Andrea Ferraris and Andrea Marutti.  Ferraris is responsible for the guitars and Marutti responsible for the processing of the sounds.

It’s a fairly competent album built around very slow moving ambient drones. It sounds slightly different to a lot of drone work albums as the main instrument here is guitar rather than keyboards. So you get moments where you can hear that it’s being played on a string instrument. A lot of the main drone sounds though seem to be generated by something other than a plectrum vibrating the strings which gives it, it’s more drone like nature.  My main concern with this album is that is seems to be missing something. A lot of it seems like it’s a backing track and that it’s waiting for something else to be added on to it. The drones themselves are so slow moving and subtle that it could all very easily just get put on as background music and forgotten about. On the odd occasion that it gets a bit more adventurous and the guitar sounds a bit more alive (such as about 2 thirds of the way through track two or the last half of track 4 (where it starts to almost sound like Main)) then it begins to feel like a good release. But ultimately these moments are too few and far between and there isn’t enough there to grab your attention. I realise that drone works are very slow moving and little changing but you have to have a sound that is interesting to the ear to start with and that benefits from repetition and these 4 tracks need some work in that department.