Impermanence was the first full length, solo effort from Peter Silberman. Acclaimed for his work with The Antlers, this album saw Silberman navigate down a road of personal healing as he uses music to illustrate the transitory nature of peace and pain. In what might be his most reflective body of work yet, Impermanence documents the slow yet crucial journey of Silberman re-entering his life with a hearing impairment.
In effort to find peace and quiet and to allow his hearing to begin healing, Silberman’s move from Brooklyn to upstate New York was the beginning of Impermanence. Whisper-singing and gentle strums on a nylon-string acoustic guitar were all that was bearable for Silberman, and the final product doesn’t veer far from this original framework. The six tracks on the album are supremely minimal and spars, both instrumentally and lyrically.
Although this album documents a crucially painful experience (especially for a musician), Impermanence also carries an emotional lightness not often heard on The Antlers’ material in the past. Tracks “Karuna” and “Ahmisa” translate to “compassion” and “non-killing” in eastern philosophy principles, while “Impermanence” is one of the three elements of existence in Buddhism. Silberman lulls us into these stretched out, elongated arrangements that are as sombre as they are hopeful.
“New York”, one of the official singles and album standout captures Silberman’s suffering eloquently: “When my nerve wore down/I was assailed by simple little sounds/hammer clangs, sirens in the park/like I never heard New York.” We learn Silberman considers sound in an entirely new way, every note is considered and the pauses in-between are as important as the noise actually made. This made for an incredibly patient album, especially closing track “Impermanence”- an instrumental that utilised a generous degree of low amp buzz and seconds at a time of white noise.
The 8-minute epic “Gone Beyond” is another standout and perhaps the most multifaceted and cathartic track on the album. Beginning with gentle chanting and gingerly-strum guitar, the last section swiftly plummets into a stoned jazz riff, with engineer and mixer Nicholas Principe helping out in the quartet for the doo-wop vocals. A necessary and relieving change of style that executes elegantly.
Although the instrumentation on this album is severely limited and Silberman’s vocal performance is subtle, it succeeds as a collection of songs to heal. The therapy is in the echoing guitar, the gentle moans, and most crucially the silence. “Impermanence” means a state of transition, the passing nature of all things. In rediscovering the nature of sound, Silberman considers the lack of permanence in suffering, and how this can aid all of our healing processes.
Review Score: 7 out of 10.
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