In textile art, when two bolts of silk are dampened and pressed together, a wavy, water-like pattern emerges known as moiré. This is because the gridded threads of one piece of fabric inevitably misalign with the other, such that the repeated differences in positive and negative space (the threads and the pockets of air between them) give rise to something entirely new. As a kind of illusion, moiré shows up everywhere: in physics, in graphics, and, as with The Closest Thing to Silence, in music.The Closest Thing to Silence is a collaboration between the seasoned French ambient composer Ariel Kalma and L.A.-based experimental duo Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer. The trio first teamed up in 2022, when Kalma tapped Chiu and Honer to work on a session for BBC 3’s experimental Late Junction series. They hit it off and then went on to create The Closest Thing to Silence, with Honer on viola, Kalma on woodwinds, Chiu on drum machine/samplers, and all three contributing synth work. Based on improvisation and collage, the album collates superimposed lines and images, found sound, and space in ways that feel simultaneously organic yet precise.
On the title track, the trio creates a Penrose staircase of ascending and descending patterns. Over sustained saxophone tones, a synth motif climbs gently upward before falling back and starting over again. Textured cabasa keeps time alongside a pendular staccato figure that eventually loops back on itself and begins to phase shift. Hypnotic, offset rhythmic phrases like this recur throughout the album. “Écoute Au Loin,” for instance, displaces one sax line against another in a way that recalls the pulsing interference patterns of Terry Riley’s “In C.” Midway through, everything but a dotted figure drops out, and Kalma’s voice enters in three overlapping waves, repeating, “So I’m going to play today/And see/If you are interested/To make layers.”
Layering and exploration are perhaps the animating forces behind the entire project. This is especially clear in “Dizzy Ditty,” which recalls Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia, or a pleasant mushroom trip through an 8-bit forest. A dotted, marimba-like synth totters about; flutes trill and meander like birdsong; strings vibrate like light. It is at once pointillistic and impressionistic. Similarly, “Stay Centered” sounds like it could be an educational ’90s VHS tape about plant cell biology. Little tintinnabulations bookend the track as if announcing the beginning and end of a stretch of active synth mitosis. “New Air,” by contrast, plays less in the light and more in the shadows. Raindrop sounds and fuzzy atmospherics recall the eléctrica selvática music of artists like Chancha Via Circuito and Nicola Cruz.
In many ways, The Closest Thing to Silence is an exercise in the manipulation of breath and space as meditation. The title itself comes from Kalma’s view of music: “Music, for me, is the closest thing to silence. Once you take the words out, once you take the mind out, and you leave everything inside…that is music.” The instincts and considered calculations of Kalma, Chiu, and Honer converge on the record, creating a separate, fourth “inside.” It is a four-dimensional space—one in which old recordings Kalma made in the ’70s (like the drum machine and synth on “Stack Attack”) meet Honer’s present-day improvisations, where a field recording Chiu made in a New York café scores a voice note Kalma made at home in Australia. The fluid yet methodical collapsing, stacking, and stretching of these spaces and silences are what define this record.
Visually, this can be seen in Chiu’s video animation for “A Treasure Chest.” Around two-thirds of the way through, three striped circles of different sizes rotate one on top of another. As they spin at different speeds and in different directions, previously hidden shapes emerge. Thickened lines coalesce and dissipate; dark and light geometric shapes tessellate outward. Layered misalignments create large-scale optical illusions that would otherwise lay dormant—were it not for the three figures animating it.
