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Silver Ray.
Until now the impressionistic albums ‘This Is Silver Ray’ and ‘New Love’ have been the only way in which we have been able to appreciate the Melbournian three-piece Silver Ray. Thankfully the Fringe’s Garden of Unearthly Delights has secured a one off performance by these critically acclaimed but elusive instrumentalists.
I was curious though if Silver Ray found it hard to translate the band’s exhilarating sonic enormity into a live context using only guitars, drums and keyboards.
"It’s no problem at all," asserted guitarist Cam Butler, having no qualms about achieving such a feat in front of an audience. "In fact those records are just how the band sounds. There are hardly any overdubs on those records. It is how we blend as a band that gives the illusion of size. In some ways I don’t know how it happens though, it’s just how we are. In fact with our next album we have even decided to do it all in just one take. That’s our plan. Straight off, no overdubs - nothing."
It looks as though an Adelaide audience might be lucky enough to hear some of this new material. "Yes, we are going to try out a couple of new things at the Adelaide show. We actually haven’t been to Adelaide before though so it will give us a chance to play a lot of our old stuff as well which is great."
I was curious as to how much changes when the song is performed in a live context and how much is improvised? "Well, whenever we play live it is always different to what we record," Butler explains. "Every gig is totally different. I hate to use this term but in some ways we are like a ‘jazz’ band in which we develop a theme at the beginning and the music spirals off from that."
Butler certainly has a point: if you strip away that word’s cultural tags and deconstruct it to its notions of improvisation, evocation of mood and freedom within structure in some funny way Silver Ray are a jazz band. They don’t sound like a jazz band though; they have much more in common with The Dirty Three musically than the likes of John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins. "That is very true. It doesn’t interest any one in the band playing in that way," states Butler "I feel the way we improvise has to contribute to the end product which of course is the song." For Silver Ray the improvisation definitely comes from the colours of musical collaboration rather than virtuoso soloing.
Finally I asked Butler how he (and his bandmates) originally settled on instrumental music. "I personally find music can express more of a range of emotions without a voice. You can express unnameable things that words can never articulate - strange moods that you can’t quite put your finger on. For the three of us capturing that seems to come very naturally for some reason. It also gives us a hell of a lot of room to create musically."
Jeremy Green
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Silver Ray play one show only on Fri 27 Feb at the Regal.
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