Silence Kit is a band from Moscow you might’ve never heard of. While it’s more or less clear on how the project came to be, how they self-published and gave away their first record for free, how they transitioned from a more neo-psychodelia and shoegaze influences with vocals to pure instrumental post-rock in later releases, it’s still not entirely clear if they have disbanded or not, for example. They have a Facebook group that got revived by one of the band founding members last year, but it’s mostly mentioning the new projects the people are involved in. They have a bancamp account that had all of their pre-2012 records set to the pay-what-you-want price, but it’s now changed to a set price instead. And I don’t know when it was changed or why. I do know, however, that they are a band you need to check out and buy the stuff that you like.
I’m genuinely glad to this day that a person I once was in touch with introduced me to them and several other bands I’ve never heard of before. She went to their shows a few times even, and had more unknown bands-savy friends and shared knowledge with me. I gave a listen to the first record by Silence Kit and was instantly hooked. I mean, Twenty Eight + Two is still one of my absolute favorite tracks in general:
The records that followed, more post-rock-ish ones, are probably a bit harder to get into if you’re not into listening records, instead of tracks. That is to say – if you love someone like, say, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and used to that kind of uninterrupted full record listening of pretty long tracks, you’ll probably enjoy even more tracks by Silence Kit than I do (I do like GYBE a lot, by the way, but I listen to them pretty rarely just due to how I usually prefer to listen music and how their format doesn’t usually fit that). But even if you are like me, there are shorter (aka 10-15 minutes) tracks that I’m absolutely in love with in their later career, like this one, for example:
The band has recorded several singles and one EP after The Great Red Spot (the track above is off it), but got increasingly more quiet as time went on. And, as already described at the start of the post, they seem to be at least on hiatus, if not disbanded. I haven’t given their newer projects a go yet, but I’ll definitely mention them in the future if I do like those. For now, though, I’d recommend checking out the bandcamp page and giving Silence Kit records a listen. They’re definitely worth checking out.
P.S. Oh and there are other bands of the same name, but they are completely unrelated.