The magic happened in fragments: Robert Wyatt's plaintive vocals drifting through the English countryside at Delfina's Farm in Wiltshire, where Chris Spedding's guitar wrapped around his phrases like mist. Across the Atlantic, Carla Bley's piano and Ron McClure's bass carved out stark, beautiful spaces in New York's Grog Kill Studio. Later, Kevin Coyne would add his raw, emotional voice in Oxfordshire, with final strings weaving everything together back at Grog Kill that November.
What emerged was something entirely new - a work that blurred the lines between avant-garde jazz and art song, between New York cool and Canterbury melancholy. Wyatt's fragile delivery on tracks like "Silence I" brought an unexpected humanity to Mantler's abstract compositions, while Spedding's guitar work added textures no pure jazz ensemble could replicate.
This WATT edition (distributed through ECM but bearing all the experimental daring of Bley's label) stands apart from Mantler's earlier work. Where the original Silence recordings dealt in icy perfection, this 1977 version breathes - sometimes raggedly, always beautifully. It's a time capsule of a moment when jazz, prog, and art rock weren't separate worlds but parts of the same musical conversation.
"The most haunting collision of jazz discipline and rock spontaneity since Miles plugged in" - Melody Maker, 1978
