The Brussels duo who turned a Dada noise project into one of Belgium's most durable and hard-to-place electronic acts, filed here as the bridge between Sub Rosa and Ant-Zen.
Silk Saw is the Brussels electronic duo of Marc Medea and Gabriel Séverin, filed by the Bureau at Tier III. The pair began in 1989 as Jardin d'Usure, a post-Dada project of art brut, musique concrète and electronics, whose album Musique du garrot et de la ferraille arrived in 1994 on Sub Rosa. By the pair's own account, Silk Saw came about when the Sub Rosa staff asked them to put the same ideas into a more direct, beat-led form; the result was a new project rather than a softening, with the conceptual work, as they put it, kept between the lines.
The début Come Freely, Go Safely in 1996 was received as a landmark of the then-young illbient field, built from massive sub-bass and slow-motion crush. Over a long run the duo broadened well past that, taking in industrial techno, electroacoustic composition and the complex granular and morphing synthesis of their later records, while keeping a fascination with organic, physical sound. The work has stayed deliberately hard to place.
The reason the Bureau files them is the path between two of its labels. When the third album grew too harsh for Sub Rosa, the duo took it to Ant-Zen, the German rhythmic-noise and industrial imprint, before later returning to Sub Rosa. Few acts sit so cleanly across both catalogues, which makes Silk Saw a useful connector node as much as a body of work.
The Bureau's reading. Silk Saw is filed at Tier III as a long-running, respected Belgian experimental duo and as the documented bridge between the Sub Rosa and Ant-Zen catalogues.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene