With his last album, 2019’s World Order Music, Levon Vincent found a home for both the cavernous techno he’s best known for and the synth-based minimalism that has cropped up from time to time on his releases. But one track indicated a third, unforeseen direction that Vincent’s music might take. “She Likes to Wave at Passing Boats” consisted of little more than a rudimentary house beat and an incredible wall of string synths, yet Vincent highlighted it as a “surprise favorite” on the album, and no wonder. There’s always been something urban and dystopian about Vincent’s music, and “Passing Boats” presented Vincent as Vangelis, lighting up his subterranean sound world with a flash of Blade Runner blues. This sound suited him, and it made for one of the most powerful productions of his career.
Vincent’s fourth album, Silent Cities, expands on the basic idea of “Passing Boats” across 78 minutes of grim, architectural, often astonishingly beautiful music. Though titles like “Birds,” “Tigers,” and “Mother Amazon” suggest lushness and greenery, the album’s simple construction and sheer scale make it hard to picture anything other than urban vastness and desolation. Among electronic music’s evocations of cities, it’s comparable to Burial’s Untrue, 2814’s Birth of a New Day, Deepchord Presents Echospace’s Liumin, and DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues in its depth, scope, and imagination. You want to soar over this city, explore its hidden streets and back alleys, discover what every pinprick of light on the horizon belongs to.
While most sonic cityscapes suggest hustle and bustle, Silent Cities is minimal and streamlined in its construction, with tracks that move glacially over long run times. This isn’t a crowded thoroughfare but a sleepy industrial hinterland or empty parking garage. It’s easy to connect this sparseness to the depopulation of city streets during COVID-19 lockdown; in fact, though Vincent recorded the bulk of the album pre-pandemic, he finalized it in 2020 while looking out at the emptiness of his adopted home of Berlin. But while the cover features Berlin’s Fernsehturm TV tower, it also incorporates the Empire State Building from his hometown of New York. Like the city in Babe: Pig in the City, which cribs landmarks from all over the world in its skyline, Silent Cities is all cities, distilled into one grander and more mysterious than any that could exist in reality.