Silent 山岡晃

Silent Hill Sounds Box is a collection of the Silent Hill game soundtracks.
Strings played at the bridge in streaking glissandi. Atonal clusters, filled in down to quarter-tones. Thundering piano chords. And what horror score is complete without the standard tool of surprise, the orchestra hit? These elements, in part derived from the early work of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, which was itself featured prominently by Stanley Kubrick in The Shining, have become staples of horror scoring. While some of these elements appear in Akira Yamaoka's scores for the Silent Hill series, he focuses more on slowly building and maintaining an unsettling atmosphere than on startling the audience, much like the games themselves. The music is not only atypical as game music, but also atypical as horror music, and while it manifests elements of various genres such as trip-hop, industrial, and hard rock from time to time…

Following the chamber music album “leggiero, pesante”, the orchestral “Metamusik/Postludium”, and the “Requiem for Larissa”, ECM New Series is pleased to present a most remarkable recording of Valentin Silvestrov’s “Stille Lieder”, a song cycle of great importance in the development and perception of the Ukrainian composer’s work, in a double album that also includes the premiere recording of his “Four Songs after Osip Mandelstam”.“We may feel we have always known these songs,” writes Paul Griffiths in the liner notes to the “Silent Songs”, “and in a sense we have.