Peter Silberman
NAME: Peter Silberman
GENRE: Indie rock / Dream pop
SOUNDS LIKE: The Antlers, Vagabon
LINKS: Spotify
The synagogue faded to black, and a silhouette emerged from the darkness, lingering next to the pew where we were seated. “That’s Peter Silberman,” I whispered to my brother in excitement. Silberman, known primarily as the frontman of the Antlers, an indie band based in Brooklyn that gained a large following after the release of the conceptual album Hospice, is touring the U.S. on a circuit of living room shows. The premise of these shows is exactly as it sounds: to play in personal spaces, to provide the quiet aura of intimacy that is all but forgotten in the age of amplification and stadiums.
I recognized Silberman even in the darkness. He had a thick beard and wore a beanie, carrying himself with the unmistakable poise of a musician not afraid of attention, but eager not to attract the unnecessary sort from adoring fans that fuels narcissism in so many other artists. He sat at the end of the pew we were in, listening as Tim Mislock, Silberman’s longtime friend, played his short set, replete with ambient guitar loops and overlocking rhythms that faded in and out like a lens unable to focus. Mislock’s amicable tone when talking to the audience contrasted the poignant yet beautiful theme of the album: the idea of slowly losing someone, inspired by his experience caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s. While different in subject matter, the thematic arc of Mislock’s performance nicely foreshadowed Silberman’s performance, and more generally, Silberman’s work as a solo artist.
In the Antlers’ breakthrough record, Hospice, Silberman uses the conceit of a hospice worker developing a romantic relationship with a cancer patient to symbolize his own emotionally abusive relationship. Similar themes pervade Burst Apart; on “Putting the Dog to Sleep,” Silberman croons that his significant other told him (or his persona) that “you can’t keep…/ Kicking yourself in the head/ Because you're kicking me too.” Familiars, the next Antlers album, provided emotional respite, but when on tour, Silberman experienced hearing loss and tinnitus. Silberman had created sense of his personal trauma through music, and the resulting loud performances transmuted this emotional anguish into physical agony and alienation.
After undergoing hearing loss, Silberman had to take a break from music. His work as a solo artist explores this hiatus and his subsequent return to his craft. In Impermanence, his new album, the alienation associated with losing a core aspect of one’s identity and the pain of tinnitus combine with Buddhist spiritual themes to form a contemplative and austere record, beautiful in its simplicity and soaring vocals. Just as Mislock’s set confronted the process of a loved one becoming a stranger, Silberman’s new work confronts the process of becoming a stranger to oneself. In “New York,” Silberman emphasizes the isolation he feels in his own city, how after losing his hearing “[he] was assailed by simple little sounds,” how he feels as if he had “never heard New York.” The “hammer clangs [and] sirens in the park”—the commonplace objects that that are now his antagonists—represent the estrangement Silberman feels in everyday life: he has lost his ability to make music, to perform, to even walk around in the city that is his home.
Unlike much of his work with the Antlers, however, Impermanence, is primarily a therapeutic record. In grappling with the challenges poised by hearing loss, Silberman finds solace in Buddhism. On the album’s first track, he wonders whether Karuna (the Buddhist concept of compassion) exists and whether it “can reach [him],” begging for its personification to “retrieve [him]” from the depths of his suffering. He also celebrates the notion of Ahimsa, or nonviolence, a constant in India’s spiritual traditions. What resonates most, though, is the title itself: impermanence. He extols the fleeting nature of experience, how even bodies are “depreciating vehicles” that “we start to lose” at the beginning of our lives. The message perfectly follows Mislock’s instrumental odyssey through the decay of the mind, and I wonder whether Mislock thinks the same thing when listening. The ultimate track on Impermanence, synonymous with the record’s title, slowly unwinds, a dissonant arrangement of chords overlaid with reverb. It epitomizes acceptance—finality—no words are necessary. It ends with a long period of silence, then static, a breath, and finally: silence once more.
Although lacking the emotional power of Hospice, Silberman’s first true effort as a solo artist achieved a sparse transcendence. Art is an interaction between artist and audience; and while the Antlers’ earlier work allows an audience member to contort their own emotional pain into a hospice ward and see beauty there, Impermanence allows the audience to heal alongside Silberman. More impressive than the album itself, though, is the tour Silberman has embarked on. An artist of his stature playing intimate sets for a few dozen people returns the intimacy between artist and audience that has been lost in our increasingly digitalized world. And Silberman did not disappoint. Sitting in a chair alongside Mislock, he played a stripped-down, angelic set, including not only his work as a solo artist but a wide array of material from the Antlers. I tried to focus on how each sound slipped in and out of consciousness, the impermanence of sensation.
After the show, Silberman manned his own merch booth, and my brother and I both went to buy posters as well as talk to him about the performance and Vipassana, a Buddhist meditation practice. We asked a fellow audience member to take a photo of the three of us. He took one shot and I didn’t look, but upon seeing the image in the car, I cursed. It seemed like a decent photo at first, but the lens hadn’t quite focused.
Karuna