Stay Tuned

The thing about 'fringe' bands (and that term is used with the utmost respect) is, due to their extremely DIY, often experimental nature, audio documentation is frequently sparse, limited, or released on cassette for some reason. And for five years Silver Screens had fallen into that trap, leaving scant evidence of their existence around for existing and prospective fans to find. But they've been working hard of late to change that. “We've been doing a fair bit of recording, so that's keeping us busy,” Fitzpatrick says. “We're doing that limited release-type thing, and that's kind of related to that. We've been just doing bulk recordings for the past few months, so we're trying to stagger out the release when we can. We've got five of those recordings on [Special Request], but... I think that clocks in at over an hour, and we've got a bunch more recordings as well that we're going to do a few other releases with.”

Doing things at their own pace is inherent in Silver Screens' dynamic, originally angling themselves as a drone/psych trio. “We've been plugging away for about five years now, and that was the idea behind how it all started, but I guess it's kind of changed a lot, beat-wise, just with Danny [Ford] working his samples and synths, so it's definitely incorporated a few more aspects now. In our case, it started off just stretching out jams for as long as we could. Trying to get gigs, we'd just use [the drone tag] as a bit of a cover, so we were kind of approaching it from the duration aspect. Just maintaining the rhythm or the groove and stretching that out for a gig.”

Although their songs have retained their jam-based roots over time, Fitzpatrick says they're much tighter compositions these days. “Now we're reducing it a lot more, so it'll be kind of poppy, five-to-ten minutes or something, but originally it was always 15-plus, 20-plus. We launch them off different samples or beats that Danny will come up with, so there's always that kind of background, and we'll have set structures that you use for each song, so it has that recurring thing but we keep it as improvisational as we can [work] within those settings.”

With added sensory depth in the form of traditional oil projection-inspired splashes of colour and the occasional black-and-white noir film backing up their expansive arrangements, the unpredictable video and soundscapes amount to a thoroughly intriguing proposition. And even if you can't make a show, you should at least have an easier time finding more songs. “We'll do some more recordings and try and get as many shows as we can. It's always been the approach we've had, but I guess we've been documenting things a lot more recently.”