Sileni – Long Forgotten Bowers (Digital Album – Eight Tower Records)
Genre/Influences: Dark-ambient, dark-cinematographic.
Background/Info: Sileni is a Portuguese solo-project driven by Valter Abreu. After two previously released albums he joined hands with Eight Tower Records for an album Influenced by the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Andrej Tarkovskij.
Content: The work takes off with overwhelming, dark-ambient sound waves. There’s a perfect twist between ambient and pure cinematographic passages. A few spoken samplings are sometimes accentuating the music. There also is something sensitive running through the work, which is characterized by a kind of violin sounds. The album features 9 cuts, which are crescendo reaching their ultimate state of angst at “Dimmed Memory”.
+ + + : This album has something fascinating because of its diversity. Valter Abreu is masterfully mixing dark-ambient and cinematic atmospheres together. The work is getting a strong visual appeal accentuated by visions of terror and also abandoned places. It’s a nihilistic universe with emotional passages. The composition reveals a great sonic canvas where field recordings (and/or samplings) have been meticulously merged with the global atmosphere.
– – – : After “Dimmed Memory”, which is a truly climax the few cuts left can’t create a similar feeling of fright and loneliness.
Conclusion: This work let me discover an interesting project, which is naturally switching ambient and cinematographic music together.
Best songs: “Dimmed Memory”, “Malformed Creation”, “Surpassed”.
Rate: (7½).
Artist: www.facebook.com/valter.abr
Label: www.facebook.com/eighthtowerrecords
About Sileni
Sileni is the dark experimental project of Portuguese sound designer and media composer Valter Abreu, started around 2014-2015 as a personal exploration of sound design, custom synthesizers and sampling after Abreu hit a creative block in his alternative rock/metal project Radiant Thought.
A self-titled debut album followed independently on Bandcamp in October 2016, later reissued in January 2018 by the now-defunct netlabel Cephalopagus Records. A second album, “Thereafter”, came in December 2018, moving the sound toward a more ambient direction. Sileni then joined Italy’s Eight Tower Records, part of Raffaele Pezzella’s Unexplained Sounds Group, for the third album, “Long-Forgotten Bowers”, released in March 2019 and reviewed here.
Sileni went on to release a fourth album, “All Heavens Rejoice” (2020, Noctivagant Collective), before compiling later compilation contributions into the 2025 album “The Lost Themes” on its own Bandcamp imprint.
Support Side-Line
More people read Side-Line than ever, and there is still no paywall and no advertising. Readers pay for it instead - from $5 a month.
Why we ask
Advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. Unlike many news organisations we have not put up a paywall, and we refuse to add annoying advertising, so we need to ask for your help. Side-Line’s independent journalism takes time, money and hard work to produce, and we do it to push the artists we like, who are equally fighting to survive.
Handled by PayPal.
I have been working for over 30 years with Side-line as the main reviewer. My taste is eclectic, uncoventional and I prefer to look for the pearls, even if the bands are completely unknown, thus staying loyal to the Side-Line philosophy of nurturing new talents.
