Exotic Metals Ltd. is the third Silverlake album.
The album title reflects the West Midlands origins of the band, as well as their own quest.

Exotic Metals Ltd. album is available here.
X (I should be digging) video is available here.
Request copy for broadcast or review here.
Download album cover – right click image above and 'Save as'.
Download photos and Silverlake logo – right click images below and 'Save as'.

About the album

 'We’ve been doing what we do, meeting in the studio, playing around in time. We’re not recording 14 tracks and choosing 9 for an album. We’re listening to everything we have and choosing tracks that are the right tracks for now.

‘Twist’ was the very first Silverlake song, which I brought along to work on years ago. I was heart-broken when I wrote it and still so when we were first working on it. As always, Silverlake was part musical exploration, part art and part therapy. We were working in a building I’d once lived in during happier times. It was a bit of a sanctuary for us all. But we’re all a bit stronger now, capable of making a bit of ‘Tower of Sunshine’ self-energising, power surging NOISEANDWORDS, racing up those steps to fire up the lantern, leaving the negative voices down below...

Tough and angry feels right. Sally-Ann is thinking back on digging in the mud for gold. It’s a summer evening and we’ve found a tiny copse of woodland behind a row of houses. People are out in the back yards having a drink. Our lights make a warm pool in the darkness, a sharp contrast to the inky black woods. The audio playback doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s radar and Sally-Ann turns in an amazing performance for the ‘X’ video. A white ghost cat walks calmly through the set like a goddess. It’s a good omen.

We’re surrounded by ‘metal bashers’ here. The studio is in the middle of houses and factories smashing out garden furniture, BMW parts and unbelievably intricate and precise high-tech bits for aircraft. These people are smart, tough and hard-working, but strangely tender and curious about folk like us doing arty stuff. The ‘X’ factory is just five minutes away. It has a sound of its own, a percussive track made, it turns out, by steel wire being spat out from a massive antique iron machine. It’s a wonderful, calm, peaceful, secret place to be while we scoot a factory truck around between the lathes and cages and capture a golden, ethereal Egyptianate apparition as best we can on camera. What is the saying? Lightning in a bottle or something? Anyway, we’re trying to capture it all, to convert otherworldly-ness into digital bytes...'

FACTS

1. ‘X (I should be digging)’ starts with a re-creation of a half-remembered tape-loop from a Tate St. Ives exhibition ‘If Everybody Had An Ocean’.

2. When shooting woodland video, we discovered that in the hands of Sally-Ann Parker, a rusty shovel can inflict serious damage on others.

3. In alchemy, chrysopoeia is the term for the mythical transformation of base metal, like lead, into gold.

4. Fender Twin vibrato, Epiphone Sheraton II and Fender Precision Bass and big BBC strings combine to create the soundscape for ‘X (I should be digging)’.

Silverlake is:

Sally-Ann Parker – vocals
Tony Sherrard – bass & programming
Robin R. Dallaway – guitar & keyboards