Until Silence marked a monumental shift for Roll The Dice, in both sonics and psychogeography.

Until Silence opens with the tense piano reverberations of ‘Blood In Blood Out’; the two protagonists have escaped from the mundane grind of the factory floor, landing in a still more perilous situation. They find themselves in the midst of great societal turmoil, with war erupting all around them.

In order to capture that landscape, “we wanted to push the music to extremes,” reveals Mannerfelt. “To make it both harder and darker, but more romantic and emotional at the same time.” To that end the duo enlisted Erik Arvinder to work on string arrangements for several of Until Silence’s tracks, which were then recorded with a 26-piece ensemble. Arvinder’s arrangements further heighten the natural cycles of tension and release that have always been cornerstones of the Roll The Dice sound. During the album’s harshest moments, they sharpen every piano note and rhythmic sub-bass throb so the music cuts jagged from the speakers, while during quieter phases they carve open huge spaces within the music.

Matching their use of orchestral instrumentation, Until Silence also finds Pardon and Mannerfelt pushing their own compositional methods further into uncharted territory. The influence of the duo’s individual projects on the collective sound of Roll The Dice has always been tangible. Pardon, who works as a composer for film and TV, has a natural flair for evocative composition and narrative arc, while Mannerfelt – who has toured as part of Fever Ray and produced techno as The Subliminal Kid – is a remarkably skilled sculptor of electronic sound and bass tones. Mannerfelt’s recent solo explorations under his own name, including the stark and brutalist electronics of his Lines Describing Circles album, have clearly fed their own energy back into Roll The Dice – with Until Silence, they take the electronic core of their sound into harsher and more heavily processed textural domains.

This greater dynamic range enables them to summon up a complex tangle of sensations, everything from elation to simmering dread, mirroring the conflicted feelings of humans at the mercy of forces beyond their control. “It’s the push and pull of being in the middle of something massive, chaotic and brutal, mixed with feelings of loss and total resignation,” says Mannerfelt. “We wanted to try and portray something like a single human being’s very personal experiences within something of epic and devastating proportions.” With that in mind, continues Pardon, “the idea of the ‘war’ has a very symbolic value, in trying to capture these different emotions, but of course the album is not about a war per se. I mean, everyday life can be like war sometimes; we wanted to capture that somehow.”

Limited edition double vinyl LP + CD – BAY 89V

CD in 6-panel digipak – BAY 89CD

BAY 89E