Physical Silence by Cody Yantis

To hear the Denver-based artist, Cody Yantis, explain it, Physical Silence is the solo album that he had always hoped to make when he initially started recording music over 20 years ago. Over that time span - the past decade in particular - Yantis has been honing his craft in various solo and collaborative projects that have appeared on notable artist-run imprints such as Full Spectrum, Patient Sounds, Flaming Pines, and Digitalis Ltd. Also noteworthy is Yantis’ work in the group Tilth, who provided the impetus for our very own Round Bale Recordings label to launch back in 2015 with their album Country Music being our inaugural release, a relationship that continues to this day with their forthcoming album Rock Music due out on the label in the coming months.

Through his divergent musical and other artistic pursuits, Yantis has broadened his instrumental prowess and palette well beyond the resonant electric guitar work that he is perhaps best known for and has further refined his skills as a composer. He has now arrived with Physical Silence, an album that is filled with concise yet beautifully evocative instrumental miniatures and arguably Yantis’ most accomplished solo release to date. The sounds and arrangements on Physical Silence can be situated comfortably alongside works by artists such as Loren Mazzacane Connors, Steven R. Smith, or some of the more meditative passages of Francis Plagne’s recent output.

In the album notes, Yantis shares that the brevity of the pieces heard on Physical Silence were influenced by two key factors that informed his musical practice while recording: “The album and song titles are phrases from The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. This text also served as inspiration for the content and short format of these pieces, many of which first took shape as sonic responses to the hand-drawn postcards I received throughout the Covid-19 lockdown (2020-2021) from the sculptor and visual artist, Charles Parson.”

Like Pessoa’s writing in The Book of Disquiet, Yantis has created in Physical Silence an album that is poignantly reflective, a work of discrete melodic and tonal parts that form one poetically rich whole.

--David Perron, Round Bale Recordings / Free Form Freakout podcast

Instrumental, improvisational, and often string-based, the works of Cody Yantis tend to reside in the margins between tonality and noise. Experiences and ideas of environment provide consistent motivations as Yantis explores what David Teague has called "people suiting posture to place." A member of Saguache and Tilth, he also writes and works in visual media.

codyyantis.com