LP version. Includes an inner sleeve and a download code. Edition of 500. "With his latest record, Notwist singer and guitar player, film soundtracker and Alien Transistor label boss Markus Acher, aka Rayon, offers up a sparse, intoxicating album of instrumentals. As the name suggests, the spaces between notes here are treated with as much gravity as the notes themselves - arpeggios spiraling upwards, conflicting yet interlocking in a dizzying overlap of time signatures. An obvious reference point is Javanese gamelan, with its ensemble of hand-beaten metallophones and bamboo flutes, pulling in all directions at once and yet, like a starling murmur, maintaining shape as one, rippling whole. Eschewing electronic equipment, the title track sees marimbaphone, piano and vibraphone appearing to mimic a delay pedal, giving the effect of rain falling with odd regiment into a singing bowl. Melancholic but weirdly uplifting arrangements surface throughout the record, punctuated by mossy synth hums and subterranean rustling. Like much of Rayon's work, A Beat Of Silence beams across like a soundtrack for some forgotten documentary: dusty archive footage of cities being built and eroded in time-lapse seeming to flicker across the screen. Closing tracks "To the Quiet", a tentative, almost impossibly fragile ballad, and "Kona", a stretched and mangled wash of orchestral drone akin to Plinth or Edmund Finnis, leave the listener fully enveloped, as this incredibly sensitive work draws to a close." --Richard Greenan (Kit Records, Devon Loch) Personnel: Sachiko Hara - piano, harmonium; Cico Beck - marimbaphone, bass-drum, percussion, electronics; Karl Ivar Refseth - vibraphone, glockenspiel, bassdrum, percussion; Anton Kaun - objects, electronics; Markus Acher - harmonium, percussion, gongs, electronics; Tadklimp - electronics, algorithmic processing. Produced by Tadklimp and Markus Acher.