Silian Rail

Each piece of music by Silian Rail is raw memory sewn into a heavy patchwork quilt—brightly colored memories giving comfort and shelter as you pull them up around your face. Their songs are human, ragged, loved, flawed, and flawless. For over three years, Silian Rail has worked relentlessly against the cold wind of the the Pacific and San Francisco’s overflowing pool of unemployed hipster bands to create a new brand of instrumental music, related to yet very much apart from predecessors like ...

Each piece of music by Silian Rail is raw memory sewn into a heavy patchwork quilt—brightly colored memories giving comfort and shelter as you pull them up around your face. Their songs are human, ragged, loved, flawed, and flawless. For over three years, Silian Rail has worked relentlessly against the cold wind of the the Pacific and San Francisco’s overflowing pool of unemployed hipster bands to create a new brand of instrumental music, related to yet very much apart from predecessors like Hella, A Minor Forest and Dilute. This is not art for art’s sake—its beauty may be every bit as useful and necessary to the listener as it is to the band. Silian Rail is Robin (guitars) and Eric (drums, additional guitar, glockenspiel, keyboard). Born of the zygote of Robin’s innate and twisted understanding of fingerpicking and open tunings, the delicate, complex and heartbreakingly beautiful guitar music blends effortlessly with Eric’s aggressive, highly syncopated and endlessly inventive drumming. Their songs are constantly shifting mazes of rich melodies and narrative rhythms; equally epic, fragile, and explosively dynamic. It never ceases to astound that they, as a duo, create such complex and dense layers of sound, which plume above the stifling stale air of a rock club and saturate every living thing there with depth, precision and the simple beauty of the rock band. But enough with the hymns of praise and flowery descriptions. The story is this—-Eric and Robin are long lost friends who grew up together in Durham/Chapel Hill, North Carolina and parted ways at 13, only to re-meet by chance years later in California. Drawn together by the shared history of their musically rich hometown and the sheer oddball luck of the situation, they began playing music together. Finding the results inspiring, they have kept on keeping on, playing everywhere from Great American Music Hall in San Francisco to the Comet Tavern in Seattle, with more than a few churches, former mortuaries, and tiny, sweaty basements in between. They have shared the stage with numerous incredible bands, including Maserati, Judgement Day, Built For the Sea, and From Monument to Masses. Add to that their award winning local music collective, Thread Productions, formed with Tartufi and Low Red Land, their live scores for new underground cinema in the Madcat Women’s International Film Festival, and songs featured in several independent films - and you have a band that is busy, humble, grateful, and loud. You do yourself a disservice by missing them.