Delerium - Silence

Release Year 1999

"Silence" is the title of a song by the Canadian electronic music group Delerium. It was co-written by Canadian singer Sarah McLachlan, who is featured as the vocalist on the track. Over the years, it has been hailed as one of the greatest trance songs of all time, over a decade after its initial release, and still plays in clubs to this day.

The original album version and subsequent radio edit of the song had a much slower tempo than the more well-known remixes and was essentially structured like a pop song, with the characteristic synthetic instrumentation of the more melodic side of ambient music — though including darker overtones, such as the prominently featured Gregorian chant (Gloria in Excelsis Deo). This last element often invites comparison to popular ambient/new age/world music projects of the 1990s like Enigma and Deep Forest who routinely sample chants from various ethnicities worldwide, though in contrast such vocals featured on Karma were all original recordings.

Although the original song did receive Canadian radio airplay in 1997, it was not released as a single until 1999, two years after the release of Karma, though it was only the Airscape Remix which received airplay at this time, rather than the more downtempo original version. The single prominently included remixes by DJ Tiësto, and Fade, which significantly boosted the song's proliferation through club play (particularly by influential DJs such asPaul Oakenfold) as evidenced by the single's positions on the Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play charts.

As a consequence, the song was largely promoted as an uptempo vocal trance song, which then influenced the marketing of the next several Delerium singles as well. Unlike most of its successors, however, "Silence" also broke into the adult top 40 radio format due to the song's club success, and through radio airplay the original version received mainstream awareness relatively greater than the remixes among club patrons

Posted in: Single Tracks