Silver Waves

Silver Waves is the alias of frighteningly young Bristolian producer Dylan Mallet. His first EP landed on Bandcamp in early 2014 and he’s been sharing a steady stream of genre-hopping experimental tracks ever since.

His music builds on a variety of styles – techno, black metal, harsh noise and aspects of ‘world music’ are all identifiable on his early recordings. With such an electric mix of sounds, it’d be easy to peg his music as noise, but understandably, he’s not ready to be pigeonholed just yet. “I never started with the intention of making ‘noise’ and I still don’t think of Silver Waves as a noise project,” Dylan tells us. “When I was first considering doing solo stuff, I had it in my mind that it would be more of an ambient thing; I think that’s reflected in the first EP. As it has continued I’ve allowed the sound to develop naturally.”

His latest EP opens with a smothered screeching scrape and evolves through fluttering breakbeats, harsh, metallic textures and amorphous, stuttering sirens to end on a pair of remixes from Bristol’s Ossia and Giant Swan. It’s far from what you might term ‘traditional’, but then neither is Mallet’s idea of what makes his output a success: “I do it because I want to and I kind of need to,” he explains, matter of factly. “There’s no ulterior motive, putting out music that I made on my own terms is what I want to do and it’s what I’ll continue to do until I don’t want to do it anymore.” Things are just getting started. Let’s hope that day is a long way off.

Silver Waves’ EP3 is out via Howling Owl Records x Portals Editions on 22 July and Silver Waves plays live to launch the EP at Bristol’s Surrey Vaults on 6 August.