‘silo portem’ is a UK-based experimental music duo and married couple, Si & Gillie Young. Drawing on a rich seam of contemporary classical music, B-movie soundtracks, experimental electronica, industrial and dark ambient music, they mash, twist and merge samples with their own field recordings to create multi-layered music that defies categorisation.

Around four years ago, their chance discovery of the work of Iranian composer, Arshia Samsaminia, on Soundcloud marked the start of a long and fruitful collaboration with Arshia, who not only kindly provided a lot of source material for them to work with, but also inspired the title to their album “Samsaminia”. He later introduced them to two more composers who co-host the Tehran Contemporary Music Festival, Idin Samimi Mofakham and Martyna Kosecka. Recorded during the 2020 Lockdown, their album “LC-20” was the result of their collaboration with all three composers, which also featured sounds contributed by two American artists, Michael Vallone (aka “The Tara Experiment) and singer/harpist Heidi Hart. Arshia also introduced them to Noise-à-Noise, who featured two tracks recorded in the same lockdown sessions on two compilations.

Although they have since gone on to record a huge volume of new material and collaborated with several more renowned artists, as they explain, they wanted to return to their Lockdown collaborators for this compilation album.

“When Soheil Soheili got in touch to ask if we’d be interested in contributing to this latest compilation for Noise-à-Noise, Iran was already very much in our minds, with all the terrible events occurring there lately, so we really felt the urge to get involved. We had such wonderful memories of our Lockdown collaborations and we thought what better way to contribute, than to create some new music using samples of music from two of Iran’s finest contemporary composers. So we dug out the same sample set that we had used during lockdown, with sounds from Arshia, Idin, Martyna, Michael and Heidi and recorded around an hour of new material late on the 19th of December 2022. Unsurprisingly given the times, the result was full of tense emotion, so we worried whether Soheil would enjoy the short taster clips we sent from the improvisation, especially as we had already gone way past the end of November deadline! We were delighted that he said that he loved them and could fit something into any of the four categories of the compilation. And as we were so late in the day and he wanted to fill up the remaining space, he suggested he’d put a track on each of the four discs!

So we set about selecting four clips that seemed to work with the four themes of the compilation:

Our second contribution for the first volume of this compilation (Track, Contemporary Classical): The samples from Arshia, Idin and Martyna are clearly in evidence here, so this was the obvious choice for the Contemporary disc with the “Twisted Whispers” at the end providing the title.