Across The Silence by Tom Johnson
As with all live albums, we enter Songs: Ohia’s set in Tilburg from October 2000,
just before the first chord rings clean and true and out into the watching crowd. There are just a few words spoken from the band on stage, a shuffle of feet, a quick re-tune, and we’re off. As listeners long after the fact, we miss out on the tangible pre-show buzz, the crowding around the bar with friends and strangers. We don’t get to notice the sudden cold of the season as we walk to the venue on the cold Autumn night, the songs swimming around our brain in anticipation.
Perhaps the most successful live albums are able to conjure some of that magic, in some small way; the pin-prick atmosphere of bright lights shimmering across in a dark room, of the crowd held in the wrap of warm communal gathering, watching the dark figure with a big voice up on stage, perched against the microphone, “staring straight across the silence”.
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Situated in the south of the Netherlands, Tilburg is a busy but modest city, once most famous for being the city of textiles back in the 19th century. Tjeerd van Erve grew up here, honing his love for music from an early age by taping songs he heard on the underground radio shows that whispered away into the night, weird and fascinating. He started going to live shows around the age of fifteen, and by seventeen he was involved in the city’s live music scene, helping to organise local festivals and shows. This path eventually led him to working as a lighting engineer at 013, the city’s chief music venue and, in turn, to being there on October 9th 2000, ready to work the lights and remembering to press the little red ‘record’ button as the band walked on stage that night. The night Jason Molina and his Songs: Ohia band came to town.