Silence chords by Portishead

"This had to go first because it has the Portuguese introduction about the number three. Geoff had a sample of a voice from a record, talking Portuguese, introducing a band. It kind of glued the track together and started it, and we liked it. Geoff discovered something about the Wiccan theory of three — do three good things and three good things will come back to you, related to the idea of bad luck coming in threes (without getting deeply into it) — so we wrote a sort of small manifesto, and got this Portuguese guy from Bristol to translate it, and recreated the sample, but with him speaking different words. "The song itself was started by Beth. An arpeggiated piano thing which is really beautiful — the timing is quite odd, there's bars of six, bars of four, bars of two, the cut–up of it is quite weird — and we messed about a long time on that before we came up with a way of playing it. Beth doesn't start singing for a long time. There's a mad guitar improvisation, which was out of time, and the echoes are out of time. So many records have perfectly timed echoes, it was interesting to make things not in time, obtusely different from the perfect triplet echoes you can set up if you want. So the sound of the whole thing is deliberately harsh straight away. "There's a huge drama change when her voice does first come in. The drums drop out, and you're left with this echoey pick bass. Then the abrupt end: Geoff's idea, but it reminded me of compilation tapes, and of the jazz drummer Tommy Chase who I worked with for two years. He used to make me tapes of stuff he wanted me to learn, and as soon as it got past the bit he was interested in, it would just end." Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.