It took 39 years for Moritz von Oswald to release his debut album. The Berlin techno icon has never followed a straight path: In the 1980s, before co-founding the pioneering dub-techno outfit Basic Channel, he was a member of Hamburg post-punk act Palais Schaumburg, and following Basic Channel, he slipped first into dub reggae (with Rhythm & Sound) and then ambient jazz (with the Moritz von Oswald Trio). But Silencio might mark his biggest swerve yet: Half of its DNA is choral music. After writing the album’s foundations on a collection of vintage analogue synthesisers, he had them transposed for choir and recorded by Vocalconsort Berlin before fusing the two elements into the album’s final form. The results are unlike anything else in his catalogue, despite the occasional, almost inaudible presence of a muted 4/4 kick drum. Synths and voices alike pile up in iridescent layers, shimmering like an oil slick—a spectral explosion more closely related to mid-century composers like Ligeti or Xenakis than anything in the ambient canon. Yet Silencio isn’t completely unrelated to von Oswald’s previous work: Four tracks are presented in two different versions, one more electronic and one more acoustic. These alternate takes are a reminder of von Oswald’s long history in dub, using the mixing desk to tease out new possibilities from the same set of materials.