Silence (6:35)

“Silence” is a song by Canadian electronic music group Delerium. The song was co-written by Canadian singer Sarah McLachlan, and she is featured as vocalist on the track. The song is often credited to be one of the best trance songs of all time,[1] still playing in many clubs to this day.

The original album version and subsequent radio edit of the song had a much slower tempo than the more well-known remixes and was essentially structured like a pop song, with the characteristic synthetic instrumentation of the more melodic side of ambient music — though including darker overtones, such as the prominently featured Gregorian chants. This last element often invites comparison to popular ambient/new age/world music projects of the 1990s like Enigma and Deep Forest who routinely sample chants from various ethnicities worldwide, though in contrast such vocals featured on Karma were all original recordings.[2]

Although the original song did receive Canadian radio airplay in 1997, it was not released as a single until 1999, two years after the release of Karma, though it was only the Airscape Remix which received airplay at this time, rather than the more downtempo original version. The single prominently included remixes by DJ Tiësto, and Fade, which significantly boosted the song’s proliferation through club play (particularly by influential DJs such as Paul Oakenfold) as evidenced by the single’s positions on the Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play charts.

As a consequence, the song was largely promoted as an uptempo vocal trance song, which then influenced the marketing of the next several Delerium singles as well.