One of his 'hits' today on Dutch radio is 'Limit to your love'. There is a very awkward silence halfway through the song, and it baffles me that Dutch radio puts this in the air.
But the way he explained the use of silence is very much what you describe in the first post. I share your thoughts on silence in tracks, just like James Blake apparently.
To quote a BBC article on James Blake:
It hits the nail on the head. I don't care much for the track 'Limit to your love', but I think it could be classified as minimal. There is nothing more than his voice, a piano, bass and beat. That's it... Oh yeah, and the silence. It gives every element space to breathe and a place of it's own."Just to hear a whole room of people not talking, with just the thud of the music downstairs bleeding through, is incredible. There was a moment when a man took his jacket off and it was like nails on a chalkboard.
"To have that control, just through music, of people's emotions, was great. Really good."
A classically-trained pianist who studied popular music at Goldsmiths University, Blake is undoubtedly aware of Claude Debussy's maxim that "music is the space between the notes".
You can drown everything in effects, or you can just give everything the room it needs. The latter gives the elements much more impact in my opinion, and makes everything 'pop' more.
I think most 'minimal' tracks put out these days are not minimal at all, they could just as well be a mix between house and techno. Nothing minimal about them really. A lot of reverb, delay, clicks & pops and 808 toms. It's not minimal techno anymore, it's just techno, but slower than normal and with 808 sounds instead of 909.
When I just discovered minimal I had a hard time getting my friends to accept it, after a while they really loved it. Everything that comes out these days just bores us, it's not the same anymore. When every producer started jumping on the minimal bandwagon, the essence was lost. Nowadays people associate the type of sounds used with minimal (claves, toms), rather than the aesthetic of the song. Even the title of this site nailed the essence of minimal, the omission of sound and being able to fill in the blanks in your head. That is probably why you (the OP) get the impression that it's mainly creative people who appreciate this type of thing the most, because they can let their creative juices flow in the silence
