In “Moving,” from Silkworm’s new album, Italian Platinum, bassist Tim Midgett sounds none too choked up about leaving town. “I never thought I’d leave this place / It has all kinds of storage space,” he sings right off the bat. The lyrics would seem to be autobiographical: in October, Silkworm drummer Michael Dahlquist moved to Chicago from the band’s longtime home base of Seattle, joining Midgett and guitarist Andy Cohen, who started the slow migration when he enrolled at the University of Chicago’s law school in 1998. While nobody in the group goes out of his way to criticize Seattle, it’s plain that they’re all happy to be here instead.
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Midgett and Cohen have grown up together; in high school in Missoula, Montana, they played together in a band called Ein Heit that also included guitarist Joel Phelps. Midgett left in the fall of 1987 to attend Northwestern University, while Cohen and Phelps started Silkworm. Midgett joined in after dropping out of NU; then for a while the band soldiered on without Cohen, who put in a year in New York at Columbia University. In early 1990 Cohen, Midgett, and Phelps moved together to Seattle, where they met Dahlquist, and the band began to make records for Seattle indies like C/Z and El Recordo.
Although Midgett lived in the area briefly while at Northwestern, the trio’s history with Chicago, and in particular with recording engineer Steve Albini (who’d graduated years before them from the same Missoula high school as Cohen and Midgett), began in 1992 when the group recorded the EP…His Absence Is a Blessing with him at his old home studio. “We had been wanting to get the way the band sounded live on tape, and we hadn’t been able to do that up to that point,” says Midgett. Back then Silkworm’s music was more aggressive and dense, influenced by Mission of Burma and Television and propelled by Dahlquist’s John Bonham-esque wallop. Since Phelps’s departure the music has grown increasingly spacious and dynamic.
