After 9 years in the plugin game, Kush can finally say without exaggeration that, at least for one particular flavor of vintage compressors that clip beautifully, we have completely closed the Analog/Digital gap. SILIKA is not ‘close’, it’s not ‘different but just as good’. It’s ‘Sonically Identical’ to the types of hardware it’s modeled after.

When you drive this plugin’s input, everything melts deliciously. In particular, the high frequencies lay back and spread out without getting edgy, or bright, or even the least bit ‘zingy’. It may get too grindy, but it won’t hurt your ears. Think Led Zeppelin IV’s hazy grunge, and you’ll start to get the idea.

SILIKA owes its killer sound to an extraordinarily complex harmonic distortion generator, but operationally it’s a relatively simple compressor with a familiar feature set. All of its distortions are controlled with the Input knob, which can be switched and blended to taste. The resulting signal then gets passed to a compressor/limiter with 4 available ratios, standard Attack/Release/Threshold/Mix controls, and sidechain filtering options which, while simple, allow for a dramatic reshaping of the compressor’s behavior.

It’s a straightforward plugin with an absolutely killer sound, and represents the dawn of a new era for Kush plugins and digital sonics in general.