by Shaun Lawton
I used to really dig listening to David Sylvian, back in his glory days of the late eighties bleeding into the nineties. I was tuned into his output during '86 and '87, when I bought and sank into his lush albums Gone to Earth and Secrets of the Beehive.
Then I lost touch with this mercurial artist (formerly of the band Japan). Until 2014 crawled around, delivering forth the now impossibly rare and invaluable CD There's a Light That Enters Houses, with No Other Houes in Sight, which I ordered because of its association with my old friend, teacher and poetry mentor, Franz Wright.
Musicians[edit]
- David Sylvian – piano, sampler, computer, electronics, laptop
- Christian Fennesz – guitar, laptop
- John Tilbury – piano
- Franz Wright – spoken word
Perhaps needless to say, this singular CD is now worth quite a pretty penny, if you're even lucky enough to see it flash toward the surface of the deep, dark web where time has been inexorably weighing it down, to plummet deep into the ever-to-be-forgotten depths of our mostly oblivious live's drowning ocean of time.
What I'm hearing now listening to the 1st side of Blemish (his sixth studio album, released in 2003) is a very sparse, minimalist sketches of ambient sounds shuddering into one another, conjuring a desolate soundscape upon which David intones his catchy lyrics, words that drift upon the glassine surface of a post-electronic sound decaying into the gentle susurration of fading soundwaves lapping unto the barren shores of our mind.
That was track 1, (13 min 42 seconds title track), which segues into The Good Son (w/Derek Bailey, an avante garde experimental guitarist whose specialty is improvisation) which plays as if they were playing live in a desolate dive bar on the outskirts of some forgotten town, with nobody else in attendance except yourself and one other intriguing persona blending into the shadows of the far wall.
Listening to him . . . listening closely now ... I'm happy to absorb this melancholy, spoken word ambient jazz which helps me escape through a portal in my mind's eye ... listen closely now ... to be led on a story telling journey with strange underlying intonations from the guitar strings being plucked and stroked in bizarrely compelling ways ... even at the short length of five minutes and twenty-five seconds, The Good Son takes the listener on a welcome journey to an uncomfortable place.
Following is another five minute song called The Only Daughter, which begins with David intoning "She was, she was.... a good friend of mine...", upon which the distillation of sounds has focused into an eerie, Enoesque backdrop scintillating with nuance and interrupted signals as Sylvian's abruptly unexpected words pull the listener in unusual directions both with the narrative and the haunting music.
An album for the truly melancholic souls among us. Ordinary folk may not get what's the deal with this. They won't even see it coming... I'm just relieved I didn't let another decade or two go by before dipping back into the silver slipstream of acoustic dreams conjured effortlessly by the one and only David Sylvian.
~thus ends Side one~
~stay tuned for the possibility
of my reviewing Side two here~
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