Sylvian

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Which phase of David Sylvian's solo career would you consider your favorite or least favorite?

1984-1988 : Brilliant Trees / Alchemy - an index of possibilities / Gone To Earth / Secrets of the Beehive / In Praise of Shamans Tour

1988-1991 : Plight and Premonition / Flux + Mutability / Ember Glance - The Permanence of Memory / Rain Tree Crow

1992-1995 : The First Day Tour / The First Day / The Road to Graceland Tour / Redemption - Approaching Silence / Damage / SlowFire Tour

1999-2001 : Dead Bees on a Cake / Everything and Nothing / Everything and Nothing Tour

― brian, Monday, 18 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

1978: The year of both Adolescent Sex and Obscure Alternatives

― Sean, Monday, 18 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Solo career, you silly billy. ;-)

First phase. If only because I listen to Gone to Earth most of all the albums.

― Ned Raggett, Monday, 18 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

i love sylvian's work with both czukay and fripp... but my favourite phase is 84-88 as well. "gone to earth" and "secrets of the beehive" are gorgeous albums.

― cecilia, Monday, 18 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

First phase, if only for Gone to Earth and Secrets of the Beehive, both of which were utterly fucking amazing. Ahem.

― Sean Carruthers, Monday, 18 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I consider Gone To Earth - to be one of the finest albums of the 80s. If i ever get around to redoing my best albums of the 80s list it will very high up.

A sublime recording the atmospherics on that album must be experienced, the guitar work in particular is awesome - the textures connect with every listen, it is album that flows - my type of sound.

― DJ Martian, Monday, 18 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Wow. I've just discovered how hard it is for me to do non-favorites as well as favorites. -jeff

― mxyzptlk, Monday, 18 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I prefer the "Fripp Trip" during the early nineties.

― Daniel Williams, Monday, 18 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I like the early 90s stuff with Fripp quite a bit, but I'm not familiar with most of the early stuff. One of the things I meant to check out (especially a few years ago in my King Crimson freak stage) but never got around to.

― Jordan, Monday, 18 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

/ Secrets of the Beehive / ....everytime i listen to this i am amazed....this always surprises me . from the production to the writing,a classic! so ya....1984-1988.

― william harris, Tuesday, 19 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I still like 'Brilliant Trees' the most, because I remember how it redefined the kind of sound some of us were aiming for in the early 80s. We went avant-acoustic because of that album (prepared piano, acoustic guitar, ambient electronics). But I was listening to the next two albums a lot through the late 80s too. I found Fripp's guitar got a little treacley on 'Gone To Earth'. 'Secrets of the Beehive' stands up well, though. I love the completely undisguised rips from Cocteau, Picasso, Sartre etc. Sylvian was very Japanese in this need to charge all the songs up with a kind of delicate secondhand existentialism. You know, turning imagery from Cocteau into a kind of elegant 80s perfume commercial.

Sylvian, pierrot and cokehead, we salute you!

― Momus, Tuesday, 19 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Brilliant Trees/Beehive, definitely...along with his single with Virginia Astley. The move from fretless to double bass was a good one. By the way, I saw Mick Karn on TV recently - a damn' site better looking with the eyebrows...

― Jez, Tuesday, 19 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

1992-1995 happens to be my favorite, mostly because the material Sylvian, Fripp and Gunn came up with seemed to span a wider range of styles than anything they created apart from each other.

― brian, Tuesday, 19 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Though probably nobody's true "favorite", I find the improvisational period of 1988 to 1991 to be quite interesting. It's mostly instrumental and collaborative work due to major writer's block. The experimentation of those years culminated in the release of Rain Tree Crow, which is basically the lineup of Japan reuniting and stretching their musical vocabulary to expand upon the influence that Holger Czukay had on Sylvian's work at the time.

― peri, Wednesday, 20 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

^brilliant trees^ is my favourite - though i adore ^gone to earth^ and ^secrets of the beehive^ - the fripp stuff doesnt engage me and ^dead bees on a cack^ is mostly treading water with protools. rain tree crow - some blerk in the nermerair said it was the first great psychedelic record of the 90s - head on the nail - ^blackwater^ is one of my fave songs evah.

― a-33, Thursday, 21 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

As far as Sylvian solo output in the 80's, "Alchemy" and "Gone to Earth" are masterpieces, but I found "Brilliant Trees" to be inconsistent with what sounds like some leftover pop from his group Japan. "Secrets of the Beehive" contains some great lyrics, but suffers from not enough variations in the sound of the music. Regarding the "improvisational phase", the collaborations with Czukay are interesting, especially the track Flux (a big, bright, colourful world). Ember Glance is benign. His reaquaintance with Japan, "Rain Tree Crow" is excellent...

― Timothy, Thursday, 21 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

...Going out on tour with Fripp gave Sylvian more focus, confidence and presence in being on stage and the music they created together had more muscle than anything else Sylvian has ever been involved with. I don't have a true favorite phase, but his most recent work (1999 through to the present)doesn't seem to be very inspired and I guess that I would consider it my least favorite. But I admit that, due to the acoustic nature of the Slow Fire tour, I was hoping that Sylvian would release something along the lines of that. This slick, psuedo electronica, laid back soul, and bluesy material he is putting out doesn't suit him well.

― Timothy, Thursday, 21 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

THE FIRST DAY ROX!!!!! goodbye thread

― gia, Friday, 22 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

three years pass...

got 'everything and nothing' on the cheap yesterday having just not bothered much w/him before - only heard japan's 'ghosts' before (a versh is on here) - and even if this compilation covers every period, and those are the highlights, its all REALLY good 2am listening. yesterday was all gloomy so perfect for it.

surprising there's not much talk of eno (the late 70s) in ref to him. I mean: 1) get collaborators from all 'fields' but also 2) play every instrument in that naive, conciuosly anti-virtuoso way 3) put it all together, carefully sculpting, make all the ambient sounded emptiness count, unlike so much ambient music and 4) sing a bunch of things that sounds like a bunch of stuff and nothing else (on 1st listen anyway). I know there is nothing (no talk) of the oblique strategist about him but still...

how's 'blemish'?

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Thursday, 28 July 2005 10:53 (twenty years ago)

it's like this.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Thursday, 28 July 2005 10:55 (twenty years ago)

Fripp stands with his back to the audience, carefully angling his guitar towards his amplifiers' speakers. A low howl of feedback is slowly swelling, battling against the rhythm section's incessant double-time boogie motif. Sylvian, stripped to the waist, his hair plastered to his face with sweat, clings exhaustedly to the microphone stand. As the shriek of guitar feedback climaxes in an earsplitting banshee wail, Sylvian raises his hand, forefinger and pinkie extended, and screams, "RAWWWK!" Fripp launches into a frenzied solo so heavily metallic that their audience's hair spontaneously and instantaneously grows by ten inches.

This is my beautiful dream.

― Palomino (Palomino), Thursday, 28 July 2005 22:58 (twenty years ago)

it's like this.

Blemish is NOT like Radiohead, Marcello.

― Naive Teen Idol (Naive Teen Idol), Friday, 29 July 2005 02:06 (twenty years ago)

I think Sylvian's best work is ALWAYS with Ryuichi Sakamoto, "Bamboo Houses", "Taking Islands In Africa" etc. Even that "No More Landmines" thing was made more decent by the presence of Sakamoto.

― SoHoLa (SoHoLa), Friday, 29 July 2005 02:17 (twenty years ago)

Before Marcello bites my head off, I should be serious for a moment: that's quite a good take on Blemish.

My first Sylvian was Gone To Earth, whose blend of dewy romanticism and "sophisticated" electronics was always intoxicating to my 16 year-old ears and remains so now that I'm twice as old. There's a massiveness to it. For some reason, its best (and most languorous) song, "Before the Bullfight", always gets lost, probably because of the second side suite. Pity -- it's his Bacharach moment.

― Naive Teen Idol (Naive Teen Idol), Friday, 29 July 2005 02:27 (twenty years ago)

Blemish is NOT like Radiohead, Marcello.

-- Naive Teen Idol (matthew.weine...), July 29th, 2005.

Not everyone will get it.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Friday, 29 July 2005 05:22 (twenty years ago)

julio you will love blemish, i suspect.

― toby (tsg20), Friday, 29 July 2005 06:52 (twenty years ago)

I finally ordered Blemish on the basis of Marcello's very affecting piece (perhaps not "basis"; it tipped me over though). I also spent yesterday evening listening to Everything & Nothing and Amnesiac. Ava giggled when I sang along to "Let The Happiness In".

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Friday, 29 July 2005 09:37 (twenty years ago)

Oh, and Secrets of the Beehive is my favourite record of all time. Except on days when it's House Tornado or Sinatra's "Ill Wind". Or "Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)".

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Friday, 29 July 2005 09:40 (twenty years ago)

was that triple juxtaposition of flatulence deliberate? ;-)

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Friday, 29 July 2005 09:42 (twenty years ago)

"Do you want it pasteurised? Cos pasteurised is best." She said, "Once there was two Mexican women, ran over the hill, ripped off their skin and ate it up." That tickled old Ernie.

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Friday, 29 July 2005 11:19 (twenty years ago)

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