David Sylvian S/D

Secrets Of The Beehive Gone To Earth (the first two sides - destroy the instrumental stuff) Brilliant Trees Dead Bees On A Cake

Destroy: Alchemy Most of the instrumental stuff except the Plight and Premonition. Sylvian/Fripp

not really necessary, but nice just the same : Dead Bees on a Cake, Secrets of the Beehive, Brilliant Trees, Plight and Premonition, Everything and Nothing

Destroy : Camphor

Though you will find many flaws...Brilliant Trees has tracks like Pulling Punches and Red Guitar, reminiscent of cheesy Japan tracks that were probably included to keep fans of that band satisfied...Gone to Earth,with the exception of needless Laughter and Forgetting occupying space, is flawless... Secrets of the Beehive includes a few too many songs in 6/8 time cuz Sylvo was in his serious Nick Drake psuedo folky phase, and this style only truly succeeds with the song Orpheus...Half of Dead Bees on a Cake is forgettable...

Alchemy is an enjoyable listening experience...Plight and Premonition is interesting , Flux and Mutability shows the improvisational path he would take with Rain Tree Crow (which were the guys from Japan, but it is so much better than anything they did)...Ember Glance is innocuous...

Sylvian / Fripp's THE FIRST DAY was definitely an important collaboration of the early nineties for both participants. Fripp kicks some much needed life into Sylvian and proves that he actually can be ballsy when he sets out to. the true stars of this album is the American rhythm section of Trey Gunn and Jerry Marotta, who groove so heavily throughout...the live album, DAMAGE, is easily the best live album from the nineties... Approaching Silence is a nice ambient piece that serves very well as either background listening or under close scrutiny... It's a shame that Fripp felt compelled to dredge up the old Crimson banner, cause his work with Sylvian was far superior.

i can't believe he left "wave" and "forbidden colors" off of "everything and nothing" and put some of the crappy stuff he did on there.

anyway right now I can't think of a better 40 minute album than the first half of "gone to earth". at the risk of sounding like Bimble or something, this thing really kicked my ass all week. probably twice a year I got back on Sylvian binges and it's always something different that stands out as his high point.

also, those ingrid chavez collaborations (the four songs from little girls with 99 lives) are pretty terrible (except for the one without her on it).

search: blemish, nine horses stuff, secrets of the beehive, gone to earth

destroy: dead bees on a cake

Oh no someone else besides me revived a David Sylvian thread. Oh my god. I could go on and on and on about Gone To Earth. Please don't get me started.

Also I recently tried the Damage album with Robert Fripp. I was actually pleasantly surprised, though I guess my expectations were low. There was an especially amazing song on that..."Every Colour You Are". I don't think I made it through the whole album, though. Not sure if I heard the last two songs or not.

So much music, so little time.

New David Sylvian album

http://www.davidsylvian.com/

13.03.09: David Sylvian ‘Manafon’

We’re preparing for the release of David’s new album ‘Manafon’. It’s a powerfully bold, uncompromising work featuring contributions from Evan Parker, John Tilbury, Keith Rowe, Christian Fennesz, Otomo Yoshihide, and many more. We’ll be sharing more information on the release shortly.

I've been listening to Smokey Robinson and thinking that he must have been on big influence on Sylvian's vocal style (the little waver in his voice). I suppose it was obvious because of the "I Second that Emotion" and "Ain't that Peculiar" covers...but for some reason I never made the connection in the actual style of singing.

this is the only good news i've had all week

This is gonna be chock a block with catchy tunes then...

tilbury and rowe together again. pretty excited here.

This sounds awesome - hopefully a followup to Blemish at last.

"tilbury and rowe together again. pretty excited here."

no, from what I know about these recordings, there were some made in Vienna (w/ Rowe, Fennesz, Stangl, others), some in Tokyo (w/ Otomo, Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura, I think Tetuzi Akiyama?), and there must have been others made in London with Tilbury and Evan Parker and others (this is the first I'm hearing of this last part). anyway, Keith and John didn't play together, or I certainly would have heard about it.

and as this looks basically like a David and the Erstwhile All-Stars project, I'm pretty excited to hear the results. FWIW, the Tokyo and Vienna recordings were made quite some time ago, I believe, late 2005/maybe early 2006?

thanks for the info, jon. i didn't love blemish but i'm still excited to hear this.

i'm hoping it's more snow borne sorrow than blemish

just judging from the other musicians, I think it's going to be pretty new territory for him.

I heard that this will be both a CD and DVD, and that it may be out as soon as April (although that's a really quick turnaround, so let's see).

looks like I was part right:

"Manafon's release date is set for Sept 14th. Manafon will be available in two editions. A regular CD/digipak edition and a twin volume deluxe edition with CD and DVD featuring the film 'Amplified Gesture'."

http://samadhisound.com/

Sadly the title of the film makes me think of an even angrier flipping of the bird.

Wire cover story next month too, dunno who's doing it/did it.

That'll be just over ten years since dude's last cover story, then.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/images/artists/sylvian_david/COVER179.jpg

Press waffle sent out just now:

On Manafon, Sylvian pursues "a completely modern kind of chamber music. Intimate, dynamic, emotive, democratic, economical." In sessions in London, Vienna, and Tokyo, Sylvian assembled the world's leading improvisers and innovators, artists who explore free improvisation, space-specific performance, and live electronics. From Evan Parker and Keith Rowe, to Fennesz and members of Polwechsel, to Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide, the musicians provide both a backdrop and a counterweight to his own vocal performances - which, minus one instrumental, are nakedly the center of each piece.

Sylvian's voice has never been so dominant or so striking, and his resonant tenor and deliberate vibrato captivate the listener from the start of "Small Metal Gods." Its prominence would come off as egotistical - except that each performance is an exercise in self-exposure, and each character study is written in the third-person, to allow the maximum detachment.

"It's like a one-man monologue in which every change of light and backdrop is crucial to the carrying of the central performance. It's an ensemble work even though there is a central performance." Though the setlist is all ballads, romanticism is out, and no percussion provides a pulse. All the melody and rhythm rest in the voice. Aside from overdubs of acoustic guitar or John Tilbury's somber, Feldman-esque phrases on piano, Sylvian enhanced but did not reconfigure the improvisations, giving himself just the skeletons of songs to guide him.

When an instrument locks with the lyrics - as when Fennesz introduces a texture that clinches the disaster of "Snow White in Appalachia" - the moment is indescribable; when it dissolves, Sylvian doesn't pause. Neither a complement nor a Greek chorus, the instrumentalists maintain an ambiguous attitude to the singer, and what he's saying. When Sylvian's delivery implies sympathy or mockery on "The Greatest Living Englishman," the music is cantankerous but dry, and Otomo Yoshihide's abrupt snippets of classical vinyl may or may not share the joke.

The closing track, "Manafon," depicts the British poet R. S. Thomas. Sylvian explains that it is "a description of a man of faith, who struggles with that faith, who imposes an order on the external world in the hope of finding it internally. A man who embraces the morals and values of his faith and lives by them but who also struggles with the silence that burns inside his own heart and mind. God's silence. He's a man out of time who begins to look, on the surface, more like some tragicomic figure as time passes. While he seems to be an insufferable individual in many ways there's a quixotic element in his quest for knowledge, for upholding morals and values that even he struggles with when it comes to believing in their efficacy."

Manafon's contradictions lay at the heart of its excellence. It's driven not just by the tension between improvisation and composition, frontman and ensemble, or in Sylvian's words, "intimacy and solitude." Manafon captures the dilemma of a man who studies himself clincically, but cannot truly understand himself; who's disillusioned, but maybe laughably so. The most common sensation, which hangs in almost every note, is a feeling of suspense. The sole instrumental - to which Sylvian also contributes - sounds less like a performance, and more like a wellspring of possibilities.

The album ends simply on a phrase and a breath. But there's a happier ending in its other theme: Manafon also explores the creative process. Intuition drew Sylvian to these pieces and these players, and the surprises they bring: a cello visiting like a warm hand on a forehead, the unpredictable use of unadulterated sine waves, the brassy path of Evan Parker's soprano sax solo. Manafon has a forbidding core, but aesthetically, each piece is an engrossing discovery.

"Maybe I'm attracted to the stories of individuals who search for meaning on their own terms," says Sylvian. "But what I'm fascinated by is the devotion to a creative discipline. The meaning with which the work imbues the life regardless of its reception and, to a certain extent, its importance."

This new one's killing it. Reminds me a touch of the start to Laughing Stock in its fragmentary/rough-edged feel, but maintained and developed in different directions throughout the album, while Sylvian's always a calm center.

often he's a calm centre to generally calm songs. nice to hear that there's a bit of a rough dynamic to this one.

He's certainly been playing around more with that over this decade but this is probably his most consistent work on that front. It's not the songs are explosive -- they're understated but very unsettled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J2IkSNO2Bo
:O

Wow Ned, that sounds great! Can't wait.

That video alone... great, great stuff.

Looking forward to this a lot. Loved what the Polwechsel guys did with Dean Roberts (i.e. Autistic Daughters).

am i missing something? that video is just the live version of "a fire in the forest"

yes that's what i'm hearing.

psyched about this

Ah, thanks damo, didn't pick that up.

Actually I meant to post another video, but am at work. It's David talking about all the musicians he worked with for this album.

Finally something to look forward to.

I played that video and—what is it, a promo? it's hard to tell—I actually hope the album doesn't have too much of that granular, burbling Fennesz sound in it. It worked once, brilliantly, but the minute I started watching the video I caught myself thinking "that's a bit of a dated sound, eh?" Maybe I have absurdly high expectations here, but some of that melodic software improv stuff hasn't aged all that well to my ears.

Sachiko M, though, is basically the anti-Fennesz though so I'm sure it will all come out balanced. Pity Ami Yoshida—Sachiko M's old partner in the delightful Cosmos—isn't onboard. Her chirping and retching noises + Sachiko's hiss and crackle would have been a beautiful voice/electronic dual counterpoint to the Sylvian croon + the Fennesz syrup.

I'm going to go run around in the yard for a minute.

fields of salmon, that video was fanmade. No clips from the album have surfaced online as far as I know.

Search song: Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit – The Librarian (feat. David Sylvian) *aka* Nine Horses - The Librarian.

did anyone hear When Loud Weather Buffeted Naoshima from 2007? one long ambient piece made up of field recordings made at naoshima. based on the collaborators alone i'm guessing it's pretty good

gahhhh when will Manafon LEAK goddamnit :(

did anyone hear When Loud Weather Buffeted Naoshima from 2007? one long ambient piece made up of field recordings made at naoshima. based on the collaborators alone i'm guessing it's pretty good

― damo tsu tsuki (r1o natsume), Sunday, August 9, 2009 11:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Love it! Haven't dound a copy of it myself, so have to do it with my illegal mp3. But it's great ~ stretching his common 'song' sound and length for an entire album. It's quite blissful.

dound=found

"Sachiko M, though, is basically the anti-Fennesz though so I'm sure it will all come out balanced. Pity Ami Yoshida—Sachiko M's old partner in the delightful Cosmos—isn't onboard. Her chirping and retching noises + Sachiko's hiss and crackle would have been a beautiful voice/electronic dual counterpoint to the Sylvian croon + the Fennesz syrup."

ha! someone should do a mashup of Ami's part of Soba to Bara with the Manafon backgrounds, Sobafon.

anyway, sadly for your plan, Sachiko and Fennesz don't overlap here. the individual personnel for each track are listed in a post at the link below, the only track Sachiko is on is the one I'm by far the most excited about, mostly for the personnel but also for the title:

the greatest living englishman (10:55)
music: akiyama/sachiko m/nakamura/yoshihide/sylvian
lyrics: sylvian
electric and acoustic guitar (left channel): tetuzi akiyama
no-input mixer: toshimaru nakamura
sine wave sampler: sachiko m.
turntables, acoustic guitar (right channel): otomo yoshihide
piano: john tilbury
vocals: david sylvian

http://www.japansylvian.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1671&start=30

that lineup is all kinds of amazing.

@ [email address removed] (r1o natsume)

Been trying to get back to you, but the ILX-mail robot continues to fail on me. Could you drop me an e-mail at [another mail removed] ?

Search song: Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit – The Librarian (feat. David Sylvian) *aka* Nine Horses - The Librarian.

I believe they're different versions, albeit not dramatically.

Sylvian's done some fantastic guest vocal appearances, search these recent ones:
Tweaker - Pure Genius
Fennesz - Transit
Blonde Redhead - Messenger
Takagi Masakatsu - Exit/Delete
Punkt - Angels
Arve Henriksen - Thermal

Also there's a recent Samadhi sampler called "The World Is Everything" with two great Sylvian tracks, "The World Is Everything" and "Sleepwalkers".

xpost

Cool, will check it out

i'd love it if they collaborated on some music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5vSkWXu-Qo

For those of us that don’t speak Japanese or have time to listen to 45 minutes, what is that?

It’s Sylvian on a Japanese radio show in 1984 playing some of his favourite music.

Apologies, throughout the 1980s (and perhaps after idk) Ryuichi Sakamoto had a radio show called Sound Street, this is Sylvian guesting on the show with Peter Barakan acting as a translator.

He kind of fascinates me as a person. Isn’t he really into gurus and new age stuff like Carlos Santana?

― beamish13, Thursday, June 22, 2023 5:50 PM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I do spend a curious amount of time wondering what his living room looks like. (Apologies if I've mentioned this before).

probably not someone who eats cheetos on a white sofa while playing xbox but you never know

I imagine a real but somehow *arty* fire. Not clutter. A large artwork - could be a painting, maybe a photograph - that might be construed as "slightly rude" but which he explains as an appreciation of "the female form"?

A couple of years back (before Ryuichi S. passed) I said something on the occasion of his birthday about how given his current wizard look I imagined him living in snowy Japanese mountains somewhere, occasionally sending Sakamoto messages via wild foxes.

i'm sorry but i'm dying at "a real but somehow 'arty' fire"

I can't believe that there's not more speculation about Sylvian's lounge.

I’m assuming beamish meant Carlos Castaneda?? Can see Sylvian appreciating some Santana tho (and I can hear his vocal on “smooth”)

beamish was referring to Carlos Santana being a big follower of Sri Chinmoy

LOL @ Sylvian in place of Thomas on "Smooth"--it's true, the hook melody would unfortunately work for him (but only if "or else forget about it" is followed by some tasteful shred-glitching c/o add'l guest cameo by Christian Fennesz)

idk if anyone needs this, but here's one of my og attempts at what i call a 'breakdance ballad'―――
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3vc0uR86yI

david sylvian ― "a fire in the forest (readymade fc vs austintayeshus)"

essentially just a blend recorded in real time using a turntable and one of those progenitor pitch-bending cdj players from the early 2000s.

raining in london, getting colder, that time of year where i can listen to Beehive again in a world that seems fit for it

A good album is a good album. You may like one song more than another, but if you’ve lived long enough with it, one song leads to another there, so all will be good in the end.

I love this.

What I meant to post before getting carried away reading old messages is, Manafon is one of my favorite records of all time. Seems to get darker and more beautiful with every listen.

Manafon rules. Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Emily Dickinson and Snow White in Appalachia are absolutely top tier Sylvian.
They feel like places he'd been moving toward his whole career (whether you wanted him to move there in the first place is another story...). Love it.

New track from the Sylvian-Dalts:

https://lucreciadalt.bandcamp.com/album/cosa-rara

Good stuff. Not a million miles removed from what you might expect from either... and I'm not gonna complain about that!

Nice, he sounds like William Shatner..
fwiw, the TBA b-sides can be read on the cover of the 7": Mabe Fratti – cosa rara (en la playa) and Matias Aguayo – cosa rara (dopamine dub), looking forward to those

good song, not really because of his contribution though. they seem to be happy together which is really nice.

Mabe Fratti rules.

I think Sylvo's contribution is cool as hell. Appears he also does some very very faint bvs on the track in addition to the recitation and guitar.
Vibe very much in keeping with his current broken desert loner vibe. I'd happily take more of that.

this new track from him and Lucrecia Dalt is so good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6_bC6gV0zI

whoops, posted already a few msgs above, mods delete

I like song with Dalt and Fratti

I like song with Dalt and Fratti

I like song with Dalt and Fratti

I like song with Dalt and Fratti

I like song with Dalt and Fratti

I like song with Dalt and Fratti

How do we feel about the version w Fratti?

I like it!

Oops. Tech issues

Tech issues with Dalt and Fratti

really excited for the new Lucrecia Dalt album, all the pre-release tracks have been stellar

she definitely warrants a thread of her own imo

but do you like the song with dalt and fratti

Ballad of a Deadman! Fantastic!

Really enjoying Sylvian at the moment - more the first disc of Victim of Stars than anything (I think of myself as more of a fan of disc two). No obvious reason for it.

Last year I rediscovered Gone to Earth after several decades of ignoring it. I know the other 80s albums well but for some reason that one never stuck with me back in the day... now it's by far my favorite.

It was my introduction to Sylvian and remains my sentimental favorite of his 80s work. The sidemen here—Wheeler, Fripp and Nelson in particular—are terrific.

wish he'd do another nine horses album

― akm, Tuesday, May 3, 2011 11:22 AM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Last year I rediscovered Gone to Earth after several decades of ignoring it. I know the other 80s albums well but for some reason that one never stuck with me back in the day... now it's by far my favorite.

― Kim Kimberly, Friday, January 2, 2026

One of my writing and before-bed albums.

Yeah it's kind of a 'hmm, something from Sylvian...that'll always do' album for me.

Sides 3/4 of Gone to Earth is easily one of the top five ambient albums ever made

Surprisingly, my introduction to Sylvian was seeing the Silver Moon video on VH1

It actually played?!

I recently dug out an ITV documentary on Now That's What I Call Music which I remembered from 2013, but what I didn't remember was Timmy Mallett, Dermot O'Leary and Dom Joly being made to listen to - and express bafflement at the inclusion of - "Red Guitar" at the end of Now 3, the given consummate example of 'obscure artsy fanbase-oriented top 30 hit included to recoup production losses that no one is going to remember today'. It's all over for you David, the voice of "Seven Little Girls Sitting in the Back Seat" only "vaguely" remembers you.

It did! I also saw it often.