heartofdavid wrote:Thanks for the heads-up about this.
the bomb mag interview
Collaboration and dialogue have been an important part of singer-songwriter David Sylvian’s 30-plus-year journey to the outer limits of popular song. From his earliest days as a post-glam pinup pop star in the group Japan, he has specialized in existentially intimate songs and a quiet but determined individualism. At the same time, in the words of Japan’s 1981 signature song “Ghosts,” this solitude has regularly been interrupted by ghosts that blow “wilder than the wind.” Perhaps these ghosts are collaborators. If so, they have included composer-pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto on Brilliant Trees (1984), Secrets of the Beehive (1987), and his surprising post-9/11 protest single “World Citizen” (2003); guitarist Robert Fripp on The First Day (1993); and, more recently, guitarist/improvisers Derek Bailey and Christian Fennesz on the remarkable Blemish (2003). The metaphor of haunting has been pushed further on 2009’s Manafon, in which Sylvian assembled a who’s who of contemporary improvisers in Tokyo, Vienna, and London, including Fennesz, Otomo Yoshihide, Evan Parker, John Tilbury, and guitarist Keith Rowe. Sylvian recorded a series of improvisations, later transforming them in his studio into the bases of a series of gloomy songs, his own voice and lyrics interrupting and shaping abstract, minimal rhizomes of sound and vice versa.
As Sylvian’s music has become progressively unmoored from conventional instrumentation and the usual building blocks of popular song such as drumbeats, melodies, and riffs, his lyrics have also grown darker and more gritty. The warm songs of 1999’s Dead Bees on a Cake, lit up by religious devotion, gave way to Blemish??’s vignettes describing the pitfalls and struggles of spiritual growth, which are redeemed by the lovely concluding ballad, “A Fire in the Forest.” ??Manafon has no such redeeming moment. The title refers to a village in Wales where the poet R. S. Thomas lived in the latter part of his life, and the songs present fragmentary meditations on this caustic, hermetic figure and his refusal of most of the appendages of modern life—perhaps resonating with Sylvian’s own New England life, reclusive yet haunted via digital technologies.
Rowe, who interviewed Sylvian via email, was a founding member of the pioneering British improvising collective AMM, which has, at various times in its 40-plus-year existence, included Cornelius Cardew, Eddie Prevost, and Manafon contributors Tilbury and Parker. Rowe has performed a Cagean transformation of the guitar, subjecting it to tabletop experimentation as part of an assemblage of pedals and everyday objects, opening up, like Sylvian does, new worlds of sound.
—Marcus Boon
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Keith Rowe I wonder about the vision leading to Manafon, an utterly unusual piece of work. In the back of my mind is that widely reported conversation between Morton Feldman and Phillip Guston in which Guston claims that he “does not finish a painting, but abandons it;” the point of abandonment occurring precisely “at the moment when it might become a painting.” Guston desired to make rather than to make something. With Manafon, was the impulse similar?
David Sylvian I’ll offer the analogy of archeology. Let’s say that after decades of work you find yourself standing in a sunken pit facing a partially concealed doorway. The journey to reach this spot has been one of personal evolution and obsession. When you started out you had no idea this location existed. Over time, knowledge and potential deepen. Many issues you struggled with earlier on in life you now respond to intuitively. This intuitive expansion, a self seated squarely in the heart of the greater self, lays the groundwork for what must be done. You come to trust in its wisdom even when it appears to lead you to points on a precipice. It beckons; you follow. Not blindly—although what is intuited is preverbal, the way forward is conveyed via a resonant network of signs and signals that you’re equipped to interpret.
You find yourself before a door. You’ll have to overcome numerous obstacles as best you can until you’re standing in the heart of the space it opens onto. Once there, illuminated, the space is invigoratingly alive, tangible. It’s utterly new to you, but it’s also confirmation of what you had intuited: it’s got a perceptible “thereness” about it.
In those early sessions in Vienna in 2004, working toward Manafon, we struck that particular kind of gold. I felt a sense of recognition and radical possibility. My musical journey led me to that location accompanied by a team of experts in the field, you among them. An emotional excavation and a musical exploration in conjunction produced Manafon, this odd genre-defying hybrid, a fairly unlikely meeting of two or more of music’s diverse tributaries. The reference point for me was the work I’d recently done with Derek Bailey for Blemish. The working method I’d stumbled upon while recording that album had proved itself more than up to the job of integrating original improv performances with lyrics and vocals. Expanding upon that one-on-one relationship with Derek to embrace larger improvising ensembles filled me with trepidation, but everyone involved couldn’t have been more gracious. An important part of the process was knowing the backgrounds of everyone involved, understanding the aesthetic at work, anticipating the chemistry of a particular constellation. This was the only “control” I could possibly exert prior to starting the process in motion.
As for the Feldman/Guston quote, yes, the process is the important part of the journey, the making. But there’s always a sense that it’s a movement toward something, not necessarily to the finished work, but onward. What happened with Manafon was that the work abandoned me. As I was writing and developing the material, the spirit holding all these disparate elements together just left me. I sat stunned for a moment and then realized: It’s over; this is as far as it goes.
KR Your analogy of the pit and the door resonates for me. Being in the pit would be like attempting to comprehend the situation during a live performance. The door… never too sure about its construction. At times it seems made of 200 or more layers; other times it appears as if there are 200-plus separate doors to be passed through. And, now and again, it’s a kaleidoscope of apertures to be negotiated all at the same time. Each one is an aspect of art or life that I should have considered before attempting to pass through, but there is no possibility of circumnavigation. I’ve started a list of these concerns: affection, degrees of opacity, absorption, disclosure and withdrawal, illusions, the nonself, a phrase’s architecture, the architecture of silence, harsh chimeras, anxiety, etc.
One aspect of negotiating these doors is the knowledge that you’re not alone. There seems to be a terra-cotta army of people around me. For instance, over my right shoulder is my old painting tutor Ben Hartley, on the other side is Cornelius Cardew, Gustav Mahler, Henry Purcell, Mark Rothko, Henri Poincaré, John Tilbury…
DS Outside of the historical figures from the recent or distant past, I envy this notion of teachers and mentors. I felt their absence, particularly in my early years, when I was likely in most need of them. I stepped from a world of teenage self-absorption into an exploitative commercial world. It was my own doing, of course, and it’s the nature of that particular game, but there were no authority figures who didn’t have a vested interest in a particular outcome, who weren’t busy persuading me that I, in fact, desired the same outcome. Since I left Japan I’ve befriended peers with whom I felt it possible to absorb a fair amount via osmosis. Some artists in whatever fields have an awful familiarity about them—it’s like entering an asylum and looking into the eyes of the residents acknowledging that they too have seen what you’ve seen. By standing on the periphery by design or circumstance, we’re better equipped to see through the conformities of the societies to which we belong.
Although I’ve embraced a ghostlike community that aligns me with the work of artists of the past, it’s healthy to reenact the process of separation at crucial periods to avoid stagnation or over-reliance. “Killing the father”—I’ve been on something of a patricidal killing spree for the best part of the last decade.