bomb mag

David's solo career interviews

bomb mag

Postby neonico on Mon Mar 15, 2010 1:36 am

b mag listing Preview BOMB 111 featuring Sam Lipsyte, Guy Ben-Ner, Carlos Reygadas, David Sylvian, Patricia Clarkson, and more!

cant wait :smt006
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Re: bomb mag

Postby heartofdavid on Mon Mar 15, 2010 3:56 pm

Thanks for the heads-up about this.
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Re: bomb mag

Postby banyan on Mon Mar 15, 2010 3:57 pm

Part of the interview plus photo from Bomb mag issue 111

http://bombsite.com/issues/111/articles/3447



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Re: bomb mag

Postby neonico on Mon Mar 15, 2010 4:19 pm

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


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.
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Re: bomb mag

Postby inkinthewell on Mon Mar 15, 2010 4:26 pm

David Sylvian wrote: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.


Well then, what door will he open next?
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans - JL 1940-1980
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Re: bomb mag

Postby Hawk on Mon Mar 15, 2010 7:21 pm

Wow! Thank you neonico this is great news!

Everything he writes resonates so deeply... everything they both write... I feel I have neglected looking for doors recently and settled for windows instead, but when there are many windows it is confusing, especially as one can only gaze outwards and contemplate visions, rather than entering fully into them.

Leaving paintings unfinished is also a guilty pleasure of mine... however it doesn't seem to work as well with writing... you can't start a story and build up a character, and then abandon it halfway through... God knows how many half-finished novels I have on my hard drive... it feels just like Sylvian says - the spirit of the piece suddenly departs for no apparent reason - and if I continue in that knowledge it will become a different piece of work altogether.... but then maybe that's not such a bad thing... I mean at least it gets it finished... hmmmmmm it's an interesting argument. I must think about it.

I like the final sentence:

“Killing the father”—I’ve been on something of a patricidal killing spree for the best part of the last decade.


So beautifully succinct. Going to think on that too.... it has given me a new story idea... :|
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Re: bomb mag

Postby Simonp on Tue Mar 16, 2010 2:03 am

Sorry but it's just another pseudo intellectual dull interview from our man. has he become totally void of humour?
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Re: bomb mag

Postby Simonp on Tue Mar 16, 2010 2:05 am

and I hate the Donald Milne photos..he just looks grey and old.
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Re: bomb mag

Postby neonico on Tue Mar 16, 2010 3:06 am

Simonp wrote:and I hate the Donald Milne photos..he just looks grey and old.


the man is grey and a bit older simonp and 52 at that ....but hes still handsome and with my younger years id except him as my boyfriend straight away if i ever got the chance.... :-D

but that will never be the case..... :( sniff
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Re: bomb mag

Postby Simonp on Tue Mar 16, 2010 3:28 am

There are a couple of the Milne photos where he looks good. I like the one where is laughing but his skin looks so grey in the others.

For the record...Manafon is still my most played record. I havent listened to a Sylvian album so much since Gone To EArth
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Re: bomb mag

Postby tracycowell on Tue Mar 16, 2010 3:46 am

I agree on the interview ,very dull, why is he always so serious,he needs to lighten up...He can sound so pretentious sometimes... As for the photos he does look aged but still remarkably handsome. My husband thinks he could easily slot into a Harry Potter film with that hair! Long hair is all well and good but not on the mature man,sorry dave... :?
Ask yourself: Do I know who I am? Perform sincere self-inquiry, and find the permanent solution to all of life’s problems. — Amma
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Re: bomb mag

Postby Simonp on Tue Mar 16, 2010 4:26 am

at last someone who agrees with me about his interviews..
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Re: bomb mag

Postby neonico on Tue Mar 16, 2010 5:29 am

tracycowell wrote:I agree on the interview ,very dull, why is he always so serious,he needs to lighten up...He can sound so pretentious sometimes... As for the photos he does look aged but still remarkably handsome. My husband thinks he could easily slot into a Harry Potter film with that hair! Long hair is all well and good but not on the mature man,sorry dave... :?


unfortunately i disagree long hair on a mature man like david is what makes him look handsome and distinguished

getting on the female male thing again never heard anyone say to a women when your older you schould keep your hair short thats perhaps why the most men crop the hair. i hate this female must that and male must that Categorization

my daughter said why can women have short or long hair but a man only short hair and is not tolerated when its long

her grandfather has long hair and is 80

i find it terrible when you are 52 and still have hair


you should show it heres enough men that are bald...

sorry this is a sore point by me


and getting back to the interview yes it is dull...

my dad said there use to be a funny reporter called paula yates she would ask really bazzar questions

perhaps we should get someone like her to interview david.... :smt006
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Re: bomb mag

Postby Simonp on Tue Mar 16, 2010 5:52 am

She's dead I'm afraid so she won't be asking any questions in the near future
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Re: bomb mag

Postby digimarsh on Tue Mar 16, 2010 7:01 am

I find most of his interviews in recent times of little value,to be honest, they tend to tread the same path and give very little solid info.David tends to ramble a bit i would say,he is very intelligent and articulate ,we have known this for years.
What we want to know is what are you working on now,when will it be released and what will it be like.By the way i agree recent photos of him do not do him any favours, he looks better in the flesh i would imagine.
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