lukasgardiner wrote:I for one have been very moved by "there's a light..."
it has, from the very first listen, become my favourite sylvian long-form piece
It has indeed touched some soft spot in me, too, and it is something I love going back to. Like the "Do you know me now?" single.
I think that with these two works DS has maybe found a better path to follow the direction he took with "Blemish", and now, leaving aside how I feel about it, I see "Manafon" as a necessary failure.
There can be no doubt that Sylvian is not an 'abstract' artist, i.e. he'll never release a record of him yelling out the alphabet. He needs to work around fixed structures, even when deranging them. With "Manafon", though, the idea was to try to find a structure in something that had none (the improv sessions). An idea that surely thrilled him at the start, but my opinion is that the experience has not produced the sparks he was hoping for. But it wasn't useless.
With "There's a light..." (and the Kilowatt Hour project) and "Do you know me now?", but basically with everything he's dome since 2010, he's gone back to working the old way: asking musicians to contribute to something that has already been precisely outlined, although allowing them to work with more freedom than before, and even go beyond the outlines (the sort of thing that happened with the Derek Bailey tracks on "Blemish"). But if something goes too far (in the sense of an unwelcome direction, a wrong turn) he can still put it back in the right track.
After all, you can't say to someone that's improvising over nothing that he's hit a bum note. "What you saying, dude?!? Out of key? WHAT key?"
Merry Christmas to all, and a happy, truly happy 2015.