David Sylvian - The shaman of silence

An introverted and enigmatic personality, with little taste for show business, David Sylvian boasts a singular artistic path in constant evolution, marked by a varied and remarkable succession of styles and musical projects, as well as by a rich and illustrious roster of collaborators (Mick Karn, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Holger Czukay, Jon Hassell, Mark Isham, Kenny Wheeler, Robert Fripp, David Torn, Phil Palmer, Danny Thompson, Wayne Braithwaite, Ronny Drayton, Bill Nelson, Mel Collins and many others).

In 1983, having abandoned at the height of their success the glam-pop fascinations of Japan, caught between the compromises that would have turned him into a commercial megastar and the courtship of tempting offers - among them those of Andy Warhol (who was meant to write lyrics for a possible further Japan album) and Ivo Watts-Russell of 4AD (who wanted to involve him, at the very least, in the "This Mortal Coil" project) - Sylvian chose the harder solo path, the one bound up with art and inner search.

Although his chameleon-like look never settled on a fixed point, his compositions gradually surfaced over the years, taking shape in an increasingly essential and refined sound, one that seems light years away from his early appearances with Japan (where he was branded a hybrid of Sylvain of the New York Dolls and Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music). Yet just two years later, starting with the third album "Quiet Life", one could already glimpse what would become his classic style. Tracks such as "The Other Side of Life", "Nightporter" and "Ghosts" quietly traced the path the London artist would go on to walk alone. A relative solitude, though, since he would go on to be joined by an impressive string of personalities from the world of rock (and beyond).

Above all, one name stands out: Ryuichi Sakamoto. "Ryuichi has a merit I will always credit him with," Sylvian recalled, "that of stepping in at the key moments of my artistic life. When, back in the Japan days, my creativity hit a standstill, he convinced me to record the track Bamboo Houses together, and when he showed me the music for the soundtrack of 'Furyo', inviting me to write the lyrics for a song, the result was the sheer naturalness of 'Forbidden Colours'. Finally, it was he who exorcised the anxiety of my solo debut, encouraging me to make my first album."

Ryuichi has always stepped in at the key moments of my artistic life. It was he who exorcised the anxiety of my solo debut, encouraging me to make my first album.

(David Sylvian)

Merry Christmas Mr. Sakamoto

The starting point, then, lies entirely with the Japanese maestro, who had already blessed the new solo direction back in 1982 with the 7" "Bamboo Houses/Bamboo Music", two electronic-pop tracks penned by Sylvian and arranged on piano by Sakamoto.

But the bomb that truly detonated the London dandy's new career was called "Forbidden Colours": a splendid composition built on the interplay between the Oriental suggestions of Sakamoto's piano and Sylvian's anguished, seductive voice. The track serves as the central theme of the soundtrack to Nagisa Oshima's film "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" (released in Italy as "Furyo"). A cult film of the entire decade, set in Java in 1942 in a Japanese prison camp run by Captain Yonoi - played by Sakamoto himself, in one of his very rare film appearances - alongside an ambiguous David Bowie as the Australian officer Jack Celliers, toward whom Yonoi cannot contain his homosexual passion, in a tragic spiral that leads to the death of them both.

"Forbidden Colours" expresses precisely this sense of emotional fullness and anguished frustration, also through lyrics that are nothing short of heart-rending: “Here am I, a lifetime away from you/ The blood of Christ, or the beat of my heart/ My love wears forbidden colours/ My life believes…”.

The track's worldwide success pushed the former Japan frontman to record (in Berlin) his first solo album, Brilliant Trees (1984), on which he nonetheless still relied on two key figures from his former band - Steve Jansen on drums and percussion, and Richard Barbieri on keyboards - placing them alongside a star-studded cast that included Sakamoto himself (on piano and keyboards), Jon Hassell and Mark Isham on trumpet, Danny Thompson on bass, Holger Czukay (the legendary former leader of Germany's Can) on guitar, French horn and voice, and Steve Nye on keyboards and piano.

The result is music that edges close to the avant-garde, picking up the languid, dreamlike tones of Japan's electronic ballads but blending them with minimalist, ambient and psychedelic techniques, flirting here and there with jazz and funk, while steering well clear of any comparison with the Japan formula. Even Sylvian's understated look - captured on the cover by Yuka Fuji in handsome black and white - is a far cry from the glittering glamour image of the "Adolescent Sex" days.

Standout moments include the tense funk of the single "Red Guitar", driven by piano chords, the acoustic ballad "The Ink In The Well", dedicated to the painter Picasso and immortalized in a video directed by Dutch filmmaker Anton Corbijn, and the tormented "Weathered Wall", which also bears the mark of Hassell and his unmistakable trumpet - a track with an unsettled gait, in which Sylvian's singing carves furrows of aching depth. Everything grows more rarefied and expansive ("Nostalgia"); only the opening "Pulling Punches" still retains some link to the old groove, by now transfigured into a few pulses over bloodless sonic carcasses (like the insistent bassline of "Backwaters").

The sonic interplay is consistently sophisticated and captivating, but the ex-Japan leader doesn't always seem to have the melodic chops to fully justify the songs, which often end up taking refuge in slow, listless instrumentals, like the imposing title track, co-written with Hassell, which marks an ideal crossroads between ambient textures and ethno-world sounds, an epic, visionary mantra of over eight minutes.

A keen enthusiast of graphic arts and photography, Sylvian manages to bring his polaroid exhibition "Perspectives" to Tokyo. While in Japan, he's approached by a local TV station to shoot a documentary in the capital's industrial district, alongside local director Yasayuki Yamaguchi. The soundtrack's main theme is a long instrumental suite titled "Steel Cathedrals", recorded at Sakamoto's studios together with Czukay, Wheeler, Hassell and Jansen. An operation with zero commercial appeal, which Virgin decides to release only as a limited-edition cassette, Alchemy – An Index Of Possibilities, which also includes three ambient pieces later folded into the EP Words With The Shaman" ("Steel Cathedrals" would later be reissued on CD in the 2000s, together with two other tracks – "Kin" and "A Brief Conversation Ending In Divorce" – taken from the 1989 EP "Pop Song").

The next step is precisely the EP Words With The Shaman (1985), a three-part instrumental suite performed together with Hassell, Czukay and the ever-present Jansen, drawn from a multimedia show with which Sylvian toured the world. The record once again blends exotic sounds, tribal rhythms and modern technology, and anticipates the subsequent avant-garde experiments made together with Czukay.

"Gone To Earth" has the forbidden, evanescent colors of a mirage, that flicker painted in abstract hues with which dreams dissolve the moment you wake.

(Giampiero Vigorito, Rockstar)

Landing on Earth

With the double album Gone To Earth (1986), its cover graced by a fine painting by Russell Mills, Sylvian returns instead to the "electronic ballad" style that had defined his solo debut, once again flanked by a cast of top-tier musicians: Robert Fripp, Bill Nelson, Kenny Wheeler, Phil Palmer, alongside the ever-present Jansen and Barbieri.

The result is his first solo masterpiece, featuring some truly memorable feats: the atmospheric funk of the single "Taking The Veil", cadenced by Palmer's acoustic guitar and Ian Madman's pulsing bass; the tribute to Milan Kundera on "Laughter And Forgetting", with Sylvian's smooth vocals propped up only by piano before an epic finale in which Wheeler's soprano brass soars; the mesmerizing "Before The Bullfight", an enveloping, hypnotic suite driven by Jansen's drumming and laid over Barbieri's soft synthetic beds, with sparing guitar interjections from Nelson and distant trumpet dissonances; the title track, with Fripp's disorienting guitar work underpinning Sylvian's spoken-word vocal; the wild percussion of "River Man" (enriched by Mel Collins's sax flourishes); the dreamlike serenade of "Silver Moon", in which the London dandy's smooth singing is elevated by an ethereal arrangement, woven through with delicate guitar touches, sax solos and piano phrases.

The second record, meanwhile, presents a series of instrumental pieces, diffused across diaphanous, opalescent electronic landscapes that immerse the listener in a dreamlike mood, at times bordering on transcendent ecstasy.

Gone To Earth confirms the full maturation of a modern, well-rounded composer, capable of fusing electronic beats and acoustic instruments into a web of delicate harmonic connective tissue. His music is a waking dream. As Giampiero Vigorito writes in Rockstar: "This record has the forbidden, evanescent colors of a mirage, that flicker painted in abstract hues with which dreams dissolve the moment you wake. There's the marble luminosity of ancient Greece, the sweetness of an English garden, the human nativity scene of an old illustration of Shanghai, the golden sand of the Sahara, the mirrored mosaic of Chinese rice paddies. One can also look higher still, to a celestial harmony of planets slowly drifting through space, carrying us on distant, wondrous sounds."

The next project is a new collaboration with Czukay, taking shape at Can Studio in Cologne under the name Plight & Premonition, also involving the drummer of the legendary kraut-rock band, Jaki Liebezeit, and radio host Karl Lippegaus. The result is a long two-movement improvisation, steeped in pictorial, abstract ambient music.

The experiment alongside the Danzig-born composer is repeated in 1988 on a new ambient work, Flux + Mutability, which – besides Liebezeit – also features Can guitarist Michael Karoli and trumpeter Markus Stockhausen, son of the legendary composer Karlheinz.

It's a period of feverish creativity for the ex-Japan leader, who seems utterly uninterested in the commercial implications of his output. So, in 1990, comes a new experimental recording, Ember Glance: The Permanence Of Memory, effectively the soundtrack to a collaboration between Sylvian and English artist Russell Mills. The pieces were composed to accompany a sculpture and experimental art installation created by various international artists at Tokyo Creative '90, hosted at Tokyo's Temporary Museum. The CD also comes with a lavish illustrated booklet. Those two tracks – "The Beekeeper's Apprentice" and "Epiphany" – would later be revived by Sylvian on the 1999 anthology Approaching Silence.

Thinking about the beehive, I found myself drawn back to the ancient image of the ideal family and a scale of values tied to spirituality. With the songs on "Secrets Of The Beehive" I was expressing the need to belong, to be accepted, while at the same time conveying a sense of isolation.

(David Sylvian)

The Wonder of the Hive

The English composer's artistic maturation culminates in the spectacular Secrets Of The Beehive (1987), which to this day remains his absolute masterpiece. The album, almost entirely acoustic, with arrangements by Sakamoto and performances from (among others) Sakamoto himself, Mark Isham and David Torn, marks a return to the song form at the expense of instrumental suites. The result is formidable arrangements and simple yet deeply moving chords, which bring out a more conversational, less lyrical Sylvian, caught between dreamy whispers, nursery rhymes and spectral poems.

Across its thirty-four minutes, the record unfolds like a painting steeped in predominantly dark tones, rich in nuance and strongly lit up by the intense bursts of light scattered throughout.

A work shrouded in half-light, as suggested by Yuka Fuji's portrait of Sylvian on the back cover, as well as by the overall design entrusted for the occasion to Vaughan Oliver (a constant presence at 4AD), in which Sylvian whispers, declaims, and transcends, immersing himself with deep devotion in the recesses of the soul through his dense, precious vocal phrasing. An almost entirely acoustic album, magically arranged by Sakamoto, able to shape Sylvian's intuitions without ever burying them, enhancing their sheer beauty with harmonic textures masterfully performed by exceptional musicians such as Mark Isham, David Torn, Phil Palmer, Danny Thompson, Steve Jansen, Danny Cummings, and Sakamoto himself.

Secrets Of The Beehive takes the form of essential song-poetry, where the lyrics, even more hermetic and emblematic than on previous records, increasingly express a need for introspection, wrestling with ghosts of the past, existential unease, dark forces and solitude. All of it accompanied by a constant glimmer of hope.

Nine tracks of intense beauty that, while each possessing its own distinct personality, together seem to form a single, cohesive journey: the fleeting portrait of autumnal moods in "Septmber"; the aching ballad "The Boy With The Gun"; the evocative chiaroscuro of the ethereal "Maria"; the gorgeous flamenco arpeggio accompanying the metaphorical lyrics of "When Poets Dreamed Of Angels"; the dark, noir-ish atmospheres of "Mother And Child" and "The Devil's Own"; the solitude and echo of memory over the orchestral carpets of "Waterfront"; the joy and sacredness of "Let The Happiness In"; and the distant reverberations of the delicate harmonies of "Orpheus", a nod to the legendary, mysterious bard.

To these nine gems, the CD edition adds one more as a bonus track: "Forbidden Colours", a new version of Sakamoto and Sylvian's masterpiece single from 1983.

Secrets Of The Beehive gives life to a music of thought that meets the soul, embracing the allure of the unknown to project itself into the deepest reaches of perception — a purity that allows no middle ground: it either enchants or alienates.

A masked reunion

Even in light of this solo success, the British dandy's next move is startling: a kind of "masked reunion" of Japan, under the pseudonym Rain Tree Crow (1991).

Seven years after their last concert together (in Nagoya, Japan), David Sylvian, Mick Karn, Steve Jansen and Richard Barbieri reconvene in the studio, but things don't exactly go smoothly — quite the opposite. Personal and artistic clashes flare up among the former bandmates, and everything ends up in the hands of the domineering Sylvian, to the point that the result ultimately feels more like one of his solo records. Phil Palmer, the guitarist brought in to flesh out the album, would later recall a tension that was far from positive, especially since it involved people who, outside the project, still held each other in high regard and genuine affection. And yet the record — released after an exhausting battle with Virgin, who wanted to put it out under the Japan name — delivers moments of absolute beauty and elegance. It's a subdued, understated, deeply melancholic and autumnal picture, born of a band that grew up on electronics suddenly grappling with an acoustic dimension, a choice that only deepens its ache and depth. Verses and choruses never feel forced, moving instead in perfect balance, within a remarkably rarefied, expansive sound that sits much closer to Sylvian's solo work.

Recorded in various studios across Europe, between France, England and Italy, the thirteen tracks forge a thoroughly captivating and evocative art-rock, starting with the gorgeous single "Blackwater", almost a waking dream guided by a radiant melody, and the overture "Big Wheels In Shanty Town", an instrumental driven by Karn's pulsing bass and Jansen's obsessive drumming. But it's above all Sylvian's voice that lends these songs a unique warmth, as on the loping "Every Colour You Are" or the overcast title track.

There's always a vibration smoldering beneath the skin of these expansive compositions: on "Red Heart (As Summertime Ends)" it springs from the drum hits and Palmer's guitar chords; on "Pocket Full Of Change" from the drumming's steady pace and thin layers of organ; while on "New Moon At Red Deer Wallow" it's African drums and electric bass that drive the dance.

Sylvian is the mastermind behind the whole operation, and doesn't shy away from picking up the guitar himself to underscore his litany on "Boat's For Burning", elsewhere ceding the spotlight to guests such as Bill Nelson and Michael Brook, who shine on guitars on "Blackcrow Hits Shoe Shine City".

The circle closes with the percussive interlude "A Reassuringly Dull Sunday", the dialogue between Sylvian's banjo and Jansen's marimba on "Scratching On The Bible Belt", and Barbieri's magical synth on "Cries And Whispers", while the bonus track "I Drink To Forget" doesn't add much.

Rain Tree Crow would remain the London quartet's final performance together.

In 1991, indeed, Sylvian returns as a solo artist with the suite The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, drawn from a cd/book by Russell Mills, “Ember Glance” (the cd would be released nine years later as Approaching Silence). That same year the London musician throws himself into two other significant collaborations: first he writes and performs two tracks for Sakamoto’s album “Heartbeat” (“Heartbeart (Tainai Kaiki II) Returning To The Womb” and “Cloud#9”), then he takes part in the concept album “Sahara Blue”, released by France’s Hector Zazou.

With the Crimson King

But the most important collaboration of the period unfolds two years later, and it involves nothing less than progressive rock’s absolute monarch. Robert Fripp had already been in the studio with Sylvian for the Gone To Earth sessions. The rapport between the two – both introverted, reserved and little inclined to compromise – proves surprisingly tight-knit, to the point of prompting the King Crimson leader to ask Sylvian to become the band’s singer. Having turned down that unwieldy offer, the London dandy nonetheless agrees to set out with Fripp on a tour that, between March and June 1992, takes him across Europe and Japan, showcasing an unprecedented cocktail of sounds and suggestions.

The natural outcome of this partnership is an album credited to both names, which gathers the fruits of the live experience along with a series of new compositions recorded at Dreamland Studios in Woodstock.

A complex, elusive work, The First Day (1993) seems to spring more from the tortuous guitar experiments of late-period Fripp than from Sylvian’s ascetic, exotic textures, though Sylvian still contributes the restless existentialism of his lyrics. The sound is robust and neurotic, streaked with funk and electronics, yet also steeped in the tension typical of the famous frippertronics (the recording techniques devised by Fripp together with Eno, which make it possible to build a canon-like sonic carpet out of a single guitar through repeated overdubs).

After the funky, lopsided opener “God’s Monkey”, it’s the driving pulse of “Jean The Birdman” that carries the whole record, thanks to the successful marriage of Fripp’s throbbing engine and Sylvian’s sinuous singing. The formula is repeated – albeit with less melodic verve – on “Firepower”, with ethereal vocalizing over a rough layer of feedback guitars, and “Brightness Falls”, where Trey Gunn lends Fripp a hand by cranking out riffs in quick succession.

Even more experimental moments like “20Th Century Dreaming” (claustrophobic and disorienting, bordering on psychedelia), “Darshan” (17 minutes of funk pulsations and frippertronics) and “Bringing Down The Light” (the most ethereal and abstract piece of the set) seal a partnership that, without being dazzling, certainly reveals the balance and class of two masters, both willing to give up a little of their own style in order to reach a shared identity.

Buoyed by this partnership, Sylvian and Fripp set off on tour again in October 1993 across Britain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Japan, the United States and Canada. Out of this comes the fine live album Damage, which captures the closing dates at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Alongside tracks from The First Day, it also features some previously unreleased pieces, such as “Damage”, “Blind Light Of Heaven” and “The First Day”, as well as reworkings of tracks from Gone To Earth (“Wave”, “Riverman”, the title track) and from Rain Tree Crow (“Every Colour You Are”). The album would later be reissued (with a different track listing) in 2001.

The collaboration between the two is officially brought to a close by the multimedia installation Redemption at the P3 Gallery in Tokyo, for which Sylvian writes the music while Fripp writes and recites the texts.

Meanwhile, life in London starts to feel too confining for the former Japan dandy: “The London routine made me claustrophobic. I began looking into places that might reawaken my interests – including non-musical ones, like abstract painting and photography. I settled on Minneapolis, where, among other things, I met my wife”. He’s referring to the singer and poet of Mexican origin Ingrid Chavez, with whom Sylvian moves to California in 1996. Their union, which would last until 2004, would produce two daughters, Ameera and Isobel.

After wrapping up the 1995 Slow Fire Tour, in which he reinterpreted his back catalogue in a stripped-down piano-guitar-voice format, Sylvian devotes himself mainly to collaborations: he takes part in the “Marco Polo” project by the Alesini-Andreoni duo, duets with Andrea Chimenti on “Ti ho aspettato”, and contributes to works by Russell Mills (“Undark”, “Pearl and Umbra”), Ana Voog (“Anavoog.com”) and Sakamoto (“Discord”).

In “Dead Bees On A Cake” the bees are a metaphor for the ego, while the cake represents the object of desire.

(David Sylvian)

Back to the Hive

Four years thus pass before the release of Dead Bees On A Cake (1999). Between the “secrets of the hive” (Secrets Of The Behive) and the “dead bees on a cake” (Dead Bees On A Cake), there has to be a connection: “Thinking about the hive, I found myself reconnecting with the ancient notion of the ideal family and a scale of values tied to spirituality – Sylvian explains – With the songs on ‘Secrets Of The Behive’ I was expressing the need to belong, to be accepted, while at the same time voicing a sense of isolation. The bees, on the other hand, are a metaphor for the ego, while the cake is the object of desire”.

Once again the London musician assembles a spectacular ensemble of collaborators: Kenny Wheeler on horns, Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell on guitars, Steve Jansen on drums, Tommy Barbarella on keyboards, and the faithful Sakamoto all take part in the sessions, held between New York and Minneapolis.

14 tracks thus emerge, seeming to sublimate the old secrets of the beehive in an even more ethereal, impalpable key. The themes range from spiritual meditations to an interest in his new family dimension (in particular, the relationship with his partner Ingrid).

The masterpiece of the whole work is the opening track "I Surrender", which instantly transports the listener into an "other" universe, governed by hazy, melancholy settings painted by strings orchestrated by maestro Sakamoto, with yet another extraordinary vocal performance from Sylvian, surrounded by delicate filigrees of guitar (Ribot), flugelhorn (Wheeler) and flute (Feldman), for a score of transcendent funk-jazz. Another emotional peak of the album is "The Shining Of Things", where orchestral openings sharpen the pathos, underpinning the London singer's nostalgic crooning.

Sylvian forgoes the immediacy of some earlier work in favour of a greater stretching-out of sound. Yet there's no shortage of thrilling instrumental refinements, such as Frisell's resonator guitar on the interlude "Dobro #1", Sakamoto's magical piano chimes on "Alphabet Angel", John Giblin's bass pulses on the abstract "Wanderlust", or the dialogue between Fender Rhodes, harpsichord and Wheeler's horn on "Thaleim", a poignant episode with ambient-house atmospheres and lyrics of aching tenderness ("Take the shadow from the road I walk upon/ Be my sunshine, sunshine").

Sylvian, accompanied by the sensual whispers of his partner Ingrid on the seductive "Café Europa", explores a kaleidoscope of countless sounds. He ranges from bluesy shades (the taut "Midnight Sun", with inserts from Charles Brown and Johnny Moore's "Drifting Blues") to tribal grooves in an ethno-world vein ("Godman"), from the post-everything rock of "Pollen Path" (with slide guitars and Ribot's acoustic work to the fore) to the Indian liturgy of "Khrisna Blue", amid gusts of bansuri and gong strikes, before closing the record by setting to keyboards the prayer of Hindu guru Shree Maa ("Praise") and giving himself over to the sweet, dreamlike sunset of "Darkest Dreaming" (co-written with Armenian musician Dijvan Gasparyan).

An album that's almost never immediately engaging, but of undoubted elegance and depth, which heightens the transcendent vocation of the former Japan frontman. To those who lump it together with new age, particularly in vogue at the time, Sylvian retorts by defining it as "a superficial sweetener for human problems", while reaffirming that he has embarked on a complex path of philosophical and spiritual inquiry.

After the instrumental album Approaching Silence (which revisits the suite "The Beekeeper's Apprentice"), Everything & Nothing is also released, a double collection rich in unreleased material and new versions of old songs. A work that confirms all of Sylvian's class, a musician who has never stopped experimenting since his sister introduced him to music: "The silence of our house was broken by her records, which spread the soul of Tamla Motown and the Beatles", he has recalled. Since then, his search has continued along the lines laid down by his favourite musicians: "The Miles Davis of the electric period, Nick Drake, Robert Wyatt, John Martyn, Scott Walker and the Lou Reed of 'Berlin'. But — he concludes — I believe the experience of living is the greatest source of inspiration".

The turn of the millennium

For Blemish (2003), the first release on his own label Samadhisound, the former Japan frontman retreats into the form of the soliloquy: gone are the prestigious guests and the full-bodied arrangements, Sylvian plays almost everything himself, his voice — now decidedly more spoken than sung — accompanied by a few minimal electronic effects, some guitar from the renowned free-jazz improviser Derek Bailey, and little else. A record steeped in the same dryness and intimacy found, in very different contexts, in Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" or Robert Wyatt's "Dondestan".

It opens with the title track, introduced by looping electronic effects, then the voice comes in — unchanged, as deep as ever, carrying the whole piece in a slow psalmody, a kind of third-millennium mantra, with a chilling yet lyrical contrast between the human quality of the voice and the robotic, at times dissonant, accompaniment. The soul of the entire work is already present in the opening track. It continues with "The Good Son", where this time the accompaniment is largely entrusted to Bailey's acoustic guitar improvisations, with Sylvian seeming less to sing than to tell us a story, in a track that offers little to a distracted listen.

Then comes "The Only Daughter", which revisits the first track in an even more minimal fashion, with a softer accompaniment reminiscent of his work with Czukay. The mood doesn't change with "The Heart Knows Better": the voice continues its slow unfolding, languid yet inexorable, hypnotic yet unsettling; there is no consolation or serenity in "Blemish", but an imperceptible retreat into a silent anguish. Next come the very brief "She Is Not", again featuring Bailey, and "Late Night Shopping", where an unprecedented singability for the record emerges. "How Little We Need To Be Happy", with Bailey once more particularly deconstructive and cacophonous, leads into the finale, marked by Fennesz's electronic swirls on "A Fire In The Forest", which closes the album in a way that's both sharper and less anguished, almost romantic.

2004 finds the English artist busy with new collaborations, including contributing lyrics to Sakamoto's "World Citizen" EP, a vocal contribution to a track from Fennesz's "Venice" ("Transit"), a 7" alongside Blonde Redhead ("Messenger"), a joint appearance with Peter Buck on the Zazou-Caillaud duo's electronic composition "Quadri+Chromies", and a theme for the Japanese manga series Monster ("For The Love Of Life").

In 2005, instead, Sylvian devotes himself to the parallel project Nine Horses, an ensemble that sees him alongside his inseparable brother Steve Jansen and the electronic alchemist Burnt Friedman. Truth be told, it's practically the whole cast of musicians that impresses, given that the names include Theo Travis (one of the finest flautists around), but also jazz bassist Keith Lowe, Thomas Hass on saxophone, even Arve Henriksen of Supersilent on trumpet, and above all maestro Sakamoto on piano.

The album Snow Borne Sorrow (2005), however, fails to leave a mark, taking refuge in classy arrangements, plenty of fine form, a voice that is — and remains — unique and inimitable. But with songs that rely solely on craft, on pronounced mannerism, and are, as such, utterly forgettable.

It's hard to grasp what role Friedman actually plays on an album that couldn't be more pop-jazzy, where the electronic arrangement is often relegated to the background behind the arsenal of horns and brushed drums dressing the compositions.

There's no shortage, however, of tracks of undoubted elegance, starting with the opening "Wonderful World", featuring the sensual whispers of Stina Nordenstam, and the following "Darkest Birds", enriched by Henriksen's trumpet. Worth noting too are the sax and clarinet inlays on "The Banality Of Evil" (ambitious, if somewhat unresolved) and the loop around which the litany of "Atom And Cell" is built.

Sakamoto leaves his mark above all in the sublime chimes that creep into the noisy title track, while Hayden Chisholm and Theo Travis's horns heat up the soft textures of "A History Of Holes". The album closes, amid vibraphones and especially rarefied atmospheres, with "The Librarian", a track built largely around vocal modulations.

Sylvian's artistic path, after all, is no longer that of a young man seduced by the New York dolls, nor that of the romantic poet infatuated with European disco-dance, but on Snow Borne Sorrow there's also precious little left of the Japanese influence, of the subtle rhythmic charm that once enchanted even the hard-hearted.

Beyond the thresholds of sound

With the Nine Horses project wrapped up, Sylvian throws himself into further collaborations ("Angels" on Punkt's album "Crimes Scenes", plus the instrumental "When Loud Weather Buffeted Naoshima" for a Japanese exhibition and three tracks on "Slope", his brother Steve's debut album), before giving birth to a new turning point.

This unfettered evolution produces, on Manafon (2009), the first true revolution in his sonic portfolio, radicalizing his ensemble writing even further. The new sonic structure belongs more to jazz and the avant-garde than to experimental rock or the more cultivated strains of ambient, with the musicians seemingly focused on the impossible task of building an undefinable sound out of infinite empty spaces.

The opening "Small Metal Gods" is the manifesto of Sylvian's new vocal power: elegiac, tenor-like tones and a delicate vibrato intensely describe the loss of faith, while elegant notes and electronic provocations underline the intellectual torment. The voice is entrusted with the full harmonic weight of the songs, becoming the primary instrument, the sole keeper of the painful truths the lyrics reveal without apparent anguish, even as fear freezes the emotions. Music replaces singing; comfort and tenderness come, in fact, from the sparse notes the musicians craft while taking care not to contaminate the voice.

"The Rabbit Skinner" churns through fragments of extreme jazz and noise with futurist overtones; the sonic turbulence of Christian Fennesz and Evan Parker duets with the languor of piano and cello, while Sylvian's voice is rich with seductive harmonies that slip free of the music's metrics.

On "The Greatest Living Englishman", the Japanese quartet of Akiyama, Sachiko, Nakamura and Yoshihide draw from John Cage's insights a set of noises and modernisms that choke off any chance of redemption; the hopeless vocal honors suicide as the only alternative to moral decay. "Emily Dickinson" and "The Department Of Dead Letters" restructure the harmonic tone with flowing piano sounds and vibrant soprano sax improvisations, while the melodic lightness (?) of "Random Acts Of Senseless Violence" settles over a harsher sonic bed. The only track that doesn't push the emotional tension to its limit is "Snow White in Appalachian", where the voice relaxes with confidence while the ending opens a sliver of light in what has by now become a cathartic sonic landscape.

The album closes with its longest instrumental intro: the voice stays in waiting, the sounds growing ever more solitary, losing all contact with the disjointed, elusive singing, while the figure of Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, evoked elsewhere on the record, becomes almost a moral projection of the artist himself. What's clear is that improvisation and unpredictability — two traits that once seemed alien to this artist's musical makeup — are in fact the real protagonists of this enchanting album, whose only weak point may lie in the narcissistic excess of "125 Spheres".

The following year, David Sylvian gathers his many and varied collaborations from the 2000s into the rich retrospective Sleepwalkers, an album that seems to draw a line under a musical cycle, while Died In The Wool (2011) opens the door to the artist's new sonic era, wrapping Manafon's textures in new clothing and warming up the emotions that had remained hidden behind its stark, innovative arrangements. Amid carefully defined orchestrations, David Sylvian's voice reclaims its central role, reigniting the emotional charge of his music and reconciling the artist with his more romantic, seductive side, as the closing "The Last Days Of December" demonstrates. 

Ultimately, Died In The Wool rises above the usual pitfalls of a collection of outtakes and variations. David Sylvian would go on to confirm himself as a meta-conceptual artist, scattering creative seeds in various directions — first with an artistic calendar titled Impossible Beauty (meant to be followed by an international tour), and then by assembling a further career retrospective, A Victim Of Stars, which for the first time casts a long bridge across the musician's artistic evolution.

The presence of the intriguing unreleased "Where's Your Gravity?", a reworking of "Ghosts", and a handful of gems born from collaborations ("Bamboo Houses", "Bamboo Music", "Pop Song", "Heartbeat", "Forbidden Colours" in the version previously included on the compact disc edition of Secrets Of The Beehive, etc.) make for a double CD of considerable interest.

The compilation's overall vision comes across as complete and exhilarating, despite its constant stylistic renewal, and it foreshadows further reworkings of his back catalogue (Amplified Gestures) as well as a photographic installation and exhibition project titled "Glowing Enigmas", commissioned by the Impossible Project, a company that produces instant film for Polaroid cameras following the closure of the original American factory.

In 2013 Sylvian crosses paths with a true guru of experimental electronics, Stephan Mathieu, enlisted to reinterpret Blemish, ten years on, in instrumental form, on the gorgeous Wandermüde. Picking back up the sonic demos from which part of the original album's tracks had sprung, Mathieu sets about a genuine stretching of time and space, starting from what had already been the most ethereal digression on the original: "The Only Daughter", which here becomes "Saffron Laudanum", brushing closely against Sylvian's work with Czukay. Closer to its source is "Velvet Revolution" — formerly "The Heart Knows Better" — stripped of its fleeting rhythmic skeleton and filled instead with synthetic flows and effects. "Trauma Ward" is an overt reprise of the album's instrumental bonus track, from which it barely strays, while the drone-flood of "The Farther Away I Am (Minus 30 Degrees)" is a welcome assemblage of unreleased material. The already oppressive "The Good Son" takes on a further dose of darkness as "Dark Pastoral", with Derek Bailey's guitar replaced by John Tilbury's piano, before two gems crown the record in its closing stretch: "Telegraphed Mistakes", an electro-acoustic ride that filters the title track of "Blemish" through radio waves and streams of glitch, and "Deceleration", a plunge into heavenly ambience for the wonderful "A Fire In The Forest", with Fennesz's contribution this time limited to guitar alone.

Wandermüde brings Sylvian's music back to a dimension of humanity that seemed to have been set aside of late, in favor of a bold and restless pursuit of the "new". Certainly not a return to the romantic sound of Secrets Of The Beehive — if anything, further proof of just how far today's Sylvian has drifted from those sounds — but an essential record for anyone who loved Blemish or even his more distant ambient work. On the whole, simply hearing a heartbeat return to his music can only be wonderful news.

There’s A Light That Enters Houses With No Other House In Sight, released in November 2014, instead consists of a single 64-minute suite that serves as an instrumental backdrop for a reading, by American writer Franz Wright, of verses drawn from his own poems. In fact, the work is structured in ten sections tied to as many poems (“Wintersleep”, “The Wall”, “The Peyote Journal Breaks Off”, “Dead Seagull”, “Blade”, “Transfusion”, “Imago”, “Nude With Handgun And Rosary”, “Song”).

Wright's pained recitation – he was seriously ill at the time – unfolds over ambient and glitch textures crafted by Sylvian once again in collaboration with Fennesz. Particularly striking is the first movement, with piano disrupted by electronic glitches and other electroacoustic noises, alongside the Austrian maestro's treated guitar. The only outside contribution comes from a sample of verses by the ancient Chinese poet Tao Yuan Ming (“Beneath the Eastern hedge I choose a chrysanthemum, And my gaze wanders slowly to the Southern hills”), while the closing piece (“Song”) is accompanied by a touching string quartet.

Meanwhile, in 2015 Malin Publishing Ltd. released the Italian edition of “On the periphery – The solo years”, a biography by Christopher E. Young charting David Sylvian's entire solo career.

Contributions by Michele Chiusi (“Blemish”), Gianfranco Marmoro (“Manafon”, “Died In The Wool”, “A Victim Of Stars”), Marco Bercella (“Snow Borne Sorrow”) and Matteo Meda (“Wandermüde”)

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