Tag: Ryuichi Sakamoto

Ride

‘the centrepiece… it made sense of the whole’

In the months that followed the autumn 1987 release of David Sylvian’s Secrets of the Beehive, listeners came to recognise its restraint and sensitivity as marks of a very special album. The nine tracks from ‘September’ to ‘Waterfront’ took only around 35 minutes to experience. There was not a spare musical gesture throughout the running order, all that was present was what was necessary to give expression to the compositions that had come so naturally and unexpectedly to the songwriter as his Gone to Earth press tour had come to an end.

I think the first time I discovered that the album may not be exactly what Sylvian had envisaged was a 1988 interview with guitarist David Torn in which he discussed his involvement with Secrets... ‘He was that man that rang me,’ said Torn of first contacts, expanding on the recording at Miraval Studios in the South of France: ‘I really was left this wild card position where he didn’t know what he wanted me to do before I started reacting to the tracks. So we did a solo on ‘The Boy with the Gun’ and I played my koto guitar on ‘Maria’.

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I Measure Every Grief I Meet

‘a piercing Comfort it affords’

I have written before on this site about the impact of attending the Punkt festival in Kristiansand, Norway, for the first time in 2011, drawn there by David Sylvian’s involvement as Artist in Residence. There were so many first experiences, hearing musicians play live whose work I have subsequently taken time to explore and which I have found to be tremendously enriching. On the opening evening alone there was Arve Henriksen, John Tilbury, Evan Parker, Sidsel Endresen and Philip Jeck. All gave performances in an art gallery surrounded by David Sylvian and Atsushi Fukui’s installation Uncommon Deities. Recorded readings by Sylvian and live recitations of the Norwegian originals by both Paal-Helge Haugen and Nils Christian Moe-Repstad were interspersed with the music, Sylvian observing proceedings from the sound desk at the rear of the space. What a line up to have in one room.

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World Citizen – The Only Daughter (remixed by Ryoji Ikeda)

elaborating upon the emotional heart of the work

Early in January this year I made my way along The Strand in central London to 180 Studios, very much within my old stomping ground as a mid-80s student. Entering the basement down the black-walled staircase, I was led to a darkened space where bean bags were laid out on the ground in a circle, each visitor invited to recline and turn their attention to the ceiling above, which was in fact taken up by a huge LED screen.

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Weathered Wall

‘native to no one involved’

‘When I recorded Brilliant Trees, I started the album in Berlin, out of necessity, out of a low budget and it being the cheapest studio I could find, but I found that going to a strange place, meeting in a strange place — all these musicians for the first time, some of them I’d never even spoken to prior to meeting them — created a sense of adventure about the whole project,’ recalled David Sylvian. ‘I didn’t just feel it, I noticed it in the other musicians, and that they would give more of themselves in that environment rather than in their natural environment, their home town or whatever.’ (1991)

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Alphabet Angel

‘unconditional love’

At the peak of Japan’s popularity in 1982, David Sylvian was posed a question during an interview with The Face: ‘Do you like children?’ The 24-year old’s response was: ‘I hate children. Children in airplanes is my biggest hate, I just cannot stand having children in such close contact and not being able to get away from them.’ Whilst some might sympathise regarding experiences when flying, Sylvian’s outspokenness reminds me how young he and his fellow band-members were at the height of their success, and how they had existed within a relatively insular world to that point.

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