This recording is what we have come to expect from Sylvian: creative splashes of sounds and unique stylings, where various patterns emerge, dissolve, fade and reappear, where the unexpected is always the norm. It is a rough terrain with burbling low frequencies, sometimes unidentifiable and haunting noises, and a sense of unease. It lurches from savage discordance to near silence. But the music is mostly in the background serving as a platform and even more as a challenge for Sylvian to stretch beyond previously settled patterns. His quiet, warm vocals add melodic subtlety and providing depth and drama without adding distraction.

Manafon is a sister album to Blemish (Samadhi Sound, 2003), Sylvian's previous excursion into improvised music where he teamed up with guitaristDerek Bailey and pushed himself in another creative direction and plateau (a record also shadowed by a divorce and long term relationship break-up). On that record he used the immediacy of writing words over music improvised during a short time, both acts happening simultaneously. For this record he took the same approach as on Blemish but also gathered an impressive cast of various free-improv musicians. The musicians' unique music excursions can easily be compared to musical approximations of abstract art where each composition unfolds unpredictably. Their interactions add plenty of emotional depth.

Manafon is a strange record where every detail, each fragment, each sensation within, is compelling. It leaves senses bristling with the shock of the new. As a record it sounds more like a theatre play rather than a musical piece with gaps in dynamics taking on the air of a dramatic pause. Sylvian's beautiful baritone floats around, at times seemingly diving deep. It sure invites loads of thinking and volumes of analysis. The title comes from the name of a village in Wales, a place where poet R.S. Thomas lived and worked and where he wrote his first three volumes of poetry.

Manafon is not an easy record to listen to and many will be severely disappointed. It is not as accessible as many of his other records nor is it easy to warm up to, which means that many may dismiss it upon a single listen or two, never giving it the time it demands in order to be felt, not to mention understood. To get to that point, a lot of patience and spinning would be necessary. Sylvian inspires, scares, confuses, provokes, stirs up the senses and that's what true artists do. It seems that only those listeners that are dedicated to the artist will probably be patient enough to stay and decode it. This record is not an easy ride but a totally worthwhile one.

NENAD GEORGIEVSKI

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Tuesday 27 April - LONDON Koko*
0870 432 5527 | www.koko.uk.com | www.ticketweb.co.uk | www.seetickets.com

Wednesday 28 April - LIVERPOOL, Philharmonic Hall
0151 709 3789 | www.liverpoolphil.com

Friday 30 April - BRISTOL, Colston Hall
0117 922 3686 | www.colstonhall.org

Sunday 2 May - GATESHEAD, The Sage Gateshead
0191 443 4661 | www.thesagegateshead.org

Tuesday 4 May - EDINBURGH, Usher Hall
0131 228 1155 | www.usherhall.co.uk

Wednesday 5 May - MANCHESTER, Bridgewater Hall
0161 907 9000 | www.bridgewater-hall.org

Thursday 6 May - BRIGHTON FESTIVAL, Dome
01273 709709 | www.brightondome.org

Friday 7 May - COVENTRY
024 7652 4524 | www.warwickartscentre.co.uk

My Dad was never really much of a New Romantic so the work of Japan passed me by, its only through the recent collaborations with Christian Fennesz and Arve Henriksen (and noted positions on The Wire and Mapsadaisical’s end of year lists) that David Sylvian has come to my attention.

I’ve been meaning to buy some of his music for a while, his contribution to the Fennesz track Transit from the album Venice is an incredibly captivating vocal emerging from the warm, creeping static.

You could wax lyrical about Sylvian’s voice for some time, his smooth baritone compliments the sparse electronic arrangements of Fennesz perfectly. It is no surprise to hear that Fennesz was involved in Manafon.

From the first track, which starts with some sparse guitar picking and hushed, distant murmurs, his voice washes straight over you, alarmingly close.  Whereas on TransitSylvian’s voice seems almost intertwined with Fennesz’ electronics, the texture of his voice echoing the textured guitar drones, here his voice floats above the music with occasional sharp plucks of guitar seemingly bouncing off his warm vocals. That’s not to say it isn’t cohesive; such is the strength of his voice the instruments are in constant reaction to it, the vocals providing the melody and binding the sparse strings, piano and electronics. This is perhaps best exemplified on The Greatest Living Englishman

“Here we are then, here we are / notes from a suicide / And he will never ever be / The greatest living Englishman … His aspirations visited him nightly / And amounted to so little”

Sylvian’s voice is so striking and used in such a melodic fashion it’s easy to just got lost in its tones and textures and forget it’s also communicating some information. One of the beauties of this record is the slow revealing of new layers of noise and lyrics on repeated listens. On The Greatest Living Englishman his lyrics are economically delivered, discussing the failed ambition of a man on his deathbed. His lyrics retain an ambiguity, only the first track on the album Small Metal Gods is written in first person, so the extent of autobiographical content is unclear. TGLE though doesn’t come across as a plea of self-importance, and retains a reticent delivery.

“And he was never gonna be /The Greatest Living Englishman /He had ideas above his station / Minor virtues go unmentioned”.

An absorbing listen, heartily recommended.

A special mention to Ruud Van Empel’s beautiful cover art, which I think gives a great indication of the adventure to be embarked on as you explore the depths of the music on Manafon.

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PETER MARGASAK

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DAVID DAVIES

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STEVE MATTEO

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Anyone who still harbours dreams of David Sylvian’s return to the faux-Ferrynew romantic stylings of yore, leave the room, now. Describing a career arc that’s elegantly swooped through coffee table ambience towards a “devotion to creative discipline”, he now inhabits (like Scott Walker) that most rarefied of zones where artistic credibility eschews commercialism in any form. Ironically, the result of such a determinedly stoic path meant that 2005’s Nine Horsesproject seemed almost disappointingly mainstream. Manafon is, by no means, such an easy listen.

Almost constructing music in reverse, his last major solo release, Blemish(2003), was stripped bare of just about everything except Sylvian’s voice and the late Derek Bailey’s rattling guitar strings. Only when Sylvian turned the work over to the remixers on The Good Son Vs The Only Daughter did anything really resembling songs emerge.

Superficially this is the same minimal fare. Manafon ploughs a confrontational furrow. Sylvian’s current modus operandi begins with him capturing his voice, bravely naked and unadorned except by pitch-shifted harmonising. He then invites collaborators across the globe to add layers of meaning.
Here the sparse chittering of Bailey is replaced with a richer cast of notables, including the free jazz of Evan Parker’s saxophone, John Tilbury’s questioning piano, Werner Dafeldecker’s earthy double bass and the dusty, ambient scratch of Otomo Yoshihide’s turntables. And as if this cast didn’t suitably underline Sylvian’s place as pop star reborn as cutting-edge experimentalist, he replaces the angular prod of Bailey’s guitar with AMM legend Keith Rowe, as well as Blemish’s other notable player, Christian Fennesz.

Close listening reveals more intricacy, intimating a stronger ensemble vibe while still leaving the door ajar for chance and accident. And while, lyrically, it still relies on a third-person recital of loss and denial, Sylvian does manage to pack some humour and self-effacement into the narrative.

Above all, the album’s autobiographical bent describes a man who may seem wilfully puritanical and harsh, but whose methods yield immense beauty for the listener. The title track – based on the village where the poet RS Thomas lived – is an analogy for a figure with whom Sylvian indentifies when he describes him as “an insufferable individual” who is “upholding morals and values that even he struggles with when it comes to believing in their efficacy”.

Manafon is a brave, disconcerting and terrible document. If only all so-called artists could display such courage.

CHRIS JONES

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Free improvisation and its nexus with more structured composition have always been of interest to Sylvian; even on his last ostensibly pop production, Dead Bees on a Cake (Virgin, 1999), the singer combined his sometimes oblique but visually arresting lyrics with Frisell's dobro improvisations. With Blemish(Samadhisound, 2003), he took the concept a giant leap forward on a largely solo album, but one where, on four of its eight tracks, late free music guitar pioneer Derek Bailey and guitarist/laptop specialist Christian Fenneszprovided Sylvian with improvisations, providing contexts around which he built his austere songs. An album of remixes, The Good Son vs The Only Daughter(Samadhisound, 2004), further demonstrated just how far these sparely constructed compositional ideas could be taken in the hands of creative remixers/recomposers.

Manafon takes the creative process even further, with Sylvian taking a series of free improvisations, performed by a cherry-picked collective of international improvisers, as the starting point, and shaping his words and loosely structured music around them. Other than adding some acoustic guitar and keyboard himself, as well as some sparely overdubbed piano by John Tilbury on six tracks, these spontaneous soundscapes have been enhanced in post-production, but the improvisations themselves remain intact and unreconstructed—as they were, in the moment.

It's a dark album of stunning beauty; oblique, to be sure, but one that reveals Sylvian to be a continually growing artist whose interests are pure, and now completely distanced from the industry concerns that were an unavoidable part of working with the major labels for the first part of his career. Not that his earlier albums weren't creative or, the assumption has to be, exactly where he was at the time; but unencumbered by outside impositions (even Nine Horses—a pop group to be sure—felt completely honest, a reflection of what the artists wanted without any undue intervention, direct or suggested), with his own Samadhisound label, Sylvian has turned from artful, post-pop crooner to an innovator of the first order.

Even the choice of Sylvian's collective reflects a breadth of concern that transcends earlier collaborations: from England, Tilbury, AMM co-founder, guitarist Keith Rowe, saxophonist Evan Parker and cellist Marcio Mattos; from Austria, guitarist/laptop player Christian Fennesz, trumpeter Franz Hautzinger, guitarist Burkhard Stengl, bassist Werner Dafeldecker and cellist Mario Mattos; from Japan, no input mixer Toshimaru Nakamura, turntablist Otomo Yoshihide, sine wave artist Sachiko M. and guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama; from the US, live signal processor Joel Ryan. On these nine songs—eight songs with lyrics, one instrumental—a baker's dozen players come together in various permutations and combinations, from trio to septet, and in many cases represent first encounters. The result is a compelling album of real songs—abstract, to be sure, not of conventional AABA form—that may provide an entry point for those who find the concept of free music unapproachable, by demonstrating that such unfettered improvisation needn't (and shouldn't) mean aimless meandering.

The results are stunning. The improvisations—in and of themselves, and without Tilbury's layered piano—are highly abstruse yet keenly intuitive; seemingly devoid of melody, harmony, rhythm and form. And yet, on "Snow White in Appalachia," there appear to be (but, given the amount of time Sylvian took in piecing Manafon together, not really) serendipitous moments where a harmonic center suddenly emerges, with as little as Dafeldecker's single bass note, coalescing this tale of disaster in a way that's subtle, but dramatic and effective. The album is described, on Sylvian's website, as an album of ballads, but without any explicit rhythm, the only real reference to conventional balladry is that the ambience is soft, the pace (even without rhythm) slow, and the dynamics subdued and subtle.

At times deeply autobiographical, elsewhere reflecting on external circumstances, Sylvian has also reached a new level of lyrical profundity. Deeply layered, image-seducing but spare poetry reveals more with each subsequent listen, as Sylvian mirrors the music's intrepid nature. These are songs that may be anything but hummable, but are absolutely memorable—powerful in their allegiance to silence, economy of scale and inherent selflessness. His overdubs are in tune with the improvisations' gradual evolutions, but act like drawstrings to bring together a number of ideas, that are anything but disparate, into even sharper focus. Tilbury's contributions are equally vital, Morton Feldman-like in their indeterminacy, and creating a clearer line between the free improvs and Sylvian's lyrics.

The deluxe edition of Manafon is packaged as a clothbound book with an added DVD that includes both DTS and Dolby 5.1 surround mixes, as well as a PCM stereo version of the CD and hardback book inserts with artwork, an essay and complete lyrics. Most important, however, is the inclusion of Amplified Gesture, a documentary film directed by Phil Hopkins, with Sylvian as executive producer. With the instrumental music of Manafon as its sonic backdrop, the film (subtitled An Introduction to Free Improvisation: Practitioners and Their Philosophy) explores the emergence of free improv through the words ofManafon's participants, as well as speaking with AMM co-founder/percussionistEddie Prévost and saxophonist John Butcher. That Sylvian does not participate as an interviewee in the documentary only speaks to his viewing himself as a beneficiary, rather than a creator, of the free music being discussed—even though Manafon truly deserves a place in the music's ultimate history.

As austere and economical as the music, Hopkins leaves the story to unfold entirely in the words of the participants, filmed in black and white and with little visual movement other than that of the musicians speaking, with a few performance stills and very, very spare use of performance footage. What emerges, over the course of Amplified Gesture's 54 minutes, are many of the foundations of the free improvising scene, which distanced itself almost immediately on its emergence, quite explicitly trying, as Keith Roweexplains, to create something that had never before been heard in the history of music.

An ambitious and, some might say, ostentatious goal, but one of the defining characteristics of all the musicians interviewed is their unmistakableselflessness. Parker describes free improvisers as not trying to command their instruments but, rather, trying to explore them, further describing the act of playing like biofeedback, where as much as the player tells the instrument what to do, the instrument speaks back, and suggests new ideas and avenues of experimentation to the performer.

And undeniable is these musicians' assertion of the experimental nature of free improvisation. Tilbury contrasts guitarists and violinists, who "sleep with their instruments," to pianists, who arrive at a venue and are presented with a black box, probably an absolutely new instrument each and every time, with different tuning, different touch, different tone. The audience, too, is a part of the experiment, more involved than they might think, as they provide more than just feedback, but an ambient energy which, in part, drives any free improvisation performed in a concert setting.

That many of these artists come from seemingly conventional backgrounds, growing up with rock and pop groups, bebop, classical music and more, might seem obvious; but, as ever, these intrepidly spontaneous creators may all come from somewhere, but in many cases, as with Keith Rowe, their references become merely one thing more to reject in the pursuit of creating something new. And while Rowe explains how playing a guitar flat on a table creates a certain detachment as opposed to orthodox guitarists for whom the instrument is more an extension of themselves, he's equally quick to note that it's impossible to be distanced from life's experiences. Growing up in wartime England, the sound of exploding bombs became an unavoidable part of who he is and, consequently, the music he makes.
In some ways, Amplified Gesture may be best seen before listening to Manafon. The enlightening insights of the artists involved, with the music playing behind them, makes Sylvian's ultimate song construction from their improvisations all the more remarkable. But whether experienced before or after Manafon (or not at all: the deluxe edition is a limited one, with a relatively small print run), the great leap of faith that Sylvian took with Blemish has been completely affirmed with Manafon. It's the inevitable evolution of a significant directional shift that represents, despite sounding unequivocally a part of Sylvian's larger body of work, a profoundly beautiful meshing of unfettered, in-the-moment spontaneity and long, careful consideration.

JOHN KELMAN

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In addition, we have a specially composed, seasonally inspired, work by Akira Rabelais which we're able to offer as a free download here. Titled '1340 Gaw. & Gr. knt 471 Wel by-commes such craft vpon cristmasse' and running at 59.54 mins, it's further exploration of the material Akira unearthed and treated for his samadhisound debut ' Spellewauerynsherde (see here for more details).

Which brings us around to the subject of the releases for the year ahead. In early 2010 we will be releasing Akira's second work for Samadhisound, 'Caduceus'. A guitar based series of compositions treated by software of his own design, 'Caduceus' is a powerfully dynamic work, at turns disquietingly romantic, couched in an unnervingly volatile quietude, and raucously savage, a beautiful brutality. It is a compelling work, hallucinatory, a true auditory experience. Jan Bang releases his debut album with us in 2010. '...and Poppies from Kandahar' is marked by Jan's amazingly acute ear for sound design and his ability to create and sustain delicate, but powerfully evocative, moods of sonic and textural complexity. Some of you might be familiar with Jan's remix work for David Sylvian in collaboration with his Punkt partner, Erik Honoré. This team was also responsible for co- writing / producing Arve Henriksen's 'Cartography' (ecm). '... and poppies from Kandahar' could be seen as something of a companion piece to the latter featuring, as it does, contributions from Henriksen, Jon Hassell, Sidsel Endresen, Eivind Aarset and many more. Toshimaru Nakamura, a contributor to the album 'Manafon', brings both his improvisatory and compositional skills into focus on the beautifully minimal solo album 'Egrets'. Toshi played a pivotal role in developing the aesthetic that became the basis for the onkyo scene in Japan. He's since established himself as a mainstay of the free improv scene with his adopted 'no-input mixing board' and continues to perform and record with a great diversity of musicians annually, worldwide. With contributions from Arve Henriksen (tpt) and Tetuzi Akiyama (gtr), and executively produced by David Sylvian, 'Egrets' belies its improvisational beginnings via its distilled, opaque beauty. Some of the solo performances bring to mind early experiments in Frippertronics dialed three decades into the future. It's an album that surprises with its variety of tonal colours drawn from minimal resources.

We are also in the process of producing a strictly limited vinyl edition of 'Manafon'. A double album that will include the Japanese only released remix of 'Random Acts of Senseless Violence' by classical composer Dai Fujikura.

Updates on these and further releases in the new year.

samadhisound

David Sylvian, former frontman of one of my favorite bands, Japan, has proven time and again that he is an artist to keep watching and listening to. Not only does he possess one of the most captivating voices, but he has never been content to stay put in one musical genre; he’s remained fluid and interesting for the last thirty years, collaborating with numerous experimental forces like Holger Czukay and Ryuichi Sakamoto. His latest album, Manafon, is no exception. As far as I can discern, the album was largely recorded via improvisation, yet its lyrics are mainly inspired by the Welsh poet/rector, R.S. Thomas, whose North Wales parish included the village Manafon. I read in a recent interview with Sylvian that Thomas interested him because of his seemingly contradictory beliefs: staunch Christian ideals and a violent, misanthropic nationalism. In fact, Thomas supported the Welsh nationalist movement Meibion Glyndŵr, calling for a campaign to deface English-owned homes, and he once said “what is one death against the death of the whole Welsh nation?” I, myself, don’t know how contradictory those two beliefs are, especially given Christian fundamentalism and patriotism going quite hand in glove; however, Thomas still makes for an interesting, relatively dark subject for an album. What I find so fascinating about Thomas is his melancholy in the face of a supposedly loving God and his perspective on Welsh character and its seemingly soul-destroying propensity for wallowing in nostalgia. The latter “past as a prison” idea is a point I’ve heard from other Welsh artists before, and ultimately, even the Christian misanthropy could be construed as quite Welsh when looking at the history of Methodism in Wales. This strain of Protestantism appears to have taken on the dour atmosphere of the Welsh rain. At the same time, Wales is also full of a magic that is as deep as the valleys and of a lyrical, sing-song language made for music and poetry. And Sylvian’s Manafon manages to take in all of these various tendrils of Welshness and works them into an uncompromising piece of art.

Admittedly, this album (and some of Sylvian’s other work) may not be everyone’s cup of tea – it pushes so hard at the rules and boundaries of music in such an understated fashion that some may find it tedious or boring. In other words, there is no immediacy in this record. You must arch and stretch to meet it, but when you do, it seeps into your bones and nestles there like a Pre-Cambrian fossil. Recorded over the period of three years in three different cities with fifteen artists including Sylvian, there’s a meandering quality to the music. It takes its time just as you would imagine those pastoral, downtrodden characters portrayed in Thomas’s poetry do. It comes up close around you like the penetrating isolation of a parish in North Wales.

This album is easier to discuss as whole piece rather than individual tracks because I found myself so thoroughly cocooned in it, that making separations ceased to matter. Sylvian and his band of experimental artists end up sculpting a sonic structure largely out of silence; in a way, they use silence as yet one more instrument. Like the white space in graphic design and the clean lines of modern furniture, this silence makes the album starkly beautiful and quietly alive. When instruments do finally come in, a small flutter of saxophone, some splayed guitar strings, droplets of piano, all of your attention is upon them; sometimes they actually startle you from the rich silence. Sylvian’s characteristically languid vocal style, though slightly more ragged and deeper now, is enchanting, and his phrasing for this record is a mixture of accapella gospel and a poetry reading. He draws out each line meaningfully, and makes space for the twinkling, twitching music to creep up the walls like ivy. Each track tugs at you, drawing you forward in unexpected ways, and it feels like you must follow along as Sylvian finds his own unpredictable way through his words.

The lyrical content most definitely matters in Manafon, especially considering the connection to Thomas, and it is sometimes explicit in this connection (as in the final title track, which includes the characteristically Thomasonian lyric, “There’s a man down in the valley who doesn’t speak in his own tongue/He bears a grudge against the English/A tune to which his songs are sung”), and sometimes not as explicit as in a track like Emily Dickinson. However, even when the subject matter seems to veer away from the foundation of R.S. Thomas, its mood and themes remain consistent. Emily Dickinson is a perfect complement, in a sense, because of her own darkness and isolation. The opening song on Manafon, entitled Small Metal Gods, sets up that sense of isolation, perhaps as a communication of Thomas’s own emotional state when moved to the small parish. Like Dickinson, Thomas seemed rather disconnected from the people around him, only opening up in his poetry. The mystery of the artistic process is probed and extapolated in this record.

Some of my favourite lyrics are in the track Random Acts of Senseless Violence. The following lyrics unroll over nearly seven minutes:

I’ve put away my childish things

Abandoned my silence too
For the future will contain

Random acts of senseless violence

The target’s hit will be non-specific

We’ll roll the numbers play with chance

All suitable locations unplanned in advance

Someone’s back kitchen, stacked like a factory

With improvised devices, there’s bound to injuries

With improvised devices…

No phone-ins, no courtesy, no kindness

And the future will contain

Random acts of senseless violence

And it’s not just the boredom

It’s something endemic
It’s the fear of disorder

Stretched to its limits

Not only does it seem to take in Thomas’s rather militant nationalism that bordered on terrorism, but the section on improvised devices refers quite neatly back to the actual method of the song itself. I also love that the song ends with: “And the safety of numbers is just a contrivance/For the future will contain/Random acts of senseless violence/Democracy is very…/Democracy is very, very…” As Sylvian leaves the unfinished statement dangling as an ellipse, a cipher that can’t be filled adequately.

Manafon is truly bottomless. Its pregnant silences give birth to gripping anticipation, labouring as intensely and as constantly as the stalwart, seemingly defeated figures in Thomas’s poetry. Sylvian has arranged an astounding assortment of avant-garde musicians to create a music more omnipresent than God and more mortal than R.S. Thomas. A low simmer of rage and a clammy mist of ennui combine to form a focused atmosphere of anger and surrender. An ode to the fermata that is the Welsh condition.

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