Vinyl versions of both records have been out of print since their very limited initial pressing in the early 2000s. These new versions of Blemish (1LP) and Manafon (2LP) have been recut for vinyl by veteran engineer Tony Cousins at Metropolis studios.

Blemish was David Sylvian’s first solo album to be issued on his samadhisound label. Initially released online in 2003, the vinyl version was published in 2004 and is now a collector’s item. Working primarily solo, Sylvian created an impromptu suite of songs for guitar, electronics and voice. The compositions were crafted from improvisational sessions by Sylvian and the acclaimed free-jazz guitarist Derek Bailey on three tracks and Austrian guitarist and producer Christian Fennesz on ‘A Fire In The Forest’. Sylvian said about the album at the time, ‘I wanted to get into those difficult emotions, and penetrate them as deeply as I felt I was capable of doing, in the security of that working space. So, although there were elements of my life that were bringing all these negative emotions to the fore, what I was doing in the studio was taking them further – whereas in life we try to restrain them, we hold them back. We don't allow ourselves to go too far with it because they feel dangerous, they feel threatening. Living through these emotions was very difficult, but finding a voice for them was so cathartic. After that six-week period, I'd felt I'd worked through some very difficult emotions. I felt an enormous amount of release.’

Released in 2009, Manafon was David’s second solo album for samadhisound and was described by the artist as ‘A modern kind of chamber music. Intimate, dynamic, emotive, democratic, economical’. Recorded during sessions in London, Vienna and Tokyo, ‘Manafon’ brings together some of the world’s leading free improvisers, including Evan Parker, Keith Rowe, Christian Fennesz, Sachiko M, Otomo Yoshihide, John Tilbury and members of Polwechsel working in small ensembles. Of this process, Sylvian said, ‘It’s still a path I intend to pursue musically, working with improvisation in some form or another. So you just follow whatever you feel is right for you. You follow your instinct and that's all you can remain true to.’

Preorder Blemish and Manafon.

Pre-order Sleepwalkers in the Grönland Shop:
Gatefold 2LP / Digipak CD

Visit the Sleepwalkers microsite for detailed notes.

Art direction: David Sylvian. Assistant art direction: Yuka Fujii. Graphic design and typography: Giles Dunn for Punkt, London.

Size: 235 × 300 mm landscape. Extent: 216 pages. Cover: Full dust jacket over foil blocked case cover. Printing: Offset lithography. Binding: Thread sewn book block, case bound.

Purchase the Standard Edition of ERR at the Grönland Shop.
Signed and Numbered Edition: sold out.

Visit the davidsylvian.com ERR microsite to read David’s notes on the book

Brilliant Trees (1LP Deluxe)
David Sylvian’s debut solo album from 1984 is to be released for the first time on 180gram vinyl. Featuring the singles “Red Guitar”, “The Ink in The Well” and “Pulling Punches”, the album is now housed in a gatefold sleeve with a printed inner bag and comes with a download card. David is joined on his debut album by a stellar cast including Holger Czukay, Jon Hassell, Kenny Wheeler, Mark Isham, Phil Palmer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Danny Thompson.

Alchemy – An Index of Possibilities (1LP Deluxe)
David Sylvian’s intermediary album, made up of two entirely separate projects from 1985, is to be released for the first time on 180gram vinyl. Featuring brand new artwork, the album includes rare photographs by Yuka Fujii, design by Chris Bigg, and a download card. David is joined on ‘Alchemy’ by Holger Czukay, Robert Fripp, Jon Hassell, Steve Jansen, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Kenny Wheeler.

Gone To Earth (2LP Deluxe)
David Sylvian’s second solo album proper, a 2LP set from 1986, is to be released for the first time on 180gram vinyl. Featuring the singles “Silver Moon” and “Taking The Veil”, the 2LP set is housed in a gatefold sleeve with brand new artwork, including rare photographs by Yuka Fujii, design by Chris Bigg, and printed inner bags plus a download card. David is joined on his second solo album by Robert Fripp, Bill Nelson, Kenny Wheeler, John Taylor, Phil Palmer, B.J. Cole, Mel Collins, Steve Jansen, and Steve Nye.

Secrets of The Beehive (1LP Deluxe)
David Sylvian’s third solo album from 1987 is to be released for the first time on 180gram vinyl. Including the singles “Orpheus” and “Let The Happiness In”, the album features new artwork based on Nigel Grierson’s original photographs, redesigned by Chris Bigg, housed in a gatefold sleeve with a printed inner bag and download card. David is joined on his 3rd solo album by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Mark Isham, Steve Jansen, Danny Thompson, and David Torn.

Like Planets consists of 5 chapters. The book documents a seemingly quiet, intimate, existence in the company of her then partner, the artist, David Sylvian. Far from the world of popular music, the book reads like a visual poem of the time shared together. Sylvian is depicted in hotel rooms, small villages, graveyards, landscapes rural, exotic, and forbidding, before finally reaching a point of change, of grace, in the darkened rooms of Konya and Istanbul. Interspersed with poems and quotations, this is a tantalising and evocative glimpse of an intensely private life at a pivotal point in its evolution.

‘David and I were frequently like planets revolving around one another and, in some sense, this gravitational pull continues to this day.’ – YUKA FUJII

‘It’s hard to match the beauty of David Sylvian’s songs and sound in a visual context … but, judging by this beautifully shot and presented book … Yuka Fujii’s images come very close.’ – ANTON CORBIJN

Preorder the regular edition
Preorder the signed edition
Visit the Like Planets microsite: davidsylvian.com/likeplanets

In the vein of the earlier Trophies editions, Hypergraphia is a reward for fans and collectors. The selection of art is as revealing as the written content, as much a manifestation of his taste as it is a stroll through his past. Under Sylvian’s direction, Chris Bigg juxtaposes blissful personal photographs with glamorous cover shots, and beloved album art with exquisite works by such artists as Atsushi Fukui, Anton Corbijn, Katharina Grosse, Tacita Dean and Kristamas Klousch.

Says Sylvian, “If I were to emphasize one aspect of Chris’s contribution, it’s his ability to find that aesthetic thread with which to make sense of all of these disparate elements, the many contributions from very different artists, all while continuing to maintain the singular identity of the project itself from cover to cover. The book develops and maintains a character all its own despite the multitudinous elements that went into forming it.”

Each section takes a different aesthetic approach to an era of Sylvian’s work. “I spent many months studying all the artwork David had sent, trying to find a way in,” recalls Bigg. “As a designer I always think your job is to make sense of stuff, but I wanted the book to feel quite loose, almost like a sketchbook. A mood of ‘controlled chaos.’”

Three interviews frame the book, conducted by Keith Rowe, Marcus Boon, and Natalia Kutsepova. All three took place near the 2009 release of Manafon, and in these revealing, sometimes cat-and-mouse discussions Sylvian talks about the challenge of releasing work as difficult and unexpected as that album – to make a personal statement in spite of public tastes, but all the while aware of its reception; to set uncompromising personal goals but question one’s place in the world. As a mature artist, Sylvian isn’t just weighing commercial success against artistic ambition – although his own progress on both axes has been anything but predictable – but challenging himself to see and pursue his path.

An immaculate and thorough retrospective, Hypergraphia’s organic structure and its juxtapositions of past and present, formal and personal, save the book from treating Sylvian’s career as a bust on a pedestal: instead, we see it as what it is – an extraordinary work in progress.

Following on from the success of the RSD 2018 white vinyl edition of David Sylvian's 1999 album Dead Bees on a Cake, Universal now present the album on 180gram black vinyl, expanded with the additional four tracks that Sylvian intended for the original release, ‘The Scent of Magnolia’, ‘Albuquerque (Dobro #6)’, ‘Cover Me With Flowers’ and ‘Aparna and Nimisha ( Dobro #5)’.

The artwork, designed by Chris Bigg, differs from the RSD edition featuring a cover portrait by David's ex-wife, Ingrid Chavez, with additional rare photographs by Anton Corbijn.

Pre-order “Dead Bees On A Cake” (2018 Standard Edition) here

Grönland Records are proud to announce the reissue of one of ambient music's hidden gems, by two unique musicians whose paths originally crossed in the early-eighties while working on Sylvian’s debut solo album, Brilliant Trees. In 1986, David Sylvian - of British Art-Pop band Japan - and Holger Czukay - founding member and bassist in legendary German Kosmiche band Can - were ostensibly reconvening for Sylvian to record a vocal for Czukay's forthcoming album Rome Remains Rome. But on arriving at Czukay's studio - a former cinema in Köln - Sylvian began playing freeform, improvising on readily available instruments located in the studio itself. No sooner had Sylvian, on whatever instrument he’d been applying himself, start to structurally define/refine the performance than Czukay would stop the recording he’d surreptitiously been making. Czukay had attempted to capture the process of creation without a musician's inclination for refinement. This process, drawn out over two nights, gave birth to the duos first, full-fledged, collaboration, Plight and Premonition.

Having been out of print for some time, the parallels between the original release 30 years ago and now are quite stark; at the time of recording the Cold War was lifting - but still very real - after a bitter winter. The names Plight & Premonition and Flux & Mutability themselves hint at an instability. In Sylvian's words, the sessions seemed to touch on something: “A form of music that seemed to have been created while we were absent by instruments abandoned to the earth and the woods, sounded by the coarse winter elements.”

The version of Plight & Premonition included here is a remix by Sylvian from 2002. All the recordings have been fully remastered. The packaging has been redesigned by Chris Bigg with art direction by Sylvian with new, previously unseen, photographs by Yuka Fujii, accompanied by an extensive essay by David Toop.

Originally released separately, they are now packaged in a 2CD / 2LP set.

groenland.com

For the first time on vinyl, and in a limited edition on white vinyl for 2018’s Record Store Day (April 21st), Universal are releasing David Sylvian’s 1999 solo album Dead Bees on a Cake. Expanded into the double album Sylvian had originally intended it to be and adorned with photographs by Anton Corbijn and redesigned by Chris Bigg, it now includes four additional tracks; ‘The Scent of Magnolia’, ‘Albuquerque’, ‘Cover me with Flowers’, and ‘Aparna and Nimisha’.

638 pages, hard back, full colour. Page size – 150mm x 225mm portrait. Regular edition: £65.00. Signed edition: £85.00 (the signed edition has sold out).

Hypergraphia is published in a limited edition of 3,000 copies. An edition of 500 signed and individually numbered copies, by Sylvian and designer Chris Bigg, has already sold out. Randomly included in the remaining 2,500 copies are 50 signed unnumbered copies. Available from 2nd November 2015, on pre-sale now. Click here for more information.

Click here to pre-order Hypergraphia.
Visit the microsite.

Record Store Day (April 18th) sees Universal release a 7” of ‘Bamboo Houses‘/‘Bamboo Music (2000 Remix)’. The release is limited to 1000 copies and is in a sleeve art directed by David, designed by Chris Bigg, and featuring images by Yuka Fujii. It contains a printed inner sleeve and, as with all of David and Chris’s design work, contains special inks and papers in the production of the cover.

The release will be available in three editions: A limited deluxe edition – now sold out – in an embossed cloth bound book featuring selected poems from Kindertotenwald as read by Franz Wright with contributions from three renowned photographers assembled by Sylvian to illustrate the edition. The second edition is a digipak showcasing photographic artwork by Nicholas Hughes. The third is a digital download with extensive digital booklet. All art directed by Sylvian and designed by Chris Bigg.