Originally printed in Pitchforkmedia.com
Interview with David Sylvian
Jan 16, 2006
Story by Chris Dahlen
Even when he was a pop star, David Sylvian didn't want to play the role.
Sylvian formed Japan at the end of the 1970s, with Mick Karn, Richard Barbieri,
and his brother Steve Jansen (both Sylvian and Jansen changed their names from
Batt). As the frontman and main songwriter Sylvian adopted an image that was
luminescent, mysterious, and androgynous, with a mane of bleached hair that
influenced both Nick Rhodes and-- reportedly-- Princess Diana, and he led a
band that took pop forms and insinuated its way beyond them. That approach
yielded their biggest single, "Ghosts"-- a ballad with an almost
ambient backdrop of plinking sounds and smeared colors, which made it to #5 in
the UK.
But that single-- and personal conflicts in the band--
persuaded Sylvian to break up Japan and work on his own. In addition to
instrumental and ambient projects like Plight and Premonition with Holger
Czukay, his principal solo albums of the 1980s stretched pop songs into longer
forms and ambient passages; Sylvian's baritone carries the melodies, but the
pieces are defined as much by atmospherics as writing.
Although Sylvian worked sporadically throughout the '90s, his 2003 album,
Blemish-- the first release on his own Samadhi Sound label-- may be the most
powerful album he's ever recorded, the rare case where an artist uses his
maturity to show more pain than he had in his youth. Like Johnny Cash recording
for Rick Rubin, or Kristin Hersh on The Grotto, Sylvian reveals more because he
can endure more. It's a difficult record even if you don't know that Sylvian
made it in response to the emotional stress of the end of his marriage.
Sylvian now lives in the woods of southern New Hampshire in the former site of
an ashram, doing most of his work in the barn that contains his home recording
studio. Since he moved here in the 1990s with Ingrid Chavez and their two
children, he has worked in the barn, mostly alone, collaborating with Jansen or
with colleagues around the world via the Internet. When I went to meet him at a
bed and breakfast in Manchester, N.H., I expected him to come out of the woods
almost like a mystic-- maybe with the long dark hair he sported through the
late '80s or some kind of knotty, free-flowing beard. Instead, he's a clean-cut
gentleman who pulled up in a four-wheel drive vehicle and spoke articulately,
and honestly, throughout our interview, and his precise English accent sounded
smaller and much more mortal than his singing-- a good thing too, because it
would be hard to conduct an interview against such an indomitable voice.
Pitchfork: I understand that Blemish was a fairly quick project.
David Sylvian: It was enormously fast, yes. I gave myself six weeks, and that's
as long as it took. Two weeks in, I had the title track, "The Only
Daughter", and a couple of other pieces, and I could hear where it was
going. Two weeks in I contacted Derek [Bailey], so within a week of speaking to
him I had that material to work with. When I wrote "A Fire in the Forest",
I was already in contact with Christian [Fennesz]. So it moved fairly quickly.
Within a week of his receiving it he was finished and he'd sent it back.
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.
And because it was all very immediate-- writing and recording the music, lyric,
and vocals simultaneously -- there was no time for self-editing. I just went
straight in and committed to going with what surfaced.
But that whole process was very exciting. It was very immediate. So there's
this dichotomy where I was really enjoying the creative process. Living through
these emotions was very difficult, but finding a voice for them was so
cathartic, and after that six-week period, I'd felt I'd worked through some
very difficult emotions. I felt an enormous amount of release.
Pitchfork: What were the emotions that sparked it?
Sylvian: Well, a lot of it had to do with my relationship with my wife. We were
going through a lot of problems, we were in the process of breaking up, and it
was in the most intense period of the break-up. That was the primary force. It
was very disturbing, and very upsetting, and there was no release for it in any
other aspect of my life.
I don't think I'd ever worked with a complex set of emotions that hadn't
already reached a point of resolution before. This time I was right in the heat
of it, there was no resolution, there was no way of projecting that onto the
material-- an artificial sense that everything will be all right in the end,
everything resolves, everything is okay. There was none of that with the
material. It was in the heat of that complexity of emotions, of trying to face
them head on and not look away.
That generated the emotions that needed to be expressed, but as I said, I tried
to go much further with them when I was in the studio environment. So if I was
feeling anger or frustration or even just downright hatred, I wanted to know,
where do you go with that? And how do you express that? I pushed myself further
and further into those areas. Although ultimately the divorce was the impetus
for the record, if you like, in terms of its content, I think it also goes
beyond that. And I'm glad that people didn't know too much about the divorce
happening at the time the album was released, because I didn't want it just to
be seen in that light. I think it's got more to offer than that.
Pitchfork: Has she heard it?
Sylvian: She heard it when it was completed, yeah. It was very painful for her
to listen to. There's no way around it. It wasn't my intention to give voice to
something that was very private and make it very public.
She thinks it's the most powerful record I ever made. She's very generous that
she can hear that.
Pitchfork: And the album doesn't have a resolution, though the end's more
upbeat.
Sylvian: Yeah, the end is-- it's more like a longing, a yearning, a hope,
rather than a clear indication that everything's resolved satisfactorily.
Pitchfork: When you were making it, did you feel isolated by your location? And
was that good or bad?
Sylvian: Definitely good and bad. There were times when I felt painfully alone.
I have no community of friends in this part of the country. Every friendship I
have outside of my children is long distance. So if I'm here for any length of
time, the sense of isolation can be overwhelming and really overbearing.
At other times, when I've been traveling and been away for a while and spend
time with people, returning here can seem like a real retreat in the positive
sense of the word. And I can get work done with no distractions. I can spend
time with my children. I'm in that proximity where we can still be, although an
estranged family, a family.
Pitchfork: So your ex-wife lives there too?
Sylvian: Yes, we've divided the home, and it's a bit of an experiment to see
how that works. But I now think its possible that we can make this work for a
few years, to make the ultimate break a little smoother, and easier on the kids
as best we can.
Pitchfork: Do you spend time in Peterborough [the nearest town to his home]?
Sylvian: I just don't-- I thought of moving to New Hampshire as a retreat
anyway. We were following a very spiritual path. It was previously an ashram,
so it had all that energy about it. And I didn't feel the intensity of the
solitude. I sort of reveled in it for a number of years.
But when the marriage began to fall apart, there was no companionship, no mutual
goal or shared vision. And we went our separate ways in that respect. And so I
began to lose track of my practice and my discipline that was holding me
together in that place. I'm certain I will return to that practice, and that
discipline. I had to go through a rather complex journey to find myself back at
the same place, where I can take the reins of my own life and really bring
myself forward and set my own goals. Before, everything was centered around the
family and work. Now the family's dissipated.
I still find it difficult to get my head around that fact. Not that I'm
yearning for it to be put back into place-- it's impossible to do that-- but I
wanted to be able to have as much of a natural environment for my children as
humanly possible. But at the same time, I know I have certain needs that are
going to take me far and wide away from that. And I'm still trying to find a
balance in all of that-- how much do I need to be away from them to feel
complete in myself, that I can go on giving to them.
So that's kind of where I find myself, just trying to maintain or create that
kind of balance which has been absent for the past two years or so.
/ / /
Pitchfork: On Blemish, the vocals are front and center, but in other ways
they're confined by what the music's doing. I also noticed that that might have
been the first album where you really chopped up and distorted your own voice
unnaturally.
Sylvian: That's the first time I chopped it up in that fashion, I had obviously
treated it in different ways before. I mixed the vocals extremely loudly. It's
very much up front, and when I played it back in my home, the voice took on
almost a physical presence. And that was very interesting to me. It was almost
confrontational. It was like this entity that was in the room, with me, having
this dialogue with me, and I'd never had that experience with a recorded piece
of music before. And maybe that's something I'd like to explore further.
Pitchfork: You've also had a number of influences from ambient music. Do you think
Blemish helped to combine your ambient and song-based work?
Sylvian: I guess so. There were precursors to Blemish. There were little
signposts that you can point to and say, "Well, that obviously leads to
this." I don't know, I saw the instrumental material over the years as
being something like a microcosm of one of the pop songs. If you took an aspect
of a track like "Before the Bullfight" and just took two seconds and
extended it, you may end up with Plight and Premonition.
And so it's not such a strange idea to begin to explode the notion of the
composition and draw it out. I mean Blemish was predominantly drone-based
pieces. You're working along similar lines as something like Plight and
Premonition. It was just a means of entering into that material but retaining
the forceful character standing within the landscape instead of removing him
[from it].
I think it was important to do away with the given structure of popular music
for that album, and in a way that's where I want to continue to move. Because
I'm finding that the given forms of pop music have begun to lose their
currency. Maybe they lost it a long time ago and there's just occasionally one
or two very gifted writers that can just put everything back into that form,
and really [do it] in such a beautiful way that it still has relevance. But
even if I'm going back to artists that I've enjoyed for many years, decades,
and listening to their work, I feel dissatisfied with the form. It almost feels
as if it's outlived its time, that we need to find new ways of talking about
the same thing. And in a sense I tried to do that with "Ghosts" many
years ago. That was what was being aimed at. The form was still there; it was
just disguised.
Pitchfork: There is a lot of pop music that's going in the same kind of
direction, of stripping away the choruses or the melodies. Are you interested
in much recent music?
Sylvian: Missy Elliott is really creative in what she does, with structure. I
think it's beautiful. If you've got a groove, it underpins everything, and it
helps anything else you want to throw on top go across pretty smoothly, pretty
easily. The four bar beat is very forgiving. [Laughs].
In terms of contemporary popular music, I guess I don't listen to a lot. And I
wish I listened to more. I guess I just don't find enough that draws me back
again and again. I listen to a little bit of world music right now, but most of
my listening has been coming from that ground which is yet to be defined, which
is where improvisation and jazz meets contemporary classical meets contemporary
vocal music. There's a lot going on in there, and I love the fact that it's
ill-defined and that there's this enormous amount of crossover, and there's a
sense of possibility there.
I've worked with some of these people already on my next solo project, which I
started about a year ago. I've worked further with Christian Fennesz, and a
collective of musicians out of Vienna, and Keith Rowe and a few other people.
So we're seeing how that is going to develop.
Pitchfork: Going back even to your first albums, were there any specific
artists who influenced your music?
Sylvian: Brian Eno's early work certainly influenced [Japan] and me. We grew up
listening to his music as teenagers, so Another Green World was a very
important album for all of us, it was an incredible work-- still is-- and
related artists, like Jon Hassell.
But a lot of the development of personal vision just came out of working. You
just keep at it for a while. God, I made so many mistakes with the band, and
you really learn from those and begin to understand what the strengths and
weaknesses of the material are, and what are those areas that you really enjoy
working on. When you write a song, it's a song until you get into the rehearsal
room and you begin to expand upon it, and then you get into the studio and you
get into the details. The orchestration of the piece.
The details are what always interested me. And so I just began to spend more
and more time on those details, until they came to the forefront of the
material-- textures and atmospherics. I began to elaborate on those more and
more and push the rhythmic element a little bit further back. I was never that
comfortable writing more driving songs, more driven material. Which always
pissed the group off, especially Steve and Mick. "Jesus Christ, another
midtempo beat!" Or a downtempo beat! [Laughs]. There's always this
pressure to write more in a certain vein. But then when I wrote
"Ghosts", I thought, "This interests me more." As much as I
like a good groove-- performing live, it's great to have a good groove-- this
really did interest me, and that's when it became apparent that this isn't a
road I want to travel with the band, this is a road I want to travel alone.
I think that's what happened-- the material evolved. It evolves the more you
work on it, the more you develop your vocabulary. You assimilate the
influences, they become a part of your vocabulary, whether it's musical
influences, literary, whether it's life experiences, cultural experiences-- somehow
ultimately God willing they all become part of your own vocabulary.
For me, I think I've been very slow to develop that. Because I started very
young, and very insecure, so I would hide behind personas and all the rest of
it. And I was very slow to find my own voice. But during that process I was
learning how to write, how to find my voice, and how to write effectively for
groups of musicians.
And of course by that time I had the success in the band that afforded me the
luxury of being able to do that, and have a major label support it.
Pitchfork: You seem to spend a great deal of time on most of your recordings.
Sylvian: Back to Brilliant Trees, most of the time I was working one-on-one
with each musician. Occasionally I've had the rhythm section working together,
and we'd put down a groove, and I'd build from there. But often times, I'd just
be working with Steve recording the kit piecemeal-- you know, we'd take the
bass drum, or we'd take the snare, and then we'd do the hi-hat, and we would
just build up the track in that fashion. And then we could work on the sonic
nature of the composition as well as the construction itself.
So yeah, I've always in a sense worked in a very piecemeal way in the recording
studio. I enjoy working alone, being able to make all those creative decisions.
I've done a lot of collaborative work over the years, and there's an awful lot
of compromise involved. And some of it's creative, and a lot of it isn't. You
could see something you thought was very powerful being watered down and
diminished in some way, just because you've got to come to some mutual
agreement.
/ / /
Pitchfork: You often write about your spirituality, and
your practice, in your music. I'm just a layman, but I wanted to ask, where you
are with it today?
Sylvian: It's a very difficult question to answer, because I don't ever think
of it as a linear journey. And when you think you've fallen off the wagon and
you're not keeping up the practice, you think you're moving away from what is
spiritual-- [but] not if you view life as a series of lessons that bring
[self-]realization. I couldn't have created an album like Blemish [without] a
part of me that could step back and view it objectively and say, "You're
going through hell right now. But that's very interesting, isn't it?"
[Laughs]
I really respect that level of comprehension, and just being able to have that
control where it's possible to retain even that modicum of objectivity. And
I've always managed to retain that, over the past five years or so, since the
practice has afforded me that luxury. So no matter where I find myself, no
matter how far off the track I seem to be, there's still that part of me that's
objectively saying, "But that's really interesting. I wonder where that
will lead you, and how are you grappling with the different complexities that
are entering into your life, philosophically, emotionally, intellectually, on
all different levels. You're being tested. You're not the person you think you
are, that self-image that we try to hold onto is falling away." There are
holes, and if you don't recognize the holes in the picture, you're not being
true to yourself.
The process never stops-- the process of self-analysis if you will, which is
reinforced by the practice, or simple meditation, for want of a better word.
But there really is no loss. There is no linear journey. People talk about a
spiritual path, but to me that would indicate that you know where you're going
and oh, we're at this signpost, I've only got 30 miles-- it's not at all like
that.
I like the Buddhist approach, that you've always been encouraged to question
everything, to take nothing for granted. It's the most scientifically friendly
sort of religion there is in that respect. It's a kind of science for the mind,
as it's been touted, and I think that's the healthiest approach to all aspects
in life. Nothing should be taken for granted. Everything should be questioned.
There should be no stigma attached to the process of questioning, "What
are you doing? You're undermining the faith, the religion"-- if it can't
withstand questioning, what value can it possibly have?
Pitchfork: But you also work with a guru. Are you able to question her?
Sylvian: There's room for doubt, for questioning. Most of it's internalized. I
don't have a relationship with a guru where I will go to that teacher and ask
them specific questions. I can, but that's not the way I choose to work. The
notion of a guru to me is a physical representation of your higher self. So
basically what you are surrendering to is your higher self.
If that's true, then the whole dialogue is going on internally. It's not an
external dialogue. The guru acts as a provocation more often than not.
Initially it's a seductive, romantic relationship, and when you're in the fold,
it becomes provocative, it tests you. And I've never come across anything that
is as pinpoint accurate as the message you get through the guru. You go through
this process with other people who have common goals, you see them confronting
their fears, the tests that they're put through, and you look at the manner in
which they're tested and think, "I could handle that." But when the
opportunity for you to learn from your fears comes along, it's like,
"Jesus Christ, give me any other lesson you choose, but not that
one." It's like laser-sharp accuracy, it's right there on the nerve, and
it's like, "Shit, I don't know if I'm ready for that."
And it's often like that, and you work through that, and it's enormously
painful. And if you manage to come out the other side of it, you sort of reach
this plateau where you are somehow able to breathe really deeply and say,
"Jesus, I've made it through that. Something I was so afraid of, that I
didn't think I could ever relinquish that fear in this lifetime, I'm sort of
over it." And you get this wonderful period where you're able to just kind
of soak in all that that means and all the benefits of that.
Before you hit the next one. [Laughs].
You get deeper and deeper, but then the highs get higher and higher. So that's
what impels you forward, I suppose.
Pitchfork: Your songs, all the way back to Brilliant Trees, are very romantic,
but they could also be read as spiritual-- "Wave" for example.
Sylvian: Oh, absolutely. That was the objective with those pieces. For me it
was a spiritual romance. I thought, "Maybe this doesn't really have a home
in popular music, how do you deal with this?" But you can talk about it in
the same terms as a physical romance-- so that's what I tried to do. I tried to
open it up to be interpreted in different ways. Obviously most people saw it as
a love song, to someone, and they used it in that capacity in their own lives,
and that's terrific. But the grandiosity of the romance of a piece like
"Wave", existed because it was about a divine love, a universal love.
/ / /
Pitchfork: When you recorded for Virgin in the 1980s and
90s, did you ever feel the need, or the temptation, to make commercial
compromises? For example, did they ask for things like radio edits for Gone to
Earth?
Sylvian: I wish there'd been a little more of that, because that would have
indicated more interest on their part. [Laughs]. Simon Draper, who was the CEO
of the company, was very supportive and would allow me to pursue any avenue I'd
choose to pursue. But it didn't always carry through the company-- [the album]
got to the marketing man, and you can just imagine the conversations that went
on. "What are we going to do with this?" And ultimately they did very
little with it.
It was always a struggle between knowing that I could do whatever I wanted to
do and really valuing that freedom, and then knowing that there was a machine
here that didn't know how to channel it so it would find an audience. They had
no idea. But I stayed because I had that creative freedom, and I had to get the
word out myself by touring, by talking about it, whatever. -
Pitchfork: Would you have made compromises to get more support from Virgin?
Sylvian: You know, there are people who work in labels that just have to have a
say about something, because otherwise they feel that they're not doing their
jobs. And they're the people that you end up dealing with. They'll present you
with an edit of your material-- "I edited this for you"-- and the
edits aren't musical, they're all in the wrong places.
I find it offensive that the materials were handed to me that way, and they
would find it offensive that I refused it. No matter how kind and polite you
are about the process, it doesn't go anywhere unless you embrace the ideas of
the people working at the company. And I've always found it very hard to do
that.
If somebody's selling you a compromise that would really benefit the work and
will potentially get it a much larger audience, there's no cynicism in that,
because you make a work to communicate. You don't just want to communicate with
10 people over there, you want to communicate with as many people as possible,
as many people as the work might reach emotionally. Sometimes a little
compromise isn't a bad thing. You don't need to be precious about it, but you
do have to feel that the compromise is valid, that there's a point to it, that
it won't change something about the nature of the work. And very rarely was it
ever valid.
/ / /
Pitchfork: You've commented in the past about the
political climate in America. Do you feel surrounded by it out here, or does it
seem like a distant problem?
Sylvian: I have to cut off all media. I actually don't indulge in listening to
the radio. I don't have television. When I do tap into what's going on, I feel
furious at what's being done in the name of the American people, and the
bullshit you have to swallow, being an American. I find it pretty hard going
actually.
Pitchfork: You worked on World Citizen with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Did you write the
lyrics?
Sylvian: Yes. [Laughs]
Pitchfork: They were very direct.
Sylvian: The thing was, it wasn't my natural inclination to get into writing
protest songs. But it was a request from Ryuichi to give it a bash. And I felt
that there was very little dissent being vocalized in the States. I thought,
well, rather than putting something out that's a little esoteric dig at what's
happening in the world right now, it just has to be straightforward. pPut the
facts out there. Tell it like it is, because we want to make people think a
little more about what's going on.
Pitchfork: For the remix album for Blemish [The Good Son vs. The Only
Daughter], you selected a very international set of artists.
Sylvian: I think of [Samadhi Sound] as being global, and not necessarily based
in the States. It's sort of stretched between the States, Europe, and Japan. I
think nowadays it doesn't really matter where we are physically located. We
create our own culture around us to a large extent, whether it's what we're
listening to, what we're watching, what we're reading-- it can have very little
to do with one's immediate cultural environment. We are in a global culture in
that respect.
I like to go where the most interesting ideas are being produced, and tap into
that aspect of the culture, and explore that. Rather than the day-to-day
mundanities of what it is to be living in northeastern America, or wherever.
Pitchfork: Do you use the internet a lot?
Sylvian: All the time. In fact, a lot of the work that I do is done via the
internet. I have yet to sit in a room with Burnt Friedman [his collaborator on
the new Nine Horses album, Snow Borne Sorrow] and play any music. I mean, we've
sat in a bar together, and prior to that we were backstage at a gig in Cologne.
We haven't really engaged in some kind of musical conversation face-to-face.
I'm fascinated by that: How organic a piece of music can sound and feel even
though these musicians were never in the same space at the same time. And the
technology really liberates you as a musician, as a producer, to create works
that have that sense of an organic whole, even though they're comprised of
small entities, cut and pasted together.
It's fascinating to work in either context. And I often find nowadays that more
musicians are able to give more time and more concentration to the work if
they're working in isolation, than if they were working in the immediacy of an
environment in which you have to have something completed within a short time
frame. There's something wonderful about that too, because there can be a terrific
energy obviously-- we create a tension that brings an exciting performance out
of everybody. But we're not so aware of the benefits of file haring. And I do
think there's a lot to be said for it. I do think there's a lot of commitment
that people bring to the table when they are left alone with this material. At
least, that's what I'm finding.
Often I'm working with people I've never had a conversation with outside of an
e-mail exchange. And you're just sending material off to the other side of the
world, it comes back, it's either absolutely perfect as it is or it just needs
a little bit of shaping and reediting, and everything falls into place. Not to
be too idealistic about it, but it is that sense of shared musical vocabulary.
/ / /
Pitchfork: You've said that The First Day tour in the
early '90s was one of the first times you enjoyed live performance.
Sylvian: That was because Robert [Fripp] gives an enormous amount of support on
stage. He would come to the concert soundcheck, [and] he wouldn't leave the
theater, he'd be there all evening, he would be practicing in a certain form of
meditation, if you like. And when we hit that stage, I could feel that energy
coming. His focus was 100%. And I just respected that so much.
It was the trio work that we did first, only in Europe, Trey [Gunn], Robert and
myself, that was the eyeopener. We had some material which was kind of knocked
up one week before we went on the road, and so it was very unstable, and just
sitting there on stage with these guys and just trying to keep a hold of it was
fascinating. There were periods in the evening when I was doing nothing, and I
was just absorbed in what Robert was doing. And I began to realize that is was
a comfortable place to be. I enjoy this environment. Up until that point it was
all about reproducing the songs and presenting them in such-and-such way. But
this was different, and this began to interest me, and it opened up my eyes to
the pleasures of performing.
The Blemish tour was slightly less enjoyable because there wasn't enough
flexibility involved in the performance of the material. A lot of it was laptop
based, and so it didn't have that unknown element to it. And it was just Steve
and I performing, so we kind of knew what we were doing.
Pitchfork: Do you have any future tour plans?
Sylvian: I don't. With every tour that I've done over the years, I've told
myself it was the last. The only way I could get through them is to say,
"This has to be the last one I'm going to do." And then after a
period of a year I think, "Well, maybe we could do that one more
time." But I have reached a point where I could stop, for sure.
I could imagine different scenarios where it could be very interesting to get
back into live performance, if it wasn't all about presenting the prerecorded
material. The difficulty with that is presenting that idea to my audience. If I
just come to improvise, I don't know how well that's going to go down. And I
don't know how the improvisation community of listeners is going to embrace me in
that context either. But that's something I think about.
Pitchfork: Have you considered any small venues or living room shows? [I bring
up the non-event series in Boston, and the improv shows at the Zeitgeist
Gallery in Cambridge, Mass.]
Sylvian: It could be very interesting.
It would depend on the expectations of the people who come to see the show. If
they're willing to settle into a different experience, I could imagine it being
very fruitful and exciting for everybody.
Blemish and the remix album The Good Son
vs. The Only Daughter are available now at www.samadhisound.com.
Sylvian's latest project, Nine Horses, includes his brother Steve Jansen and
electronica artist Burnt Friedman, with guest appearances by Ryuichi Sakamoto,
Stina Nordenstam, and Supersilent's Arve Henriksen. Their debut, Snow Borne
Sorrow, was released October 10.