David Sylvian
Approaching Silence
1999

genre: ambient, minimalist, experimental
1. The Beekeeper's Apprentice - 32:56
2. Epiphany - 2:52
3. Approaching Silence - 38:17

David Sylvian, the former lead singer of new wave/post-glam maestros Japan has been on my radar for a long time. Quite some time, in fact, before I decided that I even liked him. Back on this old forum I used to to moderate on, before anyone really knew how to make and upload mixtapes as I do pretty much everyday now, the admin organised a CD swap for all the moderators. The admin fella himself ended up sending me a whole bunch of stuff I'd never heard before, including a David Sylvian song I can't remember the title of. I hated it. This would've been something like 3 or 4 years ago. About a year later, I got round to watching the Old Grey Whistle Test DVDs, one of which featured Japan's performance of Ghosts. I hated that too. To say that it seemed like me and Mr. Sylvian would simply never hit it off is quite the understatement. Even further down the line, I somehow got round to downloading Sylvian's Secrets Of the Beehive and forgetting about it for almost a year. This is pretty much the definition of how an artist can simply slip through the cracks with anyone.

I forget when it was exactly. Sometime around January's my guess, but I thought I'd post the final scene of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence in that favourite movie scenes thread that's gathering dust somewhere in the Media forum. Hearing that end with the instrumental version of Ryuichi Sakamoto's Forbidden Colours led me to look it up on youtube again, which led me on to Sylvian's vocal version of it. I fucking loved it, to the point that I'd happily call it my favourite song of all time. I then remembered Secrets Of the Beehive, listened to it about 50 times in the space of a week, and the rest of his discography (or at least as much of it as I could find) just kinda floated my way so to speak.

I had a few albums under my belt then, but what loomed large and pretty ominously was the flipside to the beautiful manipulations and cross-breedings of jazz, free improv, folk-rock, new wave and ambient electronica, that being a wealth of collaborations, LPs and EPs that made little to no use of what to me is the joint-best vocal talent in rock/pop history (keep an eye on this thread to find out who the other one belongs to). This flipside of the coin was the huge portion of Sylvian's discography dedicated to epic Eno-esque experiments with ambient music.

What you see here, and what it's taken a good three paragraph's worth of self-indulgent rambling to mention, is the finest representation of Sylvian's work in this field. Approaching Silence here is not only a hot contestant for my favourite cover art of all time, but a compilation of his ambient work. The first two of these tracks, the epic, Tangerine Dream-echoing the Beekeeper's Apprentice, and the comparitively bitesize exercise in tape loops and heavily treated voice samples, Epiphany, both derive from a different album, this being Ember Glance: the Permanence Of Memory, recorded and released some 8 years earlier. Both pieces were composed with visual artist Russell Mills as musical accompaniments to an installation of sculpture at the Temporary Museum in Tokyo. It shows too, as the Beekeeper's Apprentice in particular seems designed to truly test the patience of anyone who doesn't have a stomach for ambient music, a lot like Eno's Music For Airports. It's very much time and place music, but both piece are gorgeously visual works of ambience if you can hack them. What makes this album into something truly extraordinary is the following Approaching Silence title track, composed by Sylvian with King Crimson's Robert Fripp for the Redemption installation at the P3 Gallery in Tokyo, some 5 years prior to this album's release. It's a 40 minute, despairingly ethereal monolith of ambient electronica, with a hugely fascinating motif of ghostly synth flourishes, growing more intense as the gong strikes. Like the opening track, it's a minimalist piece, but one with a completely different intent and with a lot more hooks to reel you in.

As with anything of its ilk though, you'll either find it intensely fascinating or incredibly boring. It definitely does stand as one of my favourite records to be credited to David Sylvian, and definitely one for anyone curious enough to try and spread themselves into a very demanding area of electronic music.



There's not a lot of this to be found on youtube, but below's the closest I could find to a clip of the title track in case you're curious...