I have been a huge fan of David Sylvian’s work since the early days of the New Romantic era of Japan.

I was extremely fortunate to do a telephone interview with him a few years ago, I have to say it was totally nerveracking. I found him to be warm and easy to chat with.

The good news is that he is releasing a new album on Monday 14 September 2009

Manafon

“It’s like a one-man monologue in which every change of light and backdrop is crucial to the carrying of the central performance. It’s an ensemble work even though there is a central performance.” Though the setlist is all ballads, romanticism is out, and no percussion provides a pulse. All the melody and rhythm rest in the voice. Aside from overdubs of acoustic guitar or John Tilbury’s somber, Feldman-esque phrases on piano, Sylvian enhanced but did not reconfigure the improvisations, giving himself just the skeletons of songs to guide him.

Here is a snippet of an interview with David Sylvian in conversation with Marcus Boon taken from the official Manafon website.

MB: I just listened to Manafon. I wish I’d listened to it a week ago because I’ve been sort of at my wit’s end, and the first track on the disc in particular spoke to something I’ve been feeling rather intensely without being able to articulate it, or knowing anyone else who was able to do so. As with Blemish and some of your other recordings, I’m very thankful to have that experience of something obscure reflected back to me in a way that I am able to recognize.

DS: Can’t ask for more than that really.

MB: I’ve been thinking a lot about “deflation” recently, and the bubble not only in the financial markets, but in values, practices, activities, ideas in general. And the sense that all of these bubbles are bursting or deflating. I think it’s true in music, and the turn you took with Blemish is a rare thoughtful response to this problem… that melody, song, noise etc. themselves have become sites of a bubble that makes it almost impossible to listen to them, since all one hears is their “importance”, their value as capital, as gesture in a marketplace saturated with gestures. If Manafon reminds me of anything it’s Cage’s Indeterminacy, another beautiful meditation on the question of form…

DS: Oddly, the subject of “indeterminacy” has come up a lot lately both related to this and current work. I’m also familiar with the Cage work of that title and fascinated, as many composers over the years have been, by what can be done some place between overly determined composition and its opposite and how to bring the two closer together. Not exactly a new problem but relatively new to the area of songwriting, at least in this context. After all, all writing is an act of improvisation on some level. And the emphasis here is in the compositional process rather than the notion of repeat performance. That old chestnut of the fixity of the recorded performance…

MB: It’s very low-key, but moving too. If there’s a danger, it’s in your voice, where I can feel the temptation to sing “beautifully” (this being one of your gifts), and the further temptation to refuse that gift by speech-singing or extreme lack of affectation. It lends the disk a strange sense of drama though, since in the end so much depends on very small decisions about intonation. And in the end this is part of the music’s power, that sense of struggle at the level of your voice.

DS: Of course these decisions are core for most singers in any context but they do become magnified under such circumstances. Some might feel there’s an estrangement between singer and context which is part of the work’s attraction for me. In some instances there’d be little difference in taking a field recording of say, sounds in a cafeteria, isolating 6 minutes and approaching this as a workable context for vocal composition… and indeed, that’s how some of these ideas came together for me.

You can read the full interview on the official Manafon website, I only wish it had been a video interview.

I have listened to snippets of the album from the website and I have to say I can’t wait for mine to arrive!

Here’s the first single lifted off the album:

Small Metal Gods – David Sylvian

Pre order the CD now: you won’t be disappointed!