On the homepage of David Sylvian’s new label there was a link to the imprint’s ‘Mission Statement’. ‘Samadhisound came into being as one possible blueprint for the future, intuition taking precedence over business sense and game plan,’ wrote Sylvian. ‘I don’t make long term plans as I surrender that part of my life to guru. But if I allow myself to dream I dream of a label that gives freedom to artists and musicians, creating a “safe house” for the nurturing of ideas. It will be home to much of my work and the work of my brother Steve Jansen. We will also sit at the helm as producers to a small group of artists who we hope will find a home at samadhisound. We’ll encourage projects that break new ground, and support those that bring a unique slant to an existing field of enquiry. Aesthetically that field is wide open as is the nature and diversity of the projects.’
Following the label’s inaugural releases, first Blemish and then the Sylvian & Sakamoto ep World Citizen which featured Jansen’s prowess at the drums, it was time for the label’s opening disc without a musical contribution from its founder. ‘First up is a fascinating project by Akira Rabelais which goes by the title Spellewauerynsherde,’ wrote Sylvian on the samadhisound website in 2004. ‘Having stumbled across some old and forgotten field recordings of Icelandic laments at the home of a friend Akira went about reworking the material, digitally treating it in a variety of ways with software of his own design. The result is a truly unique, haunted and haunting collection.’
‘I got a letter from David Sylvian out of the blue,’ Akira Rabelais (aka Vincent Carté) told me when we connected recently. ‘I had no idea he was going to send me a letter, a handwritten letter. I mean, how charming is that, to get a handwritten letter from David Sylvian. He was just starting his label and he invited me to release something on it. So I was floored. I had been a big lover of Secrets of the Beehive for a long time. That was a really important album to me.’
It’s possible that Sylvian had heard Rabelais’ earlier release entitled Eisoptrophobia (i.e. the irrational fear of mirrors) on which he performed and then treated piano pieces by Satie and Bartók alongside his own compositions. It was a record that he toured in Europe. ‘David told me he was a bit of a collector and when he liked something he wanted to have everything that was involved in it,’ recalls Akira. Equally, it could have been the artist’s self-confessed ‘esoteric’ music software that came to Sylvian’s attention. Over time this was used by the likes of Aphex Twin and Radiohead.
‘He never really let on to me about how he discovered my music and I never asked. We started talking about what we would do and I had Spellewauerynsherde. It had been through several versions but it had really been done in the final version for at least a year, probably longer. David took it and listened to it and thought about it and said, “Yes!” he wanted to release it, which was great.’
Whilst Sylvian was not a contributor to the music, he was credited with ‘art direction’. ‘We started on a very long journey to find graphics for it, which went on for almost 18 months as I recall,’ confides Rabelais, ‘It was a very long time. But finally we found this great photographer.’ As the cd landed we could see the evolution of the label’s design aesthetic, which for the first pair of discs had featured paintings by Atsushi Fukui. For this edition ‘cover art is by photographer Lia Nalbantidou, design by our house designer, the splendid Chris Bigg,’ stated Sylvian proudly.
The cover image is from Nalbantidou’s series The Secure, Private Domain of My Home (1996-2001) – Zero to Five. Akira: ‘David really loved that photograph and I really liked it too, so we came to that.’ It juxtaposes an ancient religious icon with a nineteenth century wallpaper design, a functional formica-clad cupboard and what seems to be a ’70s folding stool propped against the wall.
There’s a similar disorientation in the presentation of the music. The release notes tell us that each track ‘is built up from found sounds, field recordings of traditional Icelandic acapella lament songs recorded in the late 1960s or early 1970s on Ampex tapes and then forgotten about.’ The titles for each composition, however, begin with a year between 1382 and 1671, and are articulated in language styled on Middle English. Track 5 is a brief 44 second recording of a woman’s unaccompanied voice entitled ‘1559 – W. Cuningham Cosmogr. Glasse 125’. The reference is to William Cuningham’s The Cosmographical Glasse, a treatise on mathematical methods for depicting the universe, published indeed in 1559. Other titles refer to Bible translator John Wycliffe, printer William Caxton, and the poets John Gower and John Milton.
Having studied both Middle English and Anglo Saxon at university myself (with just a brush with Old Icelandic), the title resonates with the earlier age of Beowulf, an amalgamation of three words to become one with unique meaning. The release notes explain: ‘Spellewauerynsherde: Spell. Wavering. Shard. Spell as in speaking, incantation, a digitally constructed matrix of words and voices, summoning up a strange, distant past. Wavering: the shivering of those voices as they dissolve and recombine in Rabelais’ rich filtering systems, turning into pulsating, frequency rich drones. Shard: fragments, of voices, of ideas, of memories, of the past, brought back to life again.’ The artist’s appreciation for language was self-evident. ‘The Oxford English Dictionary is one of my favourite books,’ Rabelais was quoted at the time. ‘It’s interesting how words and meaning evolve over time. It’s like a secret natural history of human thought.’
His initial task had been merely to preserve the recordings. ‘I did an independent study with a composer/conductor Lucky Mosko at CalArts. For some reason I was digging through his closet one afternoon and found this stack of old Ampex tapes, ¼ inch tapes, that were just falling apart. They’d been in there for, I don’t know how long, a couple of decades. He told me that he’d made them on a back-packing tour through Iceland and so I just took them and saved them, and gave a copy to the library mastered on cd, gave him a copy and I kept a copy.’
Rabelais ‘became fascinated with the heartbreaking sadness of the voices’ and the idea was born of developing a series of compositions using the recordings as raw material. ‘There’s about 20 hours of music and some of it is really beautiful. It was really about capturing those moments and framing them, setting them in a context that worked for me.’
On the second track of the album, ‘1390 Glower Conf. 11. 20’, the archive recording of a sung lament is accompanied by echoes and repeats, the sound processing creating a beguiling ensemble from the single voice in the source material. ‘1440 Promp. Parv. 5 18/20’ follows, here the original singing is mutated and dissolved into a shimmer of sound, a dreamy heavenly host.
Central to Akira’s approach was his self-authored software. It was this innovative and affective sound-signal manipulation that made him the perfect artist to fulfil the stated samadhisound mission of breaking new ground. The label’s website effused about the invention: ‘The frame that Rabelais uses was constructed using a piece of computer software called Argeïphontes Lyre, which Rabelais developed in the late 1990s – a flexible tool for filtering sound sources, turning them into the remarkable pulsating, shifting sound fields and strange choral effects to be heard on Spellewauerynsherde‘s track three for example. In contrast to much of the contemporary electronic music scene, which remains heavily dependent on commercially available software, and which mostly consists of running through every possible combination of the potentialities within such software, resulting in a glut of music that is basically indistinguishable from each other, Rabelais has worked continuously on developing software that can achieve his various sonic goals.’ The artist had created ‘a haunting spiritual disc that sounds at once medieval, especially framed by Rabelais’ beautiful texts, while at the same time, on the cutting edge of electronic music.’
‘I tend to write filters as I need them and they go through quite a bit of fine tuning,’ explained Akira in the same article. ‘At the same time I try to let them evolve organically. I try to appreciate my mistakes.’ A deep respect for the traditional songs captured on those original tapes was essential. ‘I didn’t want to abstract it so much that it lost its essential quality. I didn’t want to damage the fabric of the original language, I wanted to set it, cast it in a certain light…I have a sort of Magical Realist approach to writing code. Borges, García Márquez and Bruno Schulz…Code can intersect with function and abstraction in a way that poetry can. It can take on a life of its own, really surprise you.’
Of creating Spellewauerynsherde he recalled, ‘When I was working on it, I would do an iteration of filtering and editing and then I’d burn it on a disc and play it. Put it on repeat in my bedroom for a weekend and sleep to it. Let it seep into my subconscious and then make changes off of those impressions…
‘I try to connect to something ineffable and then transmit it in some way.’
Samadhisound release four, also in 2004, would be Harold Budd’s Avalon Sutra, and Akira Rabelais would once again be involved. ‘Actually the first thing that I worked on musically with David was Avalon Sutra,’ he told me. ‘I think maybe Harold’s album was intended to be next [after Blemish & World Citizen]. As we were doing this long tortuous hike looking for graphics for my album, David said that Harold’s album was running a little short and he wanted me to write a coda, about a 10-minute coda for the end of it. We ordered up the master tapes which came on black-face ADAT, I pulled a studio from Universal and took little pieces from all of the tracks and, you know, people moving their chairs around, little violin hits, just different little bits and bobs from everywhere, and put them all together in this ostinato that I made 70-minutes, and told David, “Hey, just take whatever 8/9/10 minutes you want.” Instead of doing that he made the second disc, which was a surprise to me but I was happy nonetheless!’
There was just one enhancement requested. ‘When I sent it to David, he said, “OK, we want to get a little more Harold Budd in there.” So Harold went into a studio and recorded about 13 minutes of piano and I chopped it up and sprinkled it over the top of what I had done, and away we went.’
‘Avalon Sutra (released as a 2 disc set) is a suite of short, heartbreaking ambient pieces,’ read the label’s announcement, ‘featuring Budd’s delicate piano improvisations, lush string arrangements and warm electronic drones. The second disc (As Long As I Can Hold My Breath) features a startling remix by Akira Rabelais, sending Budd’s arrangements into Feldmanesque eternities of sound.’
Maybe it had something to do with the pace at which I was living life when the set first came out, but back then I was much more at home with Harold’s miniatures on the first disc than with the longer-than-an-hour ‘As Long As I Can Hold My Breath (By Night)’. These days I love to luxuriate in that extended form of the work, for which Rabelais and Sylvian share the production credit. A fragment of the strings from disc one repeats and subtly mutates, Budd’s occasional clusters of piano notes sparkling like the catch of sunlight in a necklace set with diamonds. I find it mesmerising and calming in equal measure.
‘Harold’s playing had been an inspiration for a long while,’ says Akira, ‘The Pearl [Budd’s release with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois] is such a big album in my life, really defining so many moments in my early twenties. That album, it was a big deal for me.’
After samadhisound 003 – Spellewauerynsherde, and ss 004 – Avalon Sutra, came a surprise disc of Blemish remixes: ss 005 – The Good Son vs The Only Daughter. Sylvian invited collaborators past and present to cast the material in their own light. An opportunity to renew some artistic acquaintances and discover the possibilities of others. The result was a different take on the material which David described as ‘not unlike the re-staging of a play.’ It was no surprise to see Akira Rabelais commissioned for a re-model on the new cd, who around this time was featured by Bjork on a track for her soundtrack for the Matthew Barney film Drawing Restraint 9.
The Good Son vs The Only Daughter contains two reinventions of the original title track, ‘Blemish’, firstly by soon-to-be Nine Horses collaborator Burnt Friedman and then Rabelais’ version coming as the closing track. Akira’s approach certainly mirrored his commitment to the Icelandic laments in the retention of the essential quality of the source material. The familiar buzzes of the original are here but the pulsing frequency of the opening is replaced with a wash of sound that ebbs and flows in and out of the ensuing mix. The degraded sound of a simple piano motif is present in the introduction – soon returning as a theme – with the soft exclamation of a muted trumpet.
The vocal track of the original is edited down, the effect being only to emphasise the raw emotions expressed. Sylvian sings,
‘I fall outside of her
She doesn’t notice
I fall outside of her
She doesn’t notice at all’
and Rabelais snatches away all sound but a crackle of static, like the fall in the stomach that sudden realisation brings.
As the line is repeated close to the end, ‘I fall outside of her’, a simple rhythm enters, in contrast to the percussion-less source recording, and the muted brass re-enters, its styling reminiscent of Norwegian maestro Arve Henriksen. Rabelais’ version closes with Sylvian’s wordplay on a traditional English saying. ‘Life’s for the taking’ is usually an exhortation to someone that everything in life is there to be experienced if they will only grasp the opportunity. Here though the spirit is care-worn and, as a brass refrain echoes beyond, the question is more about whether life is actually worth living:
‘Life’s for the taking
So they say
Take it away’
‘David asked me if I wanted to work on a track. I mean, “Of course!” I was willing to do whichever needed to be done. I had carte blanche to do whatever I wanted. But I wanted to respect the piece and make something that went with it. I really had such a strong nostalgia feel from that track. I guess the thread that I’m pulling the hardest is that nostalgic, “childhood books lost in the attic, found again 28 years later” kind of thing.
‘David was easy to work with on that track. After I finished my stuff he made a few changes to it, but it pretty much went out the door the way that I made it. It came out really beautiful.’
Rabelais subsequently made a video for his remix, coupling the audio with images from a John Wayne movie, a reflection of the nostalgia he felt from the original. It’s another juxtaposition of cultural references from disparate times and places.
Rabelais would go on to appear as part of the line-up for Sylvian’s When Loud Weather Buffeted Naoshima (2009), music created for an installation on the Japanese island and intended to be experienced in that natural environment. A further solo disc entitled Caduceus was released on samadhisound the following year. This time the subject of Akira’s processing with his Argeïphontes Lyre software was the guitar, at times treated to an extreme level of distortion. Sylvian was clear that the album continued in the spirit of the label’s mission, describing it as ‘caustically romantic’. ‘Akira’s recording,’ he continued, ‘presents you with an auditory experience quite unlike any other. It’s by turns a brutal and discomforting ride. Outside of the full-on audio assault, there’s unsettling disquiet in its quietude. Once heard it won’t be forgotten and for those seeking out recorded music that is transformative, experiential, this material has that potency.’ (2010)
In producing his slowly unwinding ostinato for Harold Budd’s album, Rabelais – perhaps by accident – identified a complementary format for his craft. Sylvian sent Christmas greetings to his online followers in 2009 and accompanied them with a musical gift. ‘We have a specially composed, seasonally inspired, work by Akira Rabelais’, he wrote, ‘which we’re able to offer as a free download. 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.’ The track is like the song of angels caught on a wintry wind.
‘I am big fan of furniture music,’ says Akira, ‘music in the background: music that defines a space. It’s almost a subconscious kind of thing, which was a big thing in Spellewauerynsherde where the music is really about having it in the background at low volume, just letting it seep into your subconscious and define the space. I find that kind of music helpful to focus.’
Rabelais would go on to meet and work directly with Harold Budd, a relationship developed from that initial remix assignment. ‘Harold was kind and gentle,’ he remembers, ‘like his piano phrasing. He suggested that we make some music… I sketched a few changes and booked time at a studio in Silver Lake. The first thing we recorded is the last thing I released with Harold… The Little Glass. The title comes from that studio time (David let me know Harold was fond of good wine, so I was happy to take a couple bottles of a favourite, Williams Selyem, to the session).
‘I miss Harold… great guy, excellent player and a good friend.’ (2022)
The first disc of The Little Glass features piano pieces performed by Budd and Rabelais, the second disc being a long-form re-expression of the material. The album was intended to be released on samadhisound but ‘we didn’t get it done in time.’
As a fitting footnote to the Akira’s involvement with samadhisound, at the time the label’s activity was drawing towards a conclusion, it was David Sylvian who would create a reinvention of some of Rabelais’ music. In 2014 a short video was posted on Sylvian’s now-defunct tumblr page entitled End Times (winter NYC 2011). The soundtrack comprised two of those brief moments of quietude from Caduceus, the tracks ‘and the permanence of smoke or stars’ and then ‘on the little in-betweens’ brought together. Above them was placed the voice of poet-priest R.S. Thomas – who had previously been portrayed in Sylvian’s song ‘Manafon’ – reciting his poem, ‘The Island’.
The short audio-visual was both a footnote to this collaboration in music and a summation of the fascination that Sylvian had found in the life, work and creative inspiration of the poet (see here for more). ‘I came to feel that, in a sense, Thomas’ faith in, and need of, his outlet through poetry was more important than the faith that inspired it. They were uniquely, it seemed to me, bound to one another. Not as in the religious poetry of his and other faiths which generally speak of the ecstasy. He writes of the working poor and the landscape but it’s an austere world with little hope of comfort and so, by contrast, we are encouraged to concentrate on the fate of our souls…there’s also this underlying doubt and struggle with his belief, an uncertainty of the existence of the other.’ (2009)
The Island
And God said, I will build a church here
And cause this people to worship me,
And afflict them with poverty and sickness
In return for centuries of hard work
And patience. And its walls shall be hard as
Their hearts, and its windows let in the light
Grudgingly, as their minds do, and the priest’s words be drowned
By the wind’s caterwauling. All this I will do,
Said God, and watch the bitterness in their eyes
Grow, and their lips suppurate with
Their prayers. And their women shall bring forth
On my altars, and I will choose the best
Of them to be thrown back into the sea.
And that was only on one island.
R.S. Thomas
‘Blemish: remixed by Akira Rabelais’
Original track: David Sylvian – all instruments, vocal
Music and lyrics by David Sylvian
Remixed by Akira Rabelais
Produced by David Sylvian. From The Good Son vs The Only Daughter: The Blemish Remixes by David Sylvian, samadhisound, 2005.
Lyrics © samadhisound publishing
‘End Times (winter NYC 2011)’
Akira Rabelais – guitar, FM & AM, R.S. Thomas – voice
Audio-visual by David Sylvian
Uploaded to David Sylvian’s tumblr account, The Opposite of Order, 2014, and subsequently to his instagram page
The tracks ‘and the permanence of smoke or stars’ and ‘on the little in-betweens’ are from Caduceus by Akira Rabelais, samadhisound, 2010
‘The Island’ by R.S. Thomas © Estate of R.S. Thomas
All artist quotes are from interviews in 2004/2005 and from the author’s conversation with Akira Rabelais in 2023 unless indicated. My thanks to Akira for his generous contribution to this article. Full sources and acknowledgments can be found here.
On the closure of the samadhisound label the copyright of recordings was returned to artists in line with the label’s ethos, allowing their subsequent re-release. Akira Rabelais’ samadhisound albums, Spellewauerynsherde and Caduceus, along with his later work with Harold Budd, can be found on his bandcamp page here. Harold Budd’s Avalon Sutra was re-released with new artwork and can be found on bandcamp here.
The track by Akira Rabelais offered as a 2009 free download by samadhisound, ‘1340 Gaw. & Gr. knt 471 Wel by-commes such craft vpon cristmasse’, can be heard and downloaded here.
Download links: ‘Blemish: remixed by Akira Rabelais’ (Apple), ‘1390 Glower Conf. 11. 20’ (bandcamp), ‘As Long as I Can Hold My Breath (By Night)’ (bandcamp)
Physical media links: Avalon Sutra (bandcamp)
‘I really loved working with David and being on the label was truly amazing. Everybody who was involved with that venture was just so great. It was a labour of love for everyone who was involved.’ Akira Rabelais, 2023
Vista 
Fan-bloody-tastic
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