Nothing is Happening Everywhere

March 2012. Alerted by one of the online communities, it’s one of those moments when something appears totally out of the blue. For the most part, new material is advertised weeks or months in advance and there is opportunity for anticipation and some research into new musical partnerships. Not this time. There on soundcloud is a new account with just one track uploaded, ‘Nothing is Happening Everywhere’, credited to L A N D featuring David Sylvian.

The explanatory text reads: ‘Night Within is the new album by L A N D, the instrumental project of London based duo, Daniel Lea and Matthew Waters. Reflecting many of their musical influences, the album is a startling collision of sounds and genres. These are woven together via subliminal themes of apocalyptic chaos and modern noir undertones – drawn from reference points including the stories of Paul Auster, the paintings of Ed Ruscha and the urban neon dislocation of Taxi Driver.

‘With an array of additional players including Alexander Tucker (ATP), Duke Garwood (Fire), Daniel O’Sullivan (Sunn 0))) & Ulver) and Jamie McCarthy (Gavin Bryars), the album marries post bop jazz with baritone guitars against industrial sound design. Echoes of classic jazz albums such as Charles Mingus’ Black Saint and the Sinner Lady can be heard. Later jazz influences such as the muted trumpets of Jacques Coursil and the heavy free blowouts of Peter Brötzmann are also evident. The album however brings these elements into a new and original terrain by meshing industrial soundscapes, blues piano/baritone riffs, motorik beats and expansive Scelsi-like strings. The music is icy, smoke laced and unashamedly cinematic in its articulation.

‘Night Within has been mixed by Ben Frost at Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik, and mastered at Abbey Road Studios, London.’

Most of these names were completely new to me, one exception being Australian-in-Iceland Ben Frost whose experimental dark ambient album Theory of Machines (2006) rendered unashamedly abrasive machine-generated sound and clattering percussion into passages incongruously charged with emotion. The relative calm of the mesmerising closing track, ‘Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water’, incorporates a cello performance by Hildur Guðnadóttir who made a fleeting appearance by way of a sample on David Sylvian’s Died in the Wool and has participated in sessions with him that have yet to see the light of day.

I asked Daniel Lea of L A N D to share some background to the project. ‘L A N D started as a duo of myself and Matthew Waters in 2009,’ he told me. ‘Night Within was inspired by Film Noir, approaching an apocalyptic noir. L A N D is always highly influenced by architecture, form and shape. There are a lot of sharp edges, metallic textures, rigid and free rhythms, light and shadow.’

In the lead up to the release of Night Within there were some confusing track-listings circulating online. Some didn’t show the Sylvian track at all, instead including a piece called ‘City of Glass’. To promote the album the record company put out a video for this track, which turned out to be an instrumental edit of the song on which Sylvian performed. The visuals recalled the themes expounded in the description on the soundcloud page. Towering office blocks whose mirror-glass windows reflect the sky and clouds drifting above, the activity within these vast structures remaining firmly out of sight. The only reference to humanity, dwarfed by the scale of the architecture, is a glimpse through silhouette of a mysterious hatted figure.

The instrumental version gives us opportunity to concentrate solely on the music, the track beginning with a single beat and then the resonant sound of a bowed cymbal which repeats beneath the woodwind, the latter becoming increasingly crazed as Duke Garwood’s shrill saxophone and Dom Garwood’s clarinet combine with the deep reverberations below to set us in a nervy, disconcerting setting. There is a slightly stuttering percussion loop that drives the track uneasily along, seemingly a sample from the opening bars of Talk Talk’s ‘New Grass’ from their final album, Laughing Stock.

My cd copy of Night Within does not credit Daniel Lea or Matthew Waters for instrumentation, listing them only as composers and producers. I had therefore always assumed that theirs was a directorial role, guiding the guest musicians towards their combined vision. Daniel however corrects me on this point. ‘I haven’t checked the credits since 2012, but we played: Daniel Lea – guitars, bowed percussion, EBow, processing and sound design; Matthew Waters – guitar, piano, bowed cymbals and bass. We wrote the bulk of materials with raw recordings of bowed cymbals and then would get individual samples and tune them to make chords. A lot of it was written on piano and structured as we went along.

‘Session musicians were guided conceptually, however most of that was improvised by the players, so in a similar way to a film score is composed where you have the main compositions written and there are some extended techniques, textures and colours to offset that. We were working with mainly friends and people we respected musically. I had a relationship with most of the people before starting this record.’

Daniel shared the specific musician credits for ‘Nothing is Happening Everywhere’ with me (reproduced at the end of this article). It’s a tight group of the two Garwoods on woodwind, Lea himself on bowed percussion and guitar, and Paul Cook on drums.

There was never a plan for Night Within to be anything other than a set of instrumentals. ‘The collaboration with David Sylvian happened after the album was actually completed,’ Daniel shares, ‘it was something that was a complete surprise to us. We were not thinking of vocals, it crossed our minds as there were a few vocalists we loved but didn’t want to make a guest vocalist album.

‘Ben Frost at that time was talking to David Sylvian a bit and he heard some of Night Within and liked it. I asked if he was up for singing on anything – that would be amazing.

‘I was in NYC for Christmas of 2011. I got back to London jet lagged, woke up at 6am and had an email from David Sylvian asking if I had any feedback! I thought I was dreaming…’

Listening to what had been L A N D’s completed piece, now with Sylvian’s added vocal, was a surreal experience for Lea who ‘grew up on Japan and Sylvian’s solo work.

‘I was blown away. The way he weaves in and out of the free saxophones and clarinets on the second verse is astounding. I couldn’t think of another vocalist who was more suited to this track, I was speechless.’

‘Nothing is Happening Everywhere’ by L A N D featuring David Sylvian on L A N D’s official soundcloud

The vocal was presumably recorded by Sylvian at his home studio in Temple, New Hampshire. Lea and Waters’ response to Sylvian’s question was to confirm that ‘we had no feedback! David then added some backing vocals and Ben Frost completed the mix.’

These one-off collaborations are often the chance for Sylvian to test out something outside of normal bounds, to move beyond the palette employed for his solo work of the time. A parallel from a decade earlier would be ‘Linoleum’ with Chris Vrenna, once of Nine Inch Nails and aka Tweaker (read more here). The obvious departure for ‘Nothing is Happening Everywhere’ is the rhythmic propulsion which contrasts with an avowed percussion-less approach across Sylvian’s successive solo albums, Blemish, Manafon and Died in the Wool.

Sylvian also seemed to take aspects of L A N D’s concept for Night Within to the heart of his lyric. I love the description in the opening lines of walls topped with barbed metal to repel intrusion – and to prevent escape:

‘I’d woken in a garden
Where metal crawls
The shoulders of dividing walls

I’d woken in a garden
Where metal divides
Almighty and small

So I’ll never know you’

A natural world subjugated by the built environment to the point where man-made edifices dominate their own designers and constructors, diminishing them in the process and imposing separation.

‘I’ve run across cities
In which you’ve permission to cower
Relinquish your hold
On the vestiges of power’

The mismatch in scale serves to emphasise the impotence of a single individual, an inferiority that is the prelude to despair.

‘No desire for relevance
To say nothing of meaning
What a pitiful, pitiful feeling’

‘And nothing is happening everywhere
So I’ll never find you’

L A N D would continue albeit with a changed line-up. ‘Matthew left the project in 2013 after we played a few shows supporting Night Within,’ explains Daniel Lea. ‘I continued and later released Anoxia in 2015.’ The literal meaning of the title is an absence or deficiency of oxygen, extending the theme of the previous release from the dominance of the built environment to the point where life is suffocated by it. This time the release notes spoke of ‘visions of a Brutalist world slowly decaying, but with the mellifluous harmonics of vegetation and fluid matter entwining themselves amongst the ruination.’

Lea talks about the music in terms of physical construction. ‘The percussion and drums acted as monolithic and structured foundations, the architectural backbone, and the sound design, textures and field recordings acted as the vegetation and decay.’ A new ensemble of musicians was gathered to explore the vision, the free jazz woodwind gone in favour of layers of percussive sound. ‘The cast changes with each concept. Each record I want to try new things and new ways of working.

‘I worked a lot with drummer and percussionist Rupert Clervaux. I would programme rhythms electronically and we would copy them and expand upon them with an array of rented percussion, taikos, djun djuns, crotales, aluphone, marching quads, gongs, hand drums and there was a lot of double time playing and then slowing down to half speed. Everything was sculpted, processed and chiselled.’

Amongst those gathered were some familiar names for those who follow David Sylvian’s collaborators. Mark Wastell, who would later release There is No Love with Sylvian and Rhodri Davies, was approached by Lea after a gig at London’s Cafe OTO to undertake a session playing tam tam. Here too is the shakuhachi of Clive Bell who had appeared on When Loud Weather Buffeted Naoshima and who in 2022, as a member of Twinkle³, featured Sylvian reading Japanese death poems for their album Upon this Fleeting Dream.

‘That was a complete accident,’ says Lea. ‘It’s a small scene in London for experimental-like recording artists. Clive Bell I didn’t actually know had worked with David. Musicians were selected through what the music and thematic concepts called for, shakuhachi and the tam tam were very much the decay and vegetation, the sound matter and atmospheric mist that would float over the structured foundations of metallic percussion and stomping bass hits.’

Mixing duties were again the responsibility of Ben Frost who the record company declared to be ‘the perfect man to mix such spaces.’ ‘With Anoxia I sent Ben everything zero’d in my mix so it was the level it was recorded at, I took off all reverbs, EQ’s and kept anything processed or sound design as it was, as I worked on it so long I wanted to build up the foundation again from the ground up. Ben says he mainly does spatial work EQing and some production work, Anoxia had a lot of clanging metal as did Night Within but it was also melodic as well as sound design or rhythmic.’

For my playlist I accompany ‘Nothing is Happening Everywhere’ with its instrumental counterpart, ‘City of Glass’, and ‘Cosmopolis’ from Night Within, the latter being a further interpretation in sound of the imagined urban landscape at the core of that project. ‘Equinox’ from Anoxia comes next as a representation of the stifling terrain of the follow-up, with Mark Wastell added to the ensemble and the sound of Clive Bell’s breath through wooden shakuhachi proof that some organic life prevails.

Since L A N D last released music, Daniel Lea relocated to Los Angeles where he has contributed to an array of projects. He is still working with Ben Frost, working with him on additional music and sound design for the soundtrack of Ridley Scott’s TV series Raised by Wolves and releasing another disc mixed by the Australian as part of a duo with Michael Deragon known as Heliochrysum. More L A N D music is also in the offing. ‘I’m actually just finishing an album now with L A N D with Duke Garwood singing, it’s a full album I wrote years back and Duke sang on it over a year back. It’s a beautiful record and will be out next year some time. I’m also following up Anoxia now which should be complete by next year and released the year after, actually strangely ten years after Anoxia.’

A final reflection on the work with David Sylvian, which seems to have been as unexpected by Daniel as it was to listeners on its surprise appearance online? ‘It was an absolute honour and one of the highlights of my collaborations with artists. I absolutely love that track still. I think one of my favourite tracks of all time is David’s ‘Darkest Dreaming’ one of the most beautiful tracks ever written for me, it kills me and just has this incredible atmosphere that floats through it.’

‘Nothing is Happening Everywhere’

Paul Cook – drums; Dom Garwood – clarinet; Duke Garwood – saxophone; Daniel Lea – guitars, bowed cymbals, sound design; David Sylvian – vocals

(track credits provided by Daniel Lea)

Music by Daniel Lea and Matthew Waters. Lyrics by David Sylvian.

Produced by Daniel Lea and Matthew Waters. From Night Within by L A N D, Important Records, 2012.

Lyrics © samadhisound publishing

My thanks to Daniel Lea for his generous contribution to this article. Full sources and acknowledgements can be found here.

Daniel Lea’s official website can be found at daniel-lea.com.

The featured image is that posted to accompany ‘Nothing Is Happening Everywhere’ on the official samadhisound soundcloud account.

Download links: ‘Nothing is Happening Everywhere’ (bandcamp), ‘City of Glass’ (YouTube), ‘Cosmopolis’ (bandcamp), ‘Equinox’ (bandcamp)

Physical media: Night Within (important records); Anoxia (important records)

‘It was such an honour to have worked with David Sylvian on this track. It’s a perfect marriage and he really made that track what it is.’ Daniel Lea, 2023

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