As David Sylvian’s In Praise of Shamans tour reached the West Coast in April 1988, he was interviewed for a piece in the Los Angeles Times. It was put to him that the ‘New Age tag has cropped up frequently’ in connection with his music. ‘It’s a very easy category to throw me into,’ Sylvian observed. ‘The music generally isn’t aggressive and therefore they define it as easy-listening, and they think I could belong to that category. And also some of the philosophies of life that I speak about they think may bear some resemblance to New Age.
‘I find that generally, what New Age set out to achieve… in that the work should have a specific function and induce a certain state of mind in the listener, I tend to think that it fails, quite badly… They approach the work on the intellectual level rather than the creative level. I think that somebody like Brian Eno and people that have worked with him for some time – Harold Budd, Michael Brook, Jon Hassell – in many ways achieve the aims of the New Age group far more profoundly than New Age itself.
Continue reading “Avalon Sutra – Perhaps”
