Tag: David Sylvian

The Other Side of Life

‘a new high mark of maturity’

There were fundamental differences in band preparations for Japan’s third LP. The material for the first two albums, Steve Jansen explained, ‘was performed extensively live before we had the opportunity to record it. Therefore, those albums serve more as a document of what we’d learnt as a group performing together. There was very little recording craft involved, just a lot of energy and influences from an eclectic mix of styles, which were all a part of our early teenage years onwards.

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Zero Landmine

‘a real hope’

‘Lt Colonel Colin Mitchell became famous in the late 1960s as commanding officer of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders,’ explains Chris Moon, recalling his job interview with the colonel early in 1993, as he searched for the right assignment to follow his own service in the military. ‘He set up a mine clearance charity after visiting Afghanistan, where he saw farmers unable to work their land, refugees who couldn’t go home and a Red Cross hospital full of amputees.’

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Praise (Pratah Smarami)

bhagavatīstutiḥ – ‘so moving…so pure’

‘I met Shree Maa in the Spring of 1996, when my wife asked me to accompany her to a friend’s house where the saint was visiting,’ recollects Charles Seward. ‘When we arrived everyone was singing, ringing bells and dancing about the room. I thought, “Is this a wild party, or a spiritual gathering?” Trying not to feel out of place, I sat in the back of the room and watched. There were song sheets but I could not pronounce the words which were in Sanskrit. The atmosphere was alive with a kind of infectious loving, joyful feeling. Slightly out of character for me, my hands started to slap my crossed legs, and before long my knees were bouncing, my head waving and my hands clapping. My heart started to open, as the boundaries that separated me from others faded. The whole experience contained a great sense of elation.

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Ghosts

‘adventurous and strange’

‘New means change the method; new methods change the experience, and new experiences change man. Whenever we hear sounds we are changed: we are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is the more the case when we hear organised sounds, sounds organised by another human being: music.’ So said the ground-breaking composer of electronic music, Karlheinz Stockhausen, during a lecture given in London in 1971.

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When We Return You Won’t Recognise Us

‘the interior life of a community’

March 2009. The venue is on the north-east coast of Gran Canaria, the near-circular island surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. Part of a Spanish archipelago but geographically much closer to Africa. In fact, at its closest point, Morocco is less than a hundred miles to the East. Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM, or the Atlantic Centre of Modern Art) in Las Palmas has dedicated exhibition space to the second architecture and art biennial of the Canary Islands, with parallel presentations taking place at a number of venues across Gran Canaria.

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