Tag: Russell Mills

Avalon Sutra – Perhaps

‘from the resonant heart of a soulful man’

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.

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Silver Moon – Silver Moon over Sleeping Steeples

‘Just glorious. Transporting. Mesmerising.’

Gone to Earth draws to a close with its most musically up-beat track. Probably the first radio play of ‘Silver Moon’ was on London’s Capital Radio at the close of a disappointingly brief interview with David ‘Kid’ Jensen, who had indulged in much more in-depth discussions with David Sylvian during his prior stint as evening host on BBC Radio One. Speaking a few weeks before the release of the album, Sylvian introduced the track saying, ‘I think it’s quite a romantic piece. It’s almost a love song… It’s the nearest I’ve got to writing one for a while anyway…’

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The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

‘subtle shifts of perception’

“The quality of art is that it makes people who are otherwise always looking outward, turn inward.” The Dalai Lama

The above quotation headed David Sylvian’s artist ‘statement’ in the 1991 book of the Ember Glance: The Permanence of Memory installation, the centrepiece of a boxed set commemorating the event held in Tokyo the previous year. Sylvian expanded upon the thought in his own reflections:

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Gone to Earth

‘the spirit coming down and taking physical form’

In 1986 the oncoming age of downloads and streaming which would reduce the impact of album cover art to that of a mere thumbnail was way beyond comprehension. The cd was rising in popularity but was still a minority format, certainly beyond my student budget at the time. When David Sylvian’s Gone to Earth was released, LP sleeves were an art form in themselves, especially the glorious expanse of the gatefold. There was something so tangible and satisfying about holding and studying the record cover as the vinyl spun on your treasured hi-fi. For the duration of a side of music you were settled in one place, enjoying the full package that the artist presented.

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Ember Glance

‘ideas of space, time and memory’

In the sumptuously presented book that came as part of the Ember Glance box set, before the reader sets eyes on anything of the installation itself, there is a section entitled ‘The Lakes: preparation’. Included here are treated photographs taken by The Douglas Brothers. A portrait of Ian Walton whose gloriously textural daubs of paint would grace the huge final wall in the finished display. Blurred frames of Sylvian in the Cumbrian outdoors. Hands sifting through rocks, twigs and bones, collating material to be incorporated in a public exhibition that will be staged over 5,000 miles away in Tokyo’s docks.

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