David Sylvian

I haven't done the math, but it may well be that David Sylvian shows up in this collection more than anybody else. Born David Batt, he formed Japan in the mid-1970s with his brother (who changed his name as well, to Steve Jansen) on drums, Richard Barbieri on keyboards, Mick Karn on bass, and Rob Dean on guitar. In the beginning, they were a rather forgettable band whose influences showed through stronger than their originality – it was apparent that they were glam wannabees who wanted to pass for sophisticated artistes, with Sylvian clearly modeling his vocal and sartorial choices after Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry, with a nod to David Bowie and the New York Dolls. After a few mediocre (ok, bad) albums, the group reinvented itself completely in 1980 with their penultimate studio album, Gentlemen Take Polaroids. The sharp stylistic turn they made with that album came to fruition on their final disc together, 1981's Tin Drum. Now, they weren't aping anybody, and the suave sophistication of their music was wholly their own. They went from second (or third) rate imitators to first rate innovators. Sylvian's too smooth baritone remains fairly consistent across the Japan albums, but the other musicians grew tremendously. Steve Jansen reworked his flat-footed beats into intricate, vaguely ethnic polyrhythms (the drum break on the live version of Visions of China (from the album Oil on Canvas) is stunning), Richard Barbieri started creating a distinctive and wondrous vocabulary of vaguely Asian, somewhat Middle Eastern, slightly Martian textures and ambiences with his synthesizers, and Mick Karn switched to a fretless bass and developed a fluid style that is unlike anything I've ever heard another bassist do – his work is immediately identifiable as his, which is, admittedly, sometimes distracting. I can always tell when he does session work for somebody else because of his distinctive style, and I often stop listening to the rest of the arrangement to pick out his burbling, bubbling lines.

And then Sylvian stole Karn's girlfriend and the band broke up. And, true to the basic formula, Sylvian – the vocalist – took most of the audience with him when he went solo. But he did more than just become a solo musician. He took his refined taste and turned it into a cottage industry, becoming more like Brian Eno than "just" a musician. He made books, he worked on films, he collaborated with other visual artists on elaborate installations (almost all of them in Japan, thank you very much Dave). And through it all, he released a series of wondrous solo projects, enlisting some of the top talents in the experimental and ambient fields, people like Jon Hassell and Ryuichi Sakamoto and Bill Nelson and Holgar Csukay. He collaborated with Sakamoto on the soundtrack for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and collaborated with geeky guitar god Robert Fripp on the spectacular The First Day. He also shows a commendable sense of restraint when it comes to his own vocals. Most vocalists can't bear to let more than a few seconds go by without singing, but Sylvian has released entire albums of instrumental work, from the legendary long-lost second disc of his sophomore outing, Gone to Earth (the US version collapsed the original double album – one of songs, one of instrumentals – into a single CD, cutting none of the songs and most of the instrumentals. I had to go to Japan to procure the original set on CD), to his haunting electronic ambient experiments with Germany's merry prankster of the audio avant-garde, and founding Can member, Holgar Czukay. Those discs, especially the first, Plight & Premonition, are loving sleepscapes filled with drones and hums and bits of shortwave radio effluvia (Czukay had been "sampling" other cultures as part of his music before most of today's "cutting edge" audio alchemists were even born).

I listened to that disc a lot during my final year at Hampshire, and I used to especially enjoy putting it on barely audibly as I drifted off to sleep – recreating Brian Eno's original ambient inspiration. After a few nights of this, I noticed a most peculiar thing. I would wake up in the middle of the night, hours after the record ended and the stereo shut itself off, and still clearly hear the potent, swirling mist of sound. At first I thought it was some distant droning machinery, or some dissipating dream, but then I'd wake up fully and listen to the unmistakable timbres of that disc. I'd sit up in bed and stare at the sleeping stereo – amplifier unmistakably off, needle undeniably tucked into its bed, dreaming dreams of vinyl canyons – but the music would continue unabated. Disturbed and entranced, I'd lie back down and listen to the ghost record until I fell asleep again. I didn't think that much about it until I mentioned it to my friend Geoff, also a Sylvian enthusiast who had been listening to Plight and Premonition a lot, and to my new girlfriend G, who heard it a lot because I listened to it a lot. Turns out that both of them were experiencing the same latent audio hallucinations, lying awake at night listening to music that wasn't there. I don't know what they put in that record (personally, I think it's the "ultrasound" that's credited to them, among the other arcane instruments), but it certainly is powerful mojo.

I can't overstate how impressed I am that Sylvian can put his vox on ice. The only other singer I know who is so judicious and restrained – and so sensitive to the needs of the music and to the completion of a mood – is Peter Gabriel, whose best album, the transcendent Passion, contains not a single word (although it does have a few moans and yells in it). It more than makes up for Sylvian's tendency to overwork his lyrics and oversing his baritone on occasion. His sensitivity and taste show in his ambient compositions, some of which walk the razor-thin line between ambient and boring, with one memorable track lasting almost 30 minutes without much change and without getting tedious (that would be The Beekeeper's Apprentice, the soundtrack for an installation that was released with a couple of similar pieces on Approaching Silence).

Sylvian’s output is roughly divided between ambient/ethnic instrumentals and regular albums full of songs. His song albums are easier to find (marginally) and friendlier to listen to, I suppose, but they generally wear on me faster than the other, harder to find instrumentals (like Alchemy: An Index of Possibilities or Words with the Shaman). Fortunately, many of these exquisite gems have been collected on one disc, a sampler of some of his more esoteric explorations, called Camphor. For his discs of songs, he tends to inhabit that imaginary "fourth world" as conceived by trumpeter Jon Hassell, the collision between the technological abilities of the first world and the sonic palette and vague spiritualism of the third world (as filtered into the first). Synthesizers are as welcome as dobros and the occasional yang t'chin.

Nostalgia, a gorgeous, wistful song that perfectly captured its title, appears on his first solo disc after the break-up of Japan, called Brilliant Trees. The track begins with a haunting hum, which is so perfectly integrated into the track that it was a shock to discover that it's actually a traditional Persian love song, which I learned when Lisa Gerrard (the decidedly better half of Dead Can Dance) covered it on her solo debut, The Mirror Pool. It blends perfectly with the light percussion and airy acoustic guitar embellishments that open up the song to Sylvian's trademark vocals, nicely restrained. The impressionistic lyrics serve the song and the subject beautifully, and it's hard not to succumb to the watery siren call of nostalgia while listening to this track. It's best if you don't struggle, and just let the black water rise up over your head and plunge you into that deep dark primal place where memories twist in the evening breeze and regrets lull your reason to sleep.