DAVID SYLVIAN
Blemish/Manafon (reissues, 2003, 2009)
SAMADHISOUND/UMC
9/10, 9/10
Glitch-improv confessionals revealed as deconstructed pop standards on new vinyl reissues. By Stephen Troussé
INTERVIEWED in 2009, David Sylvian mused upon the supposed difficulty of Manafon, his last vocal studio album to date. “I don’t personally hear it as being a difficult album, but I’ve always known the experience would be different for others. Time will soften its edges. It may sow the seeds for what might develop into a new genre for vocal music perhaps? Or maybe it’s simply a passing glitch on the digital face of popular music. I don’t know. But what I am sure of is that, over time, its abstractions will become much easier to embrace.”
The reissue of Manafon, along with its older sibling, 2003’s Blemish, on 180g vinyl, offers an opportunity to reconsider what increasingly look like the last works of David Sylvian’s long, brilliant and elliptical pop career. It’s fair to say they haven’t yet seeded a new genre – though you might find echoes of these spectral artsongs in the work of Björk and Julia Holter. But as predicted, they now seem eminently embraceable: tatterdemalion torchsongs, that for all their atmospheric disturbances you might file alongside Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, Frank Sinatra’s Where Are, John Cale’s …
