Sylvian Focus Show Redux

     Some of you might recall the intermittent hours of thought that went into my choosing the first song I would play on the very first episode of Ear Candy for Insomniacs. Once I actually took the time to scan my shelves, the answer was obvious: David Sylvian’s “Before the Bullfight” from Gone to Earth. Following that precedent, it made sense for me to do my very first WHPK Focus Show on Sylvian, especially since I’ve spent the last few days, when I took breaks from academic work, reading Martin Power’s interesting but somewhat flawed biography David Sylvian: The Last Romantic. While I won’t offer a review of the book here, it was good at least for making me dig back into Sylvian’s work with Japan, as a solo artist and as a guest/collaborator with other musicians.
     While I initially thought that I might not have enough material for the show, it turns out that I had so much that I had to make some fairly agonizing decisions about what to play. Thus it is that I have to say that there simply wasn’t enough time for me to play, for example, many of the lengthier but amazing tracks that Sylvian has done—e.g., “The Other Side of Life” from Quiet Life, “Wave” from Gone to Earth, “Wanderlust” from Dead Bees on a Cake, “Brightness Falls” and “Darshan (The Road to Graceland)” from the Sylvian and Robert Fripp album The First Day or the collaborations with Holger Czukay (available on the albums Flux and Mutability and Plight and Premonition). Programming any of them, obviously, would have made it difficult to convey a sense of his career trajectory since 1978 in the allotted time. Whatever the deficiencies of the choice, I decided to opt for comprehensiveness rather than to play all of the material I love.
     That said, I think this was a fine introduction to Sylvian’s work. If you want to know or hear more, you can browse his catalog of recordings in your favorite brick-and-mortar or online record stores. I can’t say which album is my favorite, but the first three albums he did post-Japan—Brilliant Trees (1984), Gone to Earth (1986) and Secrets of the Beehive (1987)—generally fare well in the estimation of many reviewers as does the career-spanning retrospective Everything and Nothing (2000) (note: Sylvian personally remixed many of the tracks on this compilation, in some cases even redoing vocals). For the curious, there’s a wealth of information to be found in various print and online sources, particularly the aforementioned biography, the All-Music Guide’s David Sylvian entry, the official David Sylvian site and a long-running, frequently updated fan site.

• 7:00–8:00 p.m.:
• Japan, “Transmission,” Adolescent Sex, Hansa
• Japan, “Life in Tokyo,” “Life in Tokyo” (12” Single), Hansa
• Japan, “Quiet Life,” Quiet Life, Hansa
• Japan, “My New Career,” Gentlemen Take Polaroids, Virgin
• Japan, “Visions of China,” Tin Drum, Virgin
• Japan, “Ghosts,” Tin Drum, Virgin
• Ryuichi Sakamoto with David Sylvian, “Forbidden Colours,” Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), Virgin
• David Sylvian, “Red Guitar,” Brilliant Trees, Virgin
• David Sylvian, “The Ink in the Well,” Brilliant Trees, Virgin
• David Sylvian, “Words with the Shaman, Pt. 3,” Alchemy (An Index of Possibilities), Virgin
• David Sylvian, “A Brief Conversation Ending in Divorce,” Alchemy (An Index of Possibilities), Virgin
• David Sylvian, “Taking the Veil,” Gone to Earth, Virgin

• 8:00–9:00 p.m.:
• David Sylvian, “Gone to Earth,” Gone to Earth, Virgin
• Mick Karn with David Sylvian, “Buoy,” Dreams of Reason Produce Monsters, Virgin
• Dolphin Brothers, “Pushing the River,” Catch the Fall, Virgin
• David Sylvian, “Mother and Child,” Secrets of the Beehive, Virgin
• David Sylvian, “Let the Happiness In,” Secrets of the Beehive, Virgin
• David Sylvian, “Pop Song,” Everything and Nothing, Virgin
• David Sylvian, “Epiphany,” Approaching Silence, Virgin
• Rain Tree Crow, “Blackwater,” Rain Tree Crow, Virgin
• David Sylvian and Robert Fripp, “God’s Monkey,” The First Day, Virgin
• David Sylvian, “God Man,” Dead Bees on a Cake, Virgin
• David Sylvian, “The Scent of Magnolia,” Everything and Nothing, Virgin
• David Sylvian, “A Fire in the Forest,” Blemish, Samadhi Sound

Focus Show: David Sylvian

     So, the radio station has this weekly program called Friday Focus Show, in which a WHPK DJ will treat her/his audience to two hours of music that is somehow thematically connected. The connection could be that all of the music comes from one label, from one artist, from one style or substyle. It’s really whatever the DJ decides to do.
     So, this Friday, I’m going to do my first Focus Show from 7 to 9 p.m. And for it, I choo-, choo-, choose David Sylvian, who has followed a difficult-to-predict path from his work with the group Japan to a solo career and from collaborator to collaborator beginning in 1978. Few would have expected, upon hearing Japan’s New York Dolls-like Adolescent Sex that year, that the group would go on to make the sublime albums Gentlemen Take Polaroids and Tin Drum. And they perhaps would have been even more surprised to see the group dissolve and to see Sylvian go on to produce fine work with people like Ryuichi Sakamoto, Robert Fripp, Holger Czukay, Jon Hassell, Mark Isham, Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell, among others. Whether you would have expected his career to go the way it did, you can tune in Friday to hear the history—with some stops along the way to check out the post-Japan work of the group’s other members: Mick Karn, Richard Barbieri and Steve Jansen.