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.