Exorcising Ghosts

Product Information

This idea of the composition and that this is going to tape and is permanent is something I feel I ought to get away from. I ought to somehow be more immersed in the event itself rather than removing myself in some sense and objectively analysing what's going on as it happens. It's a silly thing to do really, but it's the way I work. It's the way I've always worked, and it's very hard to get out of the habit. it's seemingly just thrown together to churn-out another compilation and make some more money for Virgin Records. Sylvian seems to find the experience of recording music a more valuable one than that of performing it. It was mainly my interest in this method of composition: improvisation", he begins. "I began to feel that there was possibly more to be gained at this moment in time by putting myself into situations where I would be forced to respond on the spur of the moment to what was happening in the studio or a given environment. That if I was to rely on my compositional techniques - as they eventually become, no matter how you try to evade these things - I might miss certain developments in my work, or that the developments might be rather too slow. s Tin Drum really nails the group’s determination to fuse eastern and Western music and make full use of the emerging programme orientated sounds. An adventurous, farsighted experiment for sure, this album contains Japan favourites like ‘Still Life in Mobile Homes’, ‘Visions of China’ and ‘Ghosts’, which vindicated the in house method when it soared into the top five. The album also charted high and went Gold and in fact, has since been posthumously awarded BBC Radio 6 Music’s ‘Goldie’ for being the best album of 1981. It’s every bit as good as that prestigious gong would indicate.

His debut solo proper, Brilliant Trees, includes contributions from Ryuichi Sakamoto, trumpeter Jon Hassell and Can bassist Holger Czukay. In many ways, it’s reminiscent of the contemporary albums being made by Talking Heads and David Byrne. Using the same core Sylvian’s Alchemy – An Index of Possibilities is a welcome return. It was originally only available as a Japanese CD or a cassette. Again the delightful blend of world music, ambient sound and prepared tapes are well ahead of the herd. By now, Sylvian was being taken seriously and any of the lingering glam/new romantic trappings, a hindrance in the first place, had long since gone. Robert Fripp plays the guitar on the sublime ‘Steel Cathedral’s and the three-part instrumental ‘Words with the Shaman’ features Soft Machine bassist Percy Jones. This is heady stuff. Through the course of his three solo albums ( Brilliant Trees ('84), Gone to Earth ('86), Secrets of the Beehive ('89)) and his experimental works with Holger Czukay ( Plight and Premonition ('88), Flux and Mutability ('89)) Sylvian involved an ever wider range of musicians in his work and, as a result of his relationship with Yuka Fujii, began experimenting with improvisation as a form of performance and composition. And it is largely as a result of this continued interest in improvisation that 1991 will see the first studio release from Japan in a decade - although to find it you'll have to look under "Rain Tree Crow" rather than Japan. That was one of the most difficult pieces for me", comments Sylvian. "It surfaced, I think, on the second day of recording and it was the only piece where the band were totally confident that a piece would work. On all the other pieces there was somebody who was a little unsure about whether it was working. Perhaps most encouraging of all is Sylvian's reaction to the suggestion that there might be an end to his involvement in making music, that at some point, he might feel he has said all he has to say. His response is not to recognise the question: "There can't be an end in sight. It would be self-defeating to think that there was an end."

Track listing

Part of Sylvian's readiness to provide vocal melodies relates to the success of the songs on Secrets of the Beehive. Exorcising Ghosts was compiled and produced in consultation with lead singer David Sylvian two years after Japan dissolved. It features three recordings from the band's early career on the Hansa Records label (such as 1979's Quiet Life) but mainly focuses on material from their two studio albums on Virgin Records; Gentlemen Take Polaroids (1980) and Tin Drum (1981). Speaking of the booklet, it was also a nice surprise to realise that the liner notes were by @Paul Rymer of this parish, who had been a helpful guide when I was first building a YMO collection - a collection which inadvertently led me to Japan! Seven years after the release of Exorcising Ghosts, Japan recorded a new studio album, but under the new moniker Rain Tree Crow. True to the traditional artistic stereotype, Sylvian's satisfaction with any of his endeavours is balanced by his dissatisfaction over their shortcomings. Given that the project could not have come about without his full co-operation, and that he's already on record as saying "One of the most important lessons I was reminded of was that being in overall control of a recording should rarely be relinquished. Group decisions are invariably of a compromised nature", had the project been a success or a failure? His reply, however, is uncompromising.

Curiously, it's just four months short of the prescribed five years that I find myself face to face with David Sylvian once again. Dressed in a brown suit and sporting the long hair that has become the badge of "the artist" over generations, he is happy to talk about the reasons for his change of heart. Exorcising Ghosts is a compilation album by the British band Japan, released in November 1984 by record label Virgin. Returning the conversation to the progress of Sylvian's career, I find that the sense of optimism that characterised our last conversation has been replaced by the sort of confusion that accompanied the dissolution of Japan. Following a brace of albums, he made with Holger Czukay and the short-lived but fertile Rain Tree Crowperiod Sylvian worked on purely ambient music and began to explore a fruitful liaison with Robert Fripp. After working with Fripp in the studio and on stage Sylvian returned to his solo career with Dead Bees on a Cake (1991) where the recipe includes Bill Frisell’s dobro, Talvin Singh’s tables and lots of Marc Ribot’s extraordinary electric, acoustic and slide guitar genius. Recorded here, there and everywhere – well Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, Box in Wiltshire, Napa, CA, Minneapolis and Seattle – this is an approachable jazz-fusion affair. The ensuing Approaching Silence (1999) is an ambient compilation featuring Fripp and is a wise choice for those seeking something sonically unique. Everything and Nothing is a quite superb compilation of a quite different sort. Here you find old Sylvian and Japan favourites, cuts that didn’t quite make Dead Bees… and Sylvian’s contributions to the hard to find Marco Polo album by world music duo Nicola Alesini and Pier Luigi Andreoni. As a studied look at what was then a twenty-year stint with Virgin, it’s hard to fault. If nothing else the album was a wake-up call to those who’d missed out the first time, or simply didn’t grasp how good all this music was.

It is the recorded medium that is important in that it has the potential to reach so many people. The live performance is far more transient, obviously. But it's a different kind of experience and maybe shouldn't compare in any way. Let's say that what I have got to date from live performance is nowhere near as profound as what I can take from recording and writing material. The only person I've found to agree with me on a certain approach to writing is Scott Walker in a comment he made to me: I mentioned something about recording an album being very difficult and very painful, and he said 'that's the way it should be, if it isn't there's something wrong'. That's what I've always felt to be true, but a lot of people I've worked with don't share that. It is important, because the actual process of writing and recording, although it is a by-product of your life's experience, it itself becomes a life experience through the process of making it. It becomes part of your learning process. The process of making a record is normally very difficult; very challenging and emotional on all different kinds of levels, but by the time you complete a project it holds within it that experience. That emotional depth is captured in the work somehow. And that can be brought out through the excavations of the listener if they care to probe that deeply. Generally my disappointment came from being too muddled", he offers in explanation. "The emphasis wasn't on songs on that tour, I was trying to create an atmosphere in a hall, and I thought it was going to be relatively easy to do that because it was something I thought I knew how to do. Although it was successful to a certain extent, I thought there wasn't enough dynamics, there wasn't enough colour. Occasionally too much happened, it could have been pared down. Unfortunately there wasn't enough time to mature musically throughout the tour. We did to a certain extent of course, but all the time there were technical problems and organisational problems, and to deal with that at the same time as knowing you'd got a performance that evening is hellishly difficult to go through.

I worked on this piece obsessively, trying to make some sense of the structure of it, but the band themselves found the piece complete as it was. I was working alone and also against everyone else because they weren't really in favour of me taking it any further. The vocal went on at the very end because I was trying to avoid putting a vocal on it at all, then I got Bill (Nelson) in to play some guitar. Once I'd got Bill's guitar on, it began to fall into shape. I could see there was a structure with the right dynamics to make it work for me, but there wasn't a dynamic peak as such so I had to put the vocal on. I had the idea, but I had to get to that point where I recognised it was absolutely necessary." Last interviewed in MT (E&MM) in September '86 following the release of Gone to Earth, Sylvian commented on the subject of a possible reformation. Then he regarded it as a romantic rather than practical idea, and admitted that it had been discussed on several occasions: "It almost came off', he revealed, "but there wasn't enough conviction and now I'm happy that it didn't. I'm sure that it'll be talked about again in another five years but I hope it'll always be talk because I don't think it would be a good thing."Anyway, the reason I came here to mention this double vinyl offering was to say that the pressing does sound excellent. I want to tour again, and I see myself touring possibly next year. I've got some projects to get through this year which will keep me in the studio, and I'm not sure when I will get around to doing an album - whether it's my own album or this group concept album - but whichever it is, I will tour with it. The problem is that the recorded work always takes priority. If I have ideas for something, I desperately want to jump into it right away rather than go on the road." And so the present and the recent A Victim of Stars (1982 – 2012), another primer to what has been a truly extraordinary career bearing in mind where Sylvian and Japan started out – basically as two-chord wonders. He isn’t that now. What could be construed as the best of his work, though that’s in so many other places too, A Victim of Starsis a triumph. Apart from a slew of defiantly modernist compositions from the vaults It also includes the newly recorded ‘Where’s Your Gravity?’ It sets the seal for now on a body of work that improves with time. I felt I was going through some inner changes which I found hard to encapsulate in my own songwriting, and I wanted to put myself in a situation where I would have to respond immediately without thinking about the situation to see what would surface. Then I could kind of glean an understanding of what was going on there and try to adapt that and develop it - whether this was along the lines of lyrical content or musical content. If it was 'New Moon at Red Deer Wallow' alone that came out of these sessions I'd be happy. It would justify the recording process, it would justify this project."

But sitting with keyboards and a vocal mic was a large part of Sylvian's role. The keyboards in question were a Korg M1, Roland D50, "very occasionally" a Prophet VS and a Kurzweil 250. Of the Prophet VS he says: "I've had that for some time and I've been meaning to try it. It seemed to have a limited scope". The Kurzweil, on the other hand, served to "supplement a few of the acoustic sounds". Oil On Canvas is a live album that was released after the band had split up in 1982, their passing much mourned by an increasingly devoted fan base. It sold over 100,000 copies. Two years later Sylvian sat down and assembled the fine compilation Exorcising Ghosts, a précis of Japan to date, including rare B-sides, remixes and instrumentals. A must-have for those with an interest in this idiosyncratic and complex group. I am always disappointed in some respects with the work that I do. I always feel that it falls short of its original potential in some way, but maybe that's what spurs me on to try again and again. What I tend to find is that, as much as I like some of the songs on the album, it's the instrumental pieces that justify the album's existence. It was on the instrumental that we really worked together as a four-piece. That was the aim of the project: to get the full potential from these four musicians working together in a really collaborative sense. I found that with the songs, I could see references to my own work far clearer than I can in the instrumental work, so I kind of feel that the emphasis should be placed on the instrumental work. Exorcising Ghosts reached No. 45 in the UK Albums Chart [4] and was certified Gold (100,000 copies) by the BPI in February 1997. [5]

MOVING ON TO THE MORE PRACTICAL aspects of Sylvian's music, his move towards improvisation has brought about various changes in his playing. Instead of spending time writing material, he now finds playing for his own pleasure a rewarding experience - though the predictable acoustic piano or electronic keyboard are not his chosen medium.