Japan / Sylvian

M

mms

sometimes
what is your favorite album by them?
tin drum is amazing imo.
my mates cousin produced that song 'ghosts.'

i know nothing of sylvian's post Japan stuff.
can someone recommends?


it's one of those boring what do you recommend threads to anyone who thought they would discover or read something about exotic psyche or acid rock from japan, personally i'd rather listen to tomita's snowflakes are dancing or yellow magic orchestra anyway.
 
swears

swears

preppy-kei
I only have Tin Drum. It's really ahead of its time with all those lovely spooky ambient synth sounds, genius.
 
N

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
I don't have Tin Drum but Gentlemen Take Polaroids is really really good, is it underrated? It's the British 'Remain In Light'.

His ambient stuff with Holger Czukay is pretty good, I like it but wouldn't necessarily recommend it without reservation. Plight & Premonition is nice frosty ambience with lots of shortwave action. Flux & Mutability is kind of similar but warmer. There's a 12" called 'Words With The Shaman' that I've had since it came out in 1985 that I'm really fond of, maybe slightly unreasonably. Sort of pseudo ethnic ambient groove. :D
 
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G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Gentlemen take polaroids is also good (not as good as tin drum tho...) But yes Tin Drum best Japan album by a long way. Almost prog-like in its percussive oddness, stylization taken to a point of beautiful grotesquerie...

But mainly: Blemish-- best album of the 00s? Definitely. Avant song ambient all built out of guitars. Heatbreakingly great.
 
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J

jd_

Well-known member
Get the Sylvian/Sakamoto Bamboo music 12" if you can find it. My favorite from both of them actually.
 
M

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Yeah second to gek on Blemish, it got me listening to him - or at least taking an interest - after I thought he went up his own arse with his albums prior to that. I like Adolescent Sex. The album, ahem.
 
S

Sick Boy

All about pride and egos
Tin Drum nuffin long.

Ghosts is probably one of my favourite songs ever (you know: the kind with singing and choruses and verses). It's so minimal in everything it sets out to do, but overachieves in every way.
 
straight

straight

wings cru
his track on fennesz's 'venice' is wonderful, full of empty but not quite vacant space, think its called 'transit'. It breaks up the downcast ambience of the rest of the record in a really affecting way. other than that i need to get digging again, i never really got secrets of the beehive but i think i'm older and wiser enough for a reappraisal
 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
straight said:
his track on fennesz's 'venice' is wonderful, full of empty but not quite vacant space, think its called 'transit'. It breaks up the downcast ambience of the rest of the record in a really affecting way. other than that i need to get digging again, i never really got secrets of the beehive but i think i'm older and wiser enough for a reappraisal
Click to expand...

This is brilliant.

If you like this then Blemish is more of the same kind of thing...
 
E

Edward

+
I love Ghosts, Quiet Life and also Suburban Love off their first LP, very lush.

MMS have you heard luke's mash up of ghosts with drexciya?
 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
mistersloane said:
Yeah second to gek on Blemish, it got me listening to him - or at least taking an interest - after I thought he went up his own arse with his albums prior to that. I like Adolescent Sex. The album, ahem.
Click to expand...

The problem with Sylvian is not "pretension" (which he's very good at...) but rather a tendency to drift towards overly lush adult-contemporary organicism. It is when he is set against his most rigorously synthetic backdrops that he does his best work (Tin Drum, Blemish etc). And hence the fact that large swathes of his solo discography are no-go areas for me as they end up being overly polite wallpaper.
 
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straight

straight

wings cru
gek-opel said:
This is brilliant.

If you like this then Blemish is more of the same kind of thing...
Click to expand...

yeah ive literally no excuse for not owning this. i think i got bogged down in robert wyatt around the time it came out, perhaps if i'd bought blemish instead of cuckooland itd be the other way round
 
T

Tweak Head

Well-known member
I'd echo the praise for Tim Drum. For Sylvian's post-Japan work I'd recommend the beautiful single "Forbidden Colours" with Ryuichi Sakamoto (from the sountrack to Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence but available in several places), the album "Brilliant Trees", and the (relatively) recent "Snow Borne Sorrow" with Nine Horses. "Blemish" looks interesting too, I haven't heard it but might buy it.
 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Tweak Head said:
I'd echo the praise for Tim Drum. For Sylvian's post-Japan work I'd recommend the beautiful single "Forbidden Colours" with Ryuichi Sakamoto (from the sountrack to Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence but available in several places), the album "Brilliant Trees", and the (relatively) recent "Snow Borne Sorrow" with Nine Horses. "Blemish" looks interesting too, I haven't heard it but might buy it.
Click to expand...

Snow Borne Sorrow exemplifies a lot of where Sylvian goes wrong for me- lots of great guests, elegant production, interesting time signatures, but it turns into a mush in the mix... and his lyrics are pretty banal therein.
 
D

dHarry

Well-known member
Brilliant Trees and Secrets Of The Beehive are the best of his post-Japan pre-Blemish I think, although most albums have some good stuff on them.

What about Quiet Life?
2227273-1183975704.jpg

That title track alone, after the outrageous glam-funk-punk of Adolescent Sex, is a sideways step into the new - icy sequenced synth-pulse; rubberised bass; portentious, pretentious, opaque, impenetrable lyrics in the new poised, restrained vocal style; clipped Chic guitar - a sublime pop moment introducing the 80s ("boys, the times are changing, going could get rough") and inadvertently inventing Duran Duran, for its sins. Elsewhere Sylvian croons "Fall In Love With Me" like a young Bryan Ferry, and you do, and it's all Eno/Bowie-isms before closing with The Other Side Of Life's indulgent symphonic melodramatics...
 
swears

swears

preppy-kei
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Best image...EVER.
 
M

michael

Bring out the vacuum
gek-opel said:
Snow Borne Sorrow exemplifies a lot of where Sylvian goes wrong for me- lots of great guests, elegant production, interesting time signatures, but it turns into a mush in the mix... and his lyrics are pretty banal therein.
Click to expand...

The more recent Nine Horses EP thing, Money For All, corrects some of the shitness. Lots of Burnt Friedman production/remixes of Snow Borne Sorrow tracks which I guess were originally arranged by Jansen.

My favourite Sylvian solo one is definitely Blemish. I wrote a big ramble about my feelings on him here: http://www.last.fm/user/jetjag/journal/2006/12/7/284794/ You can also scoff at my listening habits to get some perspective. ;)
 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Blemish is so raw I'm not sure its repeatable unfortunately. Raw in the emotional sense- its like an electro-avant garde blood on the tracks or something, although for something as bitter and angry as it is for the most part its remarkably subtle... and lyrically its a fucking masterpiece also, all his usual worthy stodgy cringiness replaced by a kind of cerebral rage, hidden in cut ups and behind soft lowering ambient drift... little shards of pain refracted and mysterious, essentially unknowable in their specificity and yet all the more alarmingly allusive for what they imply rather than make explicit... (With "The Only Daughter" as the prime exemplar... "Render the vow... its my home now..." yet sung entirely neutrally, hushed, as if numbed by fluoxetine) I guess its the sound of a Buddhist's marriage collapsing, yes? One of the very few song-based albums of late that actually sounds interested in expanding the horizons of the form.
 
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M

michael

Bring out the vacuum
Yeah, I think the lyrics are fantastic there, also the banality of things like Late Night Shopping becomes amazing in contrast to the music.

He comes through on a couple of Nine Horses tunes, though - I think Seratonin is pretty good on the whole. I certainly never thought I'd hear Sylvian singing about being "thoroughly wasted", although he does follow it up with "my mind's hallucinating lucidity". That track's also a good example of what I was thinking of regarding Friedman coming through with some much better arrangements on Money For All. His mix of Seratonin is very pared back and quite the opposite of mud, with an awesome drum feel... I think Jansen & Sylvian tend towards the big and rocky sounding side of electronics, which is not something that appeals to me. Just a certain aesthetic I can never quite describe, but which mainly just sounds very old.
 
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