David Sylvian's MANAFON
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"And when it appeared/ It was a flaming book of matches/ 125 spheres/ On a parquet floor." - David Sylvian, "125 Spheres"
Sylvian has harnessed the powers of thinking minds and careful fingers across the land to create an extraordinary object.
How do you beat this list of personnel? (If you're reading this on Facebook, that's a link to the wiki page for this album. Go find.) In a way it'd be difficult to top.
On that wiki, he's quoted as saying that he would listen to the sessions, then he'd write and record his vocal line a capella, and finally he'd edit it into the song along with any other touches.
Manafon is a sequence of incredible songs that are, perhaps more than any other song-cycle I know of, both undivorceable from and completely open with respect to their arrangements. Here free music is frozen into a crystal chamber, as careful and intentional as any rehearsed group; Sylvian's vocal forces it to be recontextualized. Unsettling effect, soothing effect, ad infinitum. It's an uncanny valley.
I'm not sure what this does to me as an artist. I'm feeling both inspired and deflated. Manafon seems to come from access and experience; I have those things, in one sense, and in another I have relatively none!
Comments (3)
"Parkay" is fake butter. "Parquet" is a flooring pattern. Pretty sure Mr. Sylvian is singing about the pattern and not some trippy floor made out of butter substitute!
I agree there's something odd and powerful about free improvisation turning concrete and immovable, never to be performed live (impossible!) - whereas songwriting - fixed music - can be performed live and improvised around!
Great record, either way.
Thanks for that fix. Didn't pay close enough attention to the results when I tried to google the spelling.
I am waiting like a junkie at 3 a.m. for the dealer to deliver Sylvian's latest. I have almost everything he has put out, like some better than others but he is an important musical force. There was a longish interview in a recent Wire in which he discussed his unique method in recording Manafon. Don't think his former bandmates appreciated his artistic control of the sessions which resulted in Rain Tree Crow, the Japan reunion that wasn't. That's ancient history now.