Log #185 - A Wonder Of Mood, David Sylvian's Wandermüde

Last week, although I liked it, I bemoaned the fact that David Sylvian's experimental Manafon album might have been better without singing. This week my wishes were granted with his 2013 follow up Wandermüde which turns out to be a pure ambient piece, with indeed no vocals. 

David Sylvian - Wandermüde

David Sylvian - Manafon

Bonnie Prince Billy - The Letting Go

Talk Talk - Laughing Stock

Talk Talk - Spirit Of Eden

Bonnie Prince Billy - Pond Scum

This instrumental collection is blended throughout and delivers cascades of haunting tones, flooded with pools of tranquil retreats and gentle showers of suspense.

igloomag.com

Wandermude (literally translated as "tired hiking" - not google translates finest hour Ed.) is indeed a gem of ambience, one of the nicest I've heard actually. The record is extremely still, consisting of percussion less drones that hardly change at all, just in very subtle ways. Most movement is heard on the final track Deceleration which is quite startling in comparison with its distorted guitar chords that sound just like Fennesz's work on Endless Summer. I've heard Sylvian has collaborated with the Austrian electronic maestro so no doubt it is him here too although it's very hard to find any information about Wandermüde anywhere.

The album is actually a collaboration between Sylvian and German sound artist Stephan Mathieu and I wonder how much Sylvian was involved actually as apparently the crux of the record is reworkings of Sylvian's Blemish album from 2003. Sounds intriguing and Blemish will definitely be one I'll be checking out next.

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Album Review - The Simmer Dim by John Martyn

The Simmer Dim is both great and poor. In the first place the playing and the repertoire is superb making it potentially one of John Martyn’s greatest live albums, however secondly it loses a significant number of brownie points on account of the poor sound which is of barely bootleg quality.

First the songs. The Simmer Dim (the name refers to the summer twilight in the most northerly part of Great Britain) captures Martyn playing 80 minutes worth of his greatest songs in one coherent solo setting thus meeting a gap in the market I’m not aware is fulfilled by any other official releases.

We are treated to five tracks from the One World album, some on straight acoustic guitar like wonderful versions of Couldn’t Love You More and Certain Surprise, and some guitar effected including Big Muff (dedicated to Margaret Thatcher), Dealer and a One World which segues into an edited version of Small Hours also known as Anna. And of course centrepiece is a masterful 18 minute Outside In where Martyn coaxes soaring melodies from his guitar while grappling with echoplexed rhythms that threaten to run away with themselves.

The performance is book-ended by Over The Hill and May You Never with Martyn slapping his guitar strings and bending the notes with more percussive vigour than the studio versions. Indeed Martyn’s acoustic guitar playing is a revelation peaking for Seven Black Roses a traditional finger picking tune harking back to his The Tumbler album.

Leave it at that and you’d have, with all the One World songs, an album probably greater than Live At Leeds or On Air its closest comparisons.

However the recording. I’m all for intimacy and rawness but this is too visceral to pass muster as an official recording. Taken from a one off gig at the tiny Lerwick Folk Club in the Shetland Islands in August 1980 the recording captures not only Martyn on stage but also every other noise in the intimate room, even a baby crying (which is quite amusing to be fair)!

Martyn is indeed on form in song and between song sharing light hearted and witty banter throughout albeit much of it is inaudible. Martyn seemed to have this slightly schizophrenic personality where he could appear a bit of a drunken yob whilst speaking — making silly noises, putting on mocking accents and berating his band members (Live At Leeds sported a parental awareness sticker on later releases) — yet effortlessly switching into beautiful playing and singing. Here he sounds like he’s enjoying himself lapping up the close adoration and the general pub like ambience lends an extraordinary warmth to the proceedings.

Not for the fainthearted but The Simmer Dim is a fascinating insight for the keen fan.

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Log #184 - Sylvian Span

Steeleye Span are another band, new to me, that cropped up through reading the excellent Electric Eden anthology of English music. A shout out on Twitter suggested Below The Salt was a good place to start.  At first it sounded a bit too folky for me but it gradually started to resonate as I tuned in to the Sandy Denny era Fairport Convention vibes.

Steeleye Span - Below The Salt

David Sylvian - Manafon

Bonnie Prince Billy - The Letting Go

Talk Talk - Laughing Stock

Talk Talk - Spirit Of Eden

Bonnie Prince Billy - Pond Scum

Manafon (a place in Wales) is a very unusual album. Top marks for David Sylvian doing something so left field it defines categorisation. But is it even music? It sounds like improvisations. In fact it sounds like avant garde ambient minimalism (with a jazz flavour) but with singing. Make of that what you will!

The parish of Manafon, Wales

For the first few listens I didn't really like it. But after a while I started to enjoy it, not in the sense of listening to music, but as an... experience.

But I wonder if it would be better just as instrumental music, like previously reviewed avant garde ambient albums by sound artists like Keith Berry and James Joys? Sylvian's very low key singing is sort of superfluous and distracting.

An interview with Sylvian reveals my impressions were well founded: "There was nothing written when we went into the studio – this was very much free improvisation. So, the selection of the group of musicians for each improvisation was paramount. I recognized on the day which pieces could work for me. The process was that I took the material away and then wrote and recorded the vocal line over in a couple of hours. So I couldn't analyze my contribution and that in a way was my form of improvisation – and I enjoyed the rapidity of response."

It sounds like the approach Van Morrison took with Astral Weeks. 

Genius or pretentious? I can't decide - it's certainly no Astral Weeks but nevertheless an intriguing listen which I will return to, along with some of Sylvian's other recent albums (Manafon dates from 2009).

Not a huge leap from David Sylvian to Talk Talk, especially when we are talk talking the band's final two albums; the "post-rock" masterpieces Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock - two albums of beautiful shimmering magnificent music topped by the late Mark Hollis's sensitive vocals.

More Bonnie Prince Billy listening in the player here with Pond Scum the 2016 offering of  BBC John Peel sessions, reworkings and covers, from this prolific artist aka Will Oldham. The renderings are stripped right back and thus even more relaxed and morose than usual.

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Log #183 - Two Sides Of Bonnie Prince Billy

Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Union Cafe

Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Music From The Penguin Cafe 

Bonnie Prince Billy - The Letting Go

Soft Hair - Soft Hair

Jerry Paper - Like A Baby

Bonnie Prince Billy - Summer In The Southeast

Bonnie Prince Billy's The Letting Go album fondly reminds me of his Lie Down In The Light album (which followed). Fairly down tempo and relaxed, as with most of his albums, The Letting Go contains one of my favourite Bonnie songs, the haunting Cursed Sleep, with its amazing video...

The beauty and eccentricity of The Letting Go doesn't provoke deep absorption or self-reflection so much as a kind of fond familiarity.

Pitchfork 

Indeed, perhaps not Bonnie Prince Billy's most daring album but he is effortlessly great in almost anything he does. I haven't yet come across an album that has disappointed...

Which takes me on to the live album Summer In The Southeast. This is stunning. Not least as it was so unexpected. Whereas The Letting Go's easy vibe is typical Bonnie Prince Billy this noisy heavy warts and all rock gig from 2005 is a new Bonnie Prince Billy to me (in fact I'd never heard of the album until it popped up on a youtube feed I was listening to one evening).

Boosted by electric guitar from collaborator Matt Sweeney BPB reinvents his back catalogue with "a delightfully drunken racket of tangled guitars and thunderous percussion" (Pitchfork). The sound verges on grunge or even punk and reminds me of The Velvet Underground. So hardly representative of any of his albums I've heard, or I imagine most of his gigs, nevertheless an exciting addition to the Bonnie catalogue. A great find. 

The other new entry this week comes from LA producer Jerry Paper. This came on to my radar via the unusual Soft Hair album. I was in a Brighton cafe one afternoon and this music came on and the weird distorted electronica sounded to me just like Soft Hair. I asked the patron and he told me it was Jerry Paper. Name lodged in notebook and album investigated forthwith.

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