For the few that got to hear the original release of 'The Opiates' it was an absorbing, captivating experience featuring the deep, rich vocals of Thomas Feiner – but it was a project that'd once threatened to go unfinished. Whilst the album began as a group effort, the band Anywhen dissolved in the two years it took to complete – leaving Feiner to finish the project alone.
This revised, re-packaged and remastered edition of 'The Opiates' will be the first time many will have heard of the album or the artist Thomas Feiner (although a track was included on David Sylvian's 'The World Is Everything' tour book sampler cd). The release comes several years after Sylvian was introduced to the work, which he regards as something of a lost classic having only been released in a few territories. The addition of two new Feiner tracks have further strengthened what was already a remarkably beautiful recording.
Sylvian recalls, "The dark, brooding, romantic nature of the material and, in particular, the emotional gravity of Thomas' voice, came as something of a surprise to me as it was quite out of keeping with my listening habits of the time but I couldn't help but be drawn into its widescreen, colour-drained, soundscapes."
Presented as ever in a beautiful digipak designed by Chris Bigg, featuring exquisite images of Jean Cocteau and Marcel Khill taken by Cecil Beaton.
For more information and to hear a stream of the album please visit: www.thomasfeiner.com
You can pre-order the album from today at the SamadhiSound store.
Available immediately is the lead track from the album, 'The Siren Songs', as an mp3 or FLAC: www.samadhisoundshop.com
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We have a very limited number of the beautifully produced "The World Is Everything" tour book currently being shipped to our warehouse and now available for pre-order in our online store.
The tour book is hard-backed with full colour quality printing and contains photographs taken by David, song lyrics, credits for the tour itself, and a sampler CD featuring a selection from the artists on Samadhisound. The sampler includes two tracks by David unavailable elsewhere entitled 'The World Is Everything' and 'Sleepwalkers'.
The tracklisting for the sampler is:
1. David Sylvian - The World Is Everything
2. Thomas Feiner And Anywhen - Siren Song
3. Harold Budd - Chrysalis Nu
4. Steve Jansen featuring Tim Elsenburg - Sleepyard
5. David Sylvian - Sleepwalkers
6. Nine Horses - Atom And Cell
7. Akira Rabelais - 1382 Wycliff Gen. Ii 7
8. Nine Horses - Get The Hell Out (Remix)
9. Masakatsu Takagi featuring David Sylvian - Exit / Delete
10. Harold Budd - Templar
11. David Toop - Heating And Cooling - Edit
As we've had many inquiries from people interested in purchasing a copy of the book since the tour ended we anticipate demand will be high and the edition is strictly limited and in short supply. The price will be $40.00 (plus postage and packing).
We won't have the book available for a few weeks yet but we'll be accepting pre-orders in our store from today. They will be shipped as soon as they arrive at our warehouse.
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Release date: 6th August.
Pre-orders are from now: click here to visit the SamadhiSound store.
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While Japan started off as one of many '70s New Romantic bands, they made an unpredictable break with their hit "Ghosts" – a searching and evocative single where spare rhythms and fleeting electronic sounds lay under Sylvian's smouldering tenor. "Writing 'Ghosts' was a turning point for me," Sylvian recalls. "So much of what we created with Japan was built upon artifice. With that song I'd felt I'd had the breakthrough I was looking for. I'd touched upon something true to myself and expressed it in a way that didn't leave me feeling overly vulnerable. In the coming years I'd forget about all notions of vulnerability, opening up the material to a greater emotional intensity. I knew that I had to find my own voice, both figuratively and literally."
On his solo records of the '80s, Sylvian's explorations in music took him from the pop-funk, stylish jazz and windswept exotica of 1984's Brilliant Trees; the ambient landscapes and epic ballads of 1985's Gone to Earth; and the austere orchestrations and romantic lyrics of 1987's Secrets of the Beehive. His collaborators included leaders of progressive music, from jazzmen such as Mark Isham, John Taylor and Kenny Wheeler to the rock and fusion guitarists Robert Fripp, Bill Nelson, and David Torn. All three albums married subtly catchy melodies to intricate atmospheres. "The details are what always interested me. And so I just began to spend more and more time on those details, until they came to the forefront of the material-textures and atmospherics. I began to elaborate on those more and more and push the rhythmic element a little bit further back"
Other projects included ambient works with trumpeter Jon Hassell and Can alumnus Holger Czukay, as well as a collection of photographic collages titled Perspectives, whose exhibition in Tokyo sparked the documentary video, Preparations For a Journey. Regular collaborations with composer and Yellow Magic Orchestra star Ryuichi Sakamoto yielded Sylvian's first international hit, "Forbidden Colours."
In the early '90s, Sylvian embarked on a series of acclaimed tours with Robert Fripp, leading to their 1993 studio release 'The First Day' as well as their 1994 multi-media installation 'Redemption – Approaching Silence' in Tokyo's P3 gallery. This followed Sylvian's first foray into the world of art installations in 1990, when in collaboration with Russell Mills, Sylvian created the installation entitled 'Ember Glance (the permanence of memory)' also held in Tokyo. And 1991 saw the release of Rain Tree Crow, a Japan reunion under a different name. But Sylvian grew less prolific as the decade wore on, enjoying his new marriage to Ingrid Chavez and taking four years to finish 1999's Dead Bees on a Cake. As seductive yet startlingly eclectic as any of his prior work, Dead Bees included the hit single "I Surrender," where Sylvian crafts an eye-openingly beautiful vessel around his spiritual journey. Immediately following Dead Bees on a Cake, Sylvian also released a retrospective of his work titled Everything and Nothing, a re-arrangement and re-evaluation of his work dating back to Japan.
Sylvian's work with his spiritual teachers has led him through a rigorous process of study and self-examination. Says Sylvian, "I've never come across anything that is as pinpoint accurate as the message you get through the guru. You go through this process with other people who have common goals, you see them confronting their fears, the tests that they're put through, and you look at the manner in which they're tested and think, 'I could handle that.' But when the opportunity for you to learn from your fears comes along, it's like, 'Jesus Christ, give me any other lesson you choose, but not that one.'"
His determination to confront his vulnerabilities led to arguably his most powerful album to date, 2003's Blemish. Recorded in his home studio in six weeks, with contributions received via the Internet from improv legend Derek Bailey and electronica artist Christian Fennesz, Blemish captured Sylvian in the process of breaking up with his wife. "I wanted to get into those difficult emotions, and penetrate them as deeply as I felt I was capable of doing, in the security of that working space. So although there were elements of my life that were bringing all these negative emotions to the fore, what I was doing in the studio was taking them further-whereas in life we try to restrain them, we hold them back. We don't allow ourselves to go too far with it because they feel dangerous, they feel threatening," says Sylvian. "Living through these emotions was very difficult, but finding a voice for them was so cathartic. After that six-week period, I'd felt I'd worked through some very difficult emotions. I felt an enormous amount of release."
Blemish also marked the debut of his own independent label, SamadhiSound. "I think of [SamadhiSound] as being global, and not necessarily based in the States. It's stretched between the States, Europe, and Japan. I think nowadays it doesn't really matter where we are physically located. We create our own culture around us to a large extent, whether it's what we're listening to, what we're watching, what we're reading-it can have very little to do with one's immediate cultural environment. We are in a global culture in that respect." Samadhi has featured artists from around the world, including new releases by Harold Budd and David Toop and the last studio recordings by Derek Bailey. This reach is also borne out in a remix album, The Only Daughter, where pieces from Blemish are reinterpreted by artists including Burnt Friedman, Sweet Billy Pilgrim, and Jan Bang and Erik Honoré.
Most of the pieces on Blemish depart from traditional pop song forms, a process that began all the way back with "Ghosts" and that continues in his solo work. More recently, he has also released Snow Borne Sorrow and Money for All, an LP and EP from the band Nine Horses. Nine Horses is a trio that includes his brother and regular collaborator Steve Jansen and electronica artist Burnt Friedman, as well as contributions from singer Stina Nordenstem, trumpeter Arve Henriksen, and Ryuichi Sakamoto on piano. Alluring and urbane, the project's trip-hop textures belie its troubled lyrics, inspired by both personal affairs and world concerns. His single with Sakamoto, "World Citizen"-recently featured on the soundtrack to the film Babel-bluntly captures his concerns as a global artist living in post-9/11 America. "It wasn't my natural inclination to get into writing protest songs. But it was a request from Ryuichi to give it a bash. And I felt that there was very little dissent being vocalized in the States," says Sylvian. "I feel furious at what's being done in the name of the American people."
Most recently Sylvian revisited the presentation of his music in forms other than simply on CD. 'When loud weather buffeted Naoshima' was commissioned by the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation on the island of Naoshima, Japan, as part of the NAOSHIMA STANDARD 2 exhibition which ran from Oct 2006 to April 2007. The composition was site specific. In fact, Sylvian has said that the work isn't really complete until the sounds of the town Honmura are incorporated into the listening experience. The work is in fact the next release on Samadhisound (sound cd ss0011) and Sylvian has incorporated some of the sounds of the island into the final mix. Whilst this obviously doesn't compare to the experience of listening to the work in situ it goes someway towards creating an echo of it. In the process Sylvian's created a piece which might find new and interesting interpretations in a variety of unanticipated contexts.
As he brings his new work to a new world tour, Sylvian continues to confront the challenges, both personal and global, that have enriched his work for three decades. And he continues to follow this path – with patience, perseverance, and beauty.
By Chris Dahlen
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