Pauline Nadrigny on
The Distance Between the Killer and the Killing
“I didn’t see him. I didn’t, Sam.”
And yet the boy had heard something. A woodpecker’s hammering, dogs somewhere in the distance, perhaps a bear, not the one he was tracking, but another, hunting him back. The sound had drifted into his ear before drifting out again, refusing to settle…
“drifting into hearing and then out again, dying away.”
I read this scene from Faulkner’s The Bear, while the piece plays in the small workshop where I study in the evenings. Perhaps because of the title, I confess – The Distance Between the Killer and the Killing – an almost too-obvious cue, and yet one that proves fruitful for reaching for something more than a theme, as I read these lines with the piece playing on around me. The prose describes, with real precision, the sonic texture of a between – the tension, the waiting in ambush. Faulkner’s boy listens between what surfaces and what is watched for, between events in the silence and the signals one waits on.
I thought of this scene – the woodpecker, the uncertain murmur of animals, the trembling dog pressing itself against the boy’s leg, neither of them knowing what has just passed through them – while listening to The Distance Between the Killer and the Killing, for the first time, and then for the tenth.
Here too, voices surge that belong to no one in particular. One that hoots and hums across a violin, worked until it loses its voice, becomes mere matter among other matter. A voice inside the breath of a clarinet or a recorder. Grunts, gurgles, distant cries, somewhere between man and bird, woman and nuthatch. Fragments of choirs, far off, snatches of a song long since lost. Too far to be recovered. Hammerings too, grindings, croaks. The whole apparatus of free improv, an ensemble working in extended techniques – breath, attack, harmonics, gesture – but each sound edited, caught at its fullest, its most distinctive shape, each one its own mood, its own nervous state.
What is at stake in this distance, in the almost-voice, the almost-tone, the almost-motif? Before the hunter seizes the note, seizes a melody where he might… rest, let go… or take hold?.
The hunt is long. It is arduous.
And yet, nearly ten times across the piece’s forty-six minutes, we come to a halt.
What kind of halt, and on what sonic trail?
The piece I am listening to, David Sylvian tells me, gathers sessions that never shared a place or a decade. Berlin, around 2016. Takes captured in 2012 for an entirely different project. Two musicians added in 2025. An ear, Otomo Yoshihide’s. A hand, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s, lost in 2023 before his trace found its place here.
His piano, each time, like a held breath.
These chords, clusters of a melancholy tonality, dissolved in vast reverberation, sweep the whole soundscape into their halo.
These chords infuse the timbral structure of the whole piece, as if they had slowly made their way through the teeming matter, gathering into their halo the harsher sounds of free playing.
These chords are clearings, sonic glades where we drink in light and beauty, briefly, before the thicket closes back in.
On a trail, one has to read the signs.
At first everything seems so dense. In its most crowded moments, the sonic matter is built from close, exacting work on the playing techniques of winds and strings: breath, attack, flautando, harmonics, glissandi, pizzicati, mouth sounds, guttural sounds, often blurred by electronic processing, between glitch and dub. A textured breathing rises, whistling, punctuated by the alarm of an electric guitar. This accumulation builds a texture that is organic, unstable, almost vocal, where it becomes impossible to tell clearly what belongs to the instrument, to the voice, to the processing.
It is never spectacular.
The weave stays secret, whispered almost into the ear, pressed close to the ear. A murmur that passes through the wind and warns us – Attention, it’s very close – without our knowing whether attention means to take care or to listen more closely, unable, ourselves, to tell aesthetic stillness apart from the waking of danger.
Behind this hybrid density, one feels, all at once…
…an imperious presence.
David Sylvian has gathered here a decade’s worth of copious material, and quietly does away with the session as a single, dated event. The piece is edited with meticulous care. To the point of scruple, I sense. A montage long weighed, long split apart and chiseled. This editing reassembles a simultaneity that never existed, times that never met in the stretch of a listening, within a vast stream of consciousness that doesn’t settle into a single voice…
…and yet, a modest withdrawal.
David Sylvian’s voice has absented itself. He may first have wished to set it down, only to withdraw it in the end. When one is the voice of David Sylvian, such a withdrawal has weight, and costs something. What remains of him in what feels like a hollowed-out Manafon? Precisely what the voice would become in the absence of voice. Because with each listening, the further in I go, hunting for his presence, the more a diffuse thought settles over me: this voice, one I love so much and keep waiting for, has moved elsewhere. It hides, that voice, golden, honeyed, unmistakably his, as an acoustic trace I might catch in the devoted use of reverb, in the delay, so expressive, so sincere. It lingers, pure, in the intermezzi, when sounds still haunting a Lexicon reverb – this is how I picture it – go on ringing through the acoustic space.
It hides, too, in a certain way of treating anything that might resemble a voice, including voices that are not his own: sustained laments on the violin, punctuating the piece’s restlessness, and above all, feminine and unsettling voices, a wary Syrinx, somewhere in these wild sonic woods.
How to leave the trail?
Faulkner, describing the boy’s very first approach to the wilderness, before he has hunted anything at all, writes that the land opening before him swings slowly and opens the widening inlet, like a boat “tossing up and down, in the infinite waste of the ocean.”
In the piece’s last minutes, the material turns diffuse: glissandi climbing into the extreme high end, harmonics softening into something like cries. I hear modulated calls, crackling, what could pass for the sounds of sea mammals. A voice-over, distant, as if narrating some operation underwater. Metal groaning like a hull. Sonar pings. I may be projecting all of this. But it is how I picture it, this boy entering the wilderness as one enters an unfathomable ocean.
I thought of this scene too, while listening to
A thirteen-year-old piano.
Dub sessions and free improvisations archived since Berlin.
A studio, far from the busy world.
There are so many people inside one consciousness, so many people inside this studio.
All of these sonic traces meeting, composing into a track that seems to wander, but is in fact cut and worked to the grain.
A stream I too listen to, on the alert, for the distance never closed between one take and another, one sonic time and the other, one sample and the other, still watching for the presence of a musician whose voice I have carried inside me for many years.
“I didn’t see him. I didn’t.”
The montage itself stands in for a subject.
I heard David Sylvian, all along.
Pauline Nadrigny
Août 2026