David Sylvian
Blemish

Much has been said about Blemish.
That it is a work difficult to understand except for enthusiasts of the genre or for those who, being fans of the master and having followed him from the beginning, can comprehend its real musical ascent; that the choice to self-produce was dictated by the decision to free oneself from the constraints imposed by record labels; that working alone was the natural evolution of a spirit now mature and adult, and blah blah blah, blah blah blah, and blah blah blah.

Nonsense.
Blemish is nothing more than a pure exercise of style for an artist who now loves hearing his own voice to the point of losing himself, just as an example, for 13 interminable minutes in hypnotic and unbearable chants with the same monotone, excuse me minimalist, tone that is supposedly the distinctive feature of the work itself. The rest doesn't differ much.
Alright, none of us expected to find the melancholic genius of Nightporter, the freshness of Answered Prayers, his first solo work dated 1986, or the exhilarating complexity of Brightness Falls and Darshan, but back then, we're talking about 1993, he still collaborated with Robert Fripp, and forgive me if that's not nothing. Surely we knew that the sublimity of Ryuichi Sakamoto was definitely lost with Heart Beat and that not even the Alesini/Andreoni duo would manage to collaborate with him after the Marco Polo I exploit, but enough is enough.

Let's say it like it is: David Sylvian doesn't have an overflowing ego; he has an ego that spills over from everywhere and that unfortunately has definitively contaminated even his being an artist. David Sylvian in fact is no longer an artist; he's a self-referentialist who self-cites, until he completely engulfs himself, to be the sole and unique shining sun in the empty galaxy that now surrounds him.

There were some signals from the beginning. Without wanting to deeply dig the knife by recalling Japan, in a not so distant 1983 Ryuichi Sakamoto composed the splendid Forbidden Colours which became the soundtrack of the famous film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, interpreted by an exceptional, decadent, and refined Ryuichi Sakamoto himself and by an equally sentimental and virile David Bowie. Have you ever seen Sylvian's music videos? Well, they are all there: Sakamoto, Takeshi Kitano, and even Tom Conti but, oops, wonder why, David Bowie doesn't appear even though, that text and that film consecrated him definitively as a world-famous performer. Not to comment on the havoc made on The Golden Way, in the double Everything and Nothing, because his egocentricity Sylvian thought it was best to eliminate Alesini's contribution to reinterpret it in a more appropriate way, Sylvian-style precisely, and render it something flat in which his majesty's voice could better shine. Even Hector Zazou had the opportunity to state that, for Sahara Blue 1992, after getting into the recording studio and working together, "David Sylvian wanted the songs sung by him not to feature in the final version (there's another one where he sings two). He never explained to me the reason for this choice and it hurt me a little...".

We can try to imagine it and, if Hector Zazou wanted, we can even try to explain it to him.