David Sylvian
Brilliant Trees

THE REVIEW

A few new albums are piling up on my shelf: Springsteen, System of a Down, Van Der Graaf Generator... except for the Armenians, one might say I'm aging prematurely, but that's not the case. Instead, I live naively unaffected by the general disinterest in music and its carriers, feeling a sense of revulsion the moment someone forgets a pirated copy or a master of the latest pop artist in vogue, without the case, as if one could play skeet shooting with today's sonic format, right? It's not a matter of nostalgia, or at least not only.

For days now, an album that marked my life has been playing in the reader, amidst full Duranian delirium, when certain proof of the subsequent void at least evoked the playful pleasure of feeling, ahem, alternative. I find this cover again, the man who listens with dignity to the rustling of the trees, and mimics with his music the possibility that the world - after the new wave reverberations - stops quietly to listen. To think it comes from the somewhat aesthete experience of Japan, whom I have never raved about...
The ancient ghosts of the past blend with the serenity of "Pulling Punches", and it's almost irritating - with its restrained energy, though beautiful - compared to the rest. A very delicate "The Ink In The Well" leads me into the Eden that the West has since failed to find: brush strokes, like those of Picasso, abstract forms that ultimately bring man only to the primordial trace of his knowledge. Ultimately, it's all relatively simple, no matter how distant it seems from everything we see. Sublime decadence, not a downfall, like "Weathered Wall", where the darkness of the night leads man to the end of contemplation and to the purity of thought. "Brilliant Trees" I still find seraphic and serene, dazzling like the rays of the sun filtering through the trees in the late afternoon, before sunset, and Sylvian is there, almost a mantra-like hermit, inviting us to reach this dimension.

"Nostalgia" is one of those songs that seem to last forever, an infinite reverberation of an indivisible emotion, poignant and even "painful" when the melody enriched by Steve Nye's piano seems to take your hand and invade your mind: yet it's a positive energy, assuredly not the tiredly academic new age that produces this never-sated effect: you'd listen to it continually and let it carry you away, far away. From here, a beach in Veneto is quite different from a Japanese exile, notwithstanding the presence of former Japan members Barbieri and Jansen, or Sakamoto - a year after the splendid "Forbidden Colours" again with Sylvian, Mark Isham, and the omnipresent Czukay, but it's as if I find myself in different places at the same time. Pure communication, making the snobbish hermeticism of his recent "Blemish" even more elusive to me.
And the concluding title track is the epilogue of a surprisingly rich narrative, almost austere yet never bleakly contemplative.

This album still holds a place in my heart, which illuminated my season at 16 years old many years ago - 1984, to be precise - despite those friends who flaunted emotions perhaps already caught up by the present's magma, and indeed preferred "Pulling Punches" as the more or less catchy pathway of their measure.
I still see myself in it: and over twenty years later, I think that from the decadent aesthetics of Japan, above all a free spirit was born and reborn.