David Sylvian
Manafon

Simplicity is not an aesthetic form but an achievement that requires great effort. Reducing a work to its bare essentials demands attention and labor. It means eliminating every superfluous gesture, anything excessive that could compromise even the simplest element. "Manafon" is this: stripping music of all embellishments as much as possible and yet still achieving a song. In the opening track, the delicate "Small Metal Gods", Sylvian sings what is the sense of his new artistic direction: "It's the farthest place I've ever been, it's a new frontier for me". With Manafon, the English musician indeed goes beyond what he achieved with the excellent "Blemish" (SamadhiSound, 2003), reaching a perfect synthesis between expressive urgency and formal rigor. Every instrument is used sparingly, starting with his distinctive voice, deep and controlled as never before, the true binder of all the fragments, from diaphanous electroacoustic improvisations, to silences, to crackles, to feedbacks that help define the album.

Recorded over three years between Vienna, London, and Tokyo, Sylvian collaborated with extraordinary musicians such as Christian Fennesz, Evan Parker, Otomo Yoshihide, the two AMM members John Tilbury and Keith Rowe, Werner Dafeldecker, and Toshimaru Nakamura. The music produced, entirely free, was subsequently remounted by Sylvian, who only then added the vocal parts and his acoustic guitar. Interesting, in this regard, is what the musician states in an interview: "I used atonal sounds as punctuation, tails, a suggested key... sometimes, I had to move forward just on the hum of an amplifier or the pickups of Keith’s guitars. Where necessary, I added my musical contribution in the form of guitars and electronics". The result of this creative process is a perpetual tension between improvisation and composition, void and fullness, abstraction and empathy. "Manafon" is neither Contemporary, nor Pop, nor Jazz, but a new way of understanding the song or as its author calls it "a modern form of chamber music, intimate, dynamic, emotional, and democratic". However, a chamber music close to dissolution, spectral, hazy, where each piece is composed of shards, sparse notes of piano, guitar, sax, cello. Particularly striking is Tilbury’s work on the piano, capable with a few touches of creating atmospheres now sinister ("Random Acts Of Senseless Violence") now suspended ("The Department Of Dead Letters"), Parker’s mournful sax (the tail of "Emily Dickinson", "The Rabbit Skinner"), Fennesz’s elegiac electronics (the intense "Snow White in Appalachian", the laconic "Manafon").

The themes addressed in the lyrics (religion, false myths, mediocrity of humankind, fears of a mature man) find their key in the last track that gives the album its title, Manafon, the name of the village where Welsh poet R. S. Thomas lived, a man with a profoundly troubled relationship with faith and family who inspired the entire album. Significant, in this respect, are the verses of rejection against his own creed present in the aforementioned "Small Metal Gods": "ho piazzato gli dei in una borsa con la zip / li ho messi in un cassetto / hanno rifiutato le mie preghiere per l'ennesima volta / così sto pareggiando i conti" ... "piccoli dei di metallo / souvenirs da poco prezzo / di sicuro mi avete abbandonato / ho scaricato le mie sciocchezze infantili / sto pareggiando i conti".

At fifty-one, David Sylvian has definitively freed himself, whatever they may be, from the insignificant souvenirs that kept him chained and has achieved his most important work, a piece that will indelibly mark this 2009. A difficult, challenging experience, which at first may give a feeling of disorientation similar to walking, without references, in an intricate forest (the image of the artwork is not accidental, perhaps we are that slender-shaped animal among the trees). "Manafon" demands attentive listening but rewards by giving back great emotions and, above all, it enhances the esteem for this artist and his courage to experiment, to explore, not to repeat himself, to venture into territories where not even Scott Walker with his masterpieces (Tilt, Drift), Arthur Russell, or Mark Hollis have arrived.