David Sylvian
Wave

THE REVIEW

I don't remember anymore, my flaw.

I don't remember the exact words, the exact TERMS. I could never say it as I wish. I would include something, and inevitably leave out something else, maybe a thousand times more important. It's difficult to reconstruct a thought, especially if that thought flashed like lightning one evening by chance, I dazzled without understanding it. Sometimes I recall THAT thought, I toy with it, try to give it the shape of a sentence, try to make something meaningful of it. Almost always in vain. But sometimes the right words, if such words exist, lend me a hand. And then I realize that thought never left, it's always been there - nothing to do, it couldn't leave me even if I wanted it to. And so yes, I return to see a light in the fog, a sentence forming on a sterile white plane: and I remember that I really perceived it, that electricity, I managed to feel it, I heard it vibrate, speak, even BREATHE like a living thing. IT WAS a living thing: the sounds spoke a language to me, the sounds jolted and took shape above that spinning 33, side B just started. And as that electricity made its way into my ears, I lost contact with everything. But perfectly clear and vigilant - in other words: master of myself, I distanced myself from myself. 

An emptiness opening, an emptiness of immense water expanses - WAVES overlapping WAVES. No orientation, no direction, no sense of time except that of a drum - it, the reverberation of a dry snare, interrupting the initial void. And then vibrations, fluctuations, deviations (loss?) and a Guitar that goes deeper in the throat, denser, stronger, more tenacious. "I seem to remember," a Voice sings, "I have dreamed thousands of dreams, we faced our days together without worrying about what they would bring - and now I feel a strange force inside: I opened the door to life and let it in." Simple, linear words: they speak to me of things lived, so much so that I could have thought them myself; now I find them again but I feel I have already encountered them, they are images already seen, sensations too familiar to be confused; the words I always wanted to say and never did. "Open the door to life": I almost feel a sense of strangeness, of inferiority - perhaps inadequacy, in front of that Voice, I almost feel the regret of having often kept that door closed. But I don't feel like a stranger in a strange land, because that Voice speaks my language. I've crossed an ocean, but I'm home. The waves are no longer a threat, while I'm sailing, the sea becomes part of me. And I feel a superhuman strength arising: nothing can hurt me, nothing can interrupt my unstoppable floating, nothing can break that rhythm that goes. I myself am a WAVE, perhaps.

Echoes of distant trumpets, voices of islands and contours blurred in the night, lights I can barely see from afar, while abandoned to the currents, the senses do not tire of being dragged, pushed, cradled. The rain is not a storm, the perpetual motion of the wave is not a gale, and I feel as if I have nothing to lose and everything to gain, as if a world is about to open beyond the water. It is the Voice that shows me that world, and tells me of a kingdom that shines to new greatness from dust and ruins, a world I will meet and reach alongside the being I'm running to. "I'll run to you, nothing stands between us now..." A new age to live, a world made for two, gold and splendor without ever meeting an end - it doesn't matter whether it's the Earthly Paradise or not, the name of the kingdom doesn't matter nor where it is located: now I am reaching it, the light that has turned on cannot turn off anymore. And the Guitar leading me to my destination is the most immense and boundless Guitar I've ever heard: every note is a breath, a pulse, a breath of life. Here it is, the electricity that BREATHES like a living thing. And the senses are masters because this is their kingdom.

"Another world just made for two

I'll swim the seas inside with you

And like the waves without a sound

I'll never let you down".