DAVID SYLVIAN & HOLGER CZUKAY
Plight & Premonition/Flux & Mutability GronlAnd
INear-mythical improv team-ups re-enter our atmosphere.
t’s rare for David Sylvian to admit he’s satisfied with his earlier work, so the remastered reissues of these instrumental collaborations with Holger Czukay suggest they’re among his personal favourites. The two minimalist pieces – strictly four, as each consists of two distinct movements – were then categorised as New Age or ambient, boxes both musicians struggled to inhabit. Yet it’s a reasonable call: rather than root for momentum or craft for melody, they murmur, exploring the spaces between sounds.
Perhaps their low profile when released in 1988 and 1989 frustrated Sylvian. Between the pair, he responded to Virgin’s pleas for something more commercial with the ‘difficult’ single Pop Song, its ironic title as subtle as a sledgehammer. Next to these, though, it was doing jazz hands.
Czukay had invited his Brilliant Trees bro to Can Studios in Cologne in late ’86 to contribute to his own album Rome Remains Rome. When they strayed off-grid, Sylvian wishing to eschew singing and create ‘environmental’ music,
Czukay directed the flow. Over a three-day session with
Jaki Liebezeit, Plight and Premonition emerged. As Sylvian enthused, “Holger works in a technically ‘wrong’ way – that’s what makes it so exciting.”
That’s a given with Czukay, but regarding Sylvian, there persisted the hangover of his pop idol image. Record companies struggled to place him, and it was almost 18 months before the album got released. This version is a 2002 remix by Sylvian, which if anything accentuates the slow-boat cruise, echoes and delays of Plight, and the church-like quivers and gentle, lulling drones of Premonition.
The briefly dynamic duo had meanwhile reconvened in Cologne to go again, producing Flux and Mutability. By comparison, these sound broader. Liebezeit dabbled in percussion on the first piece but was on African flute on the second. Mutability sprang up in a day, and it’s the stillest of all four, making every note count. Flux saw Sylvian begging for repeated takes, wanting more aural space. It has hints of the restrained, insistent rhythmic backdrop found on Sylvian’s ‘song’ albums of the 80s. Czukay called it “spiritual”.
While Sylvian was used to critics decrying his Tarkovsky-like gloom, Czukay was getting stick for not doing another Movies. Three decades later, these four enigmatic, signpost-free whisperings enchant and beguile. As the artists intended, they float and shimmer outside time, evocative of yearning, regret and desire.
COLLABORATIONS THAT FLOAT AND SHIMMER
OUTSIDE OF TIME.