David Sylvian - Secrets Of The Beehive
It would be nice to approach the visual arts with long-calculated stratagems, with reservations, restlessness and multiple anxieties, and then bring it all into the music, to the section, specifically, of slow but pleasant bleeding. It seldom happens that a detailed record, full of specificity, misses its appointment with images acquired from cues of constant dynamism.
In 1987, Talk Talk and Marianne Faithfull decided to make the dimensions of their stylistic figures rarefied, contrasting the rhythmic, jaunty residues of melodies that were taking their place in the upper reaches of the charts.
The most elegant and refined English artist found himself with nine compositions in his lap in just a fortnight, written at the end of the long tour of his third album. The fourth was not born as a precise will, but rather as a spontaneous and undisciplined artefact. Embracing and preserving the cloud of astonishment, David Sylvian decided who should collect and develop that fetus composed of virgin music with corners to be smoothed. He trusted and relied on the producer of his first solo effort and former sound engineer of XTC, Bryan Ferry and the Cure. The understanding produced a spark educated to keep the lights of this artistic journey low, suffused, articulated so that the sound did not escape the dynamics, in a conservative and contemplative state, to erudite inner richness and to place it alongside his moment specifically devoted to Sufism, to Gnostic Christianity, to Buddhism, his new discovery, open like a blanket for his ever-curious and stuttering soul. The forces of good and evil are earthly, and he explains this very well in the nine moments of a short but intense lecture.
The emphasis is on the lyrics, which originated together with the music, but which for the first time in his career as a writer had the will to drive the sound part to open windows, connections, with the intention of an artistic marriage that started from spirituality, from silence, from splendid pauses, to progress within a process that went on to highlight stories, disciplines, cultures, readings and, not least, the sense of belonging to an evolving philosophical theory. It is indeed interesting that the atmospheres, the rhythms, are vehicles of educated alarms, of stimuli that certify new consciousnesses within a temporal process that also probes the survival ground of an ancient and stunned man. Every time one listens to a Sylvian solo album, one gets the impression of a band in mothballs from the point of view of visibility, but at the same time there is an evident desire to take evolved and individual space. What emerges is the sublime technical skill, the flair, the discussions on the architecture of the songs and above all the orchestral arrangement, a task that only his precious and incredibly talented Ryuichi Sakamoto could make limpid, sunny, shadowy and at the foot of poignancy when it was appropriate. Nye's production is by far the best of the first part of David's career; for the insight to make the whole thing an almost concept album, to develop the atmosphere within moonbeams and to be able to contain and keep the wide range of mood, the true ruler of this work, excellent. The willingness to vary the path of musical genres without ending up in an inevitable shrill situation makes this work precious and unique. Clear is the matrix, the first formula that sparks everything: that jazz so beloved since childhood now finds a way to present its legs, to wear the responsibility of leading ambient, folk and atoms of new age in its gentle paths to make the whole a sensual and never boring amalgam. Challenging, liturgical, sidereal, voluminous, harsh but never raising its voice: the creative bundles decide to become the setting of a street momentarily furnished to give the asphalt a different refraction. The stories told seem like a showcase of poems rented from improvised externals, then polite, finally inserted, gracefully, to become matter in the singer's uvula, so akin always to a song that resembles a sweet, atheistic prayer.
Steve Jansen and Danny Grierson (the latter in the magnificent The Boy with...) sit on a stool to give the rhythm a sense of protection, with imagination flying over the desert to cheer and make one reflect...
The guitars, acoustic and electric, are performed by David himself, David Torn and Phil Palmer, in a melodic traversal that caresses the waves...
Danny Thompson has a unique, overflowing talent between his fingers: the way he plays the bass is Oscar-winning, as each time his notes become black and white images...
Nigel Grierson can only be offered the best of hugs: the image on the cover is the first poem, the first frame, the first thrill, the first emotion we encounter when we grab the vinyl and it is almost outrageous to abandon that image to jump into the sonic experience of the record... Nine inclinations, nine crosses crossed with destiny, nine reflections with the baritone voice, in a continuous and coherent minimalism, in order to season the emotion and induce it to the gravest sin: to create an association, benevolent, with rhythmic and harmonic seduction, in an afternoon of short rays. It seems absurd to think that this work has an identity card, because of a freshness that renews itself listening after listening, creating the hypothesis of a pact with the devil that several times shows its shadow between the tracks.
An academic lesson, a class parade, an invitation to taste absinthe in solitude, without yearning for love, except for that of a cup of tea.
The use of tracks as small vibrations grants the listener the luxury of slow transport, never occasional, always aiming to recapture the same movement as when one was rocked as a child. That is, perhaps, why this album plays with the stages of evolution, to the point of gently exhausting all fears. One can get lost in front of the last creative step in which David has left to the song form the task of guiding the evolutions, of maintaining a small contact with simplicity, of not committing too much proximity to everything that one finds: one must take advantage of this, because from this work, for some twenty years, nothing will be approached in the same way.
All the cradles face a grip with little need for modification: in the immediacy there are small and minute suites, almost imperceptible, in the happy decadence of a path that first bewitches and then drowns…
Never forget the Secrets Of The Beehive cover, with its footprints, that feather, which seems to anticipate everything by freezing the eyes in an almost worried look.
Indeed.
Indeed, it's not easy to acquire the lessons, the minuscule but present wands that these songs give us, on a dusty first day of school. Sakamoto's discipline once again allows the blending of East and West, not without some friction, sublime and dutiful. Ryuichi immediately understood from where David wanted to attend his delivery: in a semi-hidden room but lit by the ecstasy of astonishment. The ensemble of this work does not fail, it attracts, envelops, involves, without the need to overwhelm: in the modern game of music, where everything slips, Sylvian decides to create the outpost of a rarefied friction, concealed but rapacious, seeing in the production the weapon to gently wound...
Now it's time to step through the fear and into the album's nine moments, keeping the apnea in view so that the breath will be more aware of what it will and will not encounter...
Song by Song
1 - September
A piano, a voice, a mood with burrs carried away by the silent wind, the mystery of keys that all seem to be grey open this work, with a synth that appears, in the twilight, the need to locate the path of a season that has just begun with the most important month and away, slowly, in adjacency, with a vocal cuddle that hides its claws from the outset in a lyric that puffs with great capacity
2 - The Boy With The Gun
Semi-acoustic guitar, bass, synth and the confirmation that it is in the metrics of David's singing that peace can be found even in the midst of lead-filled lyrics, under the skin of the sun witnessing yet another human clash. Echoes of the debut album present themselves, but Sakamoto's arrangement takes everything further, with egregious slowness, with images emerging from the polite distortions of a majestic guitar. And it is world music full of blankets, camouflaged, waiting for a space that will arrive soon...
The play of synthetic strings deceives time and perception, to give the poetry of melody a tireless physicality...
3 - Maria
Sylvian's ambient has a dimension close to early 1970s American progressive (in the first few seconds of the track), only to materialise in a flight over the West, and it is here that Sakamoto puts his philosophy governing the whole sound process, like a spite to noise, for a religious inclination that deviates from sacred music.
4 - Orpheus
The Old Scribe adores the flugelhorn, an instrument with a phenomenal range that in this song oscillates between visibility and dream in the moment of this work that he wanted to lead towards the necessity of a single, almost as a premonition, an alert, a warning of the greatness of this fourth Sylvian episode. Rebounds, sound waves known to dolphins, soft winds of the Sahara, an emotional poetry that grazes the wall of tears to become a siren without ceasing, to enchant the auditory apparatus. Orpheus is an early twentieth-century poor unfortunate soul, who rents walls in an American garage and descends to London in search of an embrace, amid melancholy and quick-witted enchantment. The text is a slap in the face that links the history of man to his destiny, where nothing changes and where promises die, one after the other...
5 - The Devil's Own
The darkest, almost dramatic moment of the entire work is a leaden thread in search of darkness: the chimes of the white piano keys are a carillon of amazement, fit only for adults. And here appears, first timidly and then arrogantly, the fearful echo of uninhibited voices. The piece rises in intensity thanks to an orchestration that places it in the vicinity of classical music but with less vehemence and in which the reverberating voices at the end seem like windows to the soul in the process of closing. David, once again, plays with pauses to create more pathos and leave our sensitivity close to the fear that something will happen to the protagonists of the text. And indeed it will...
6 - When Poet Dreamed Of Angels
Once upon a time there was a painter who anticipated the play of light in colours. Wines, yes, the poet of Durutti Column, intent on piloting his flamenco guitar towards Manchester, only to let the London artist navigate towards other strips of asphalt. Structured differently from the other compositions, WPDOA is a sonic slit, made of stratagems, evolutions, contortions, with the light of roads that seem to start in Seville, cross the Alps and arrive in New Orleans. Timeless, with a continuous seasoning, it presents the only solo on the entire album, but never central, as it needs to be surrounded by the genuine spontaneity that does not block the melodic structure.
7 - Mother And Child
Take Japan, on an evening filled with idleness and boredom, and invite them to meditation: you're sure to find this gem applauding, almost with tremendous devotion, everything that could not be created. The double bass is a soft punch, the piano with its jazziness wake a train that is in no hurry, the charleston of the drums is a jolt coming out of the alleys of Washington and David's voice an attack of sensuality while the dramatic story seems to be routed towards a place where the oneiric can suspend everything.
8 - Let The Happiness In
Here comes the Dead Can Dance, slow, dark, magnetic, in the first seconds of the song then the voice shifts us, the musical trajectory becomes less gloomy and Mark Isham's trumpet takes the lead, blowing away the melody to contrast with a gloomy, almost menacing organ. Then one encounters a delicate, sensual drumming, while the notes make one believe they are intent on taking on light, as well as rhythm, and one realises how this moment is full of shivers, of suspense that balances a desire for serenity that seems impeded.
9 - Waterfront
How does one take leave of the beauty, the richness of such an experience? The answer is in the notes, in the wordplay, in the unobtrusive desire to lead the poignancy within the rhythm that does not need bass and/or drums: it is all consciously driven by the strings, and by a piano that needs very few notes to create a hiatus, a silent scream, packaged to give the story the credibility that the text demands. This sublime moment ends with the voice bearing the stigmata of light, sipping a polite need to leave everything as it is...
Last thought: it is good and right to give in to the beauty of this artistic facility, but do not forget to give light to the lyrics.
Among his early records there is no doubt that this is the one closest to being considered a miracle we deserved...
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