someone who's doing some things
I love music. Making music, listening, talking about it and anything else too.
Darkest dreaming is, as you’d expect, a fairly dark piece by anyone’s standards, but even so there is a hint of hope in it. The music is sublime and floats around Sylvian’s voice without the two parts ever getting in the way of each other.
The song comes from the album ‘Dead Bees on a Cake’, which is a long listen, but has a lot of good tracks in it. It took me quite a while to appreciate the album, but now I really enjoy it and this is one of the tracks I like the most.
This is such a delicate track, I really love it. It has wonderful mood swings and seems to change direction in mid flight.
It also seems quite a happy track for Sylvian, almost jolly even.
Still, I really enjoyed listening to it again.
Today is the original version of this track, or the very difficult one. I think it is fair to say that the Blemish album is a difficult listen, and this track is hard. Having said that it is also a very good track, and I love Derek Bailey’s work on it.
I heard about this site from Evolver.fm. It is just the sort of thing I was looking for when I wrote this post.
The listening room seems like a really good start
Cantonese Boy by Japan is just a great pop song. The right length, the right content, everything works perfectly and yet it is also an excellent little song. I love this song and I love the Tin Drum Album.
I took a bit of a break from this project for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that I was ill, but also because what I really wanted to listen to was some Mick Karn.
Anyway, I’ve got back to it now, and listened to ‘Buoy’ from Mick Karn’s album ‘Dreams of Reason Produce Monsters’. Two tracks from this album featured David Sylvian on vocals and I’ve chosen this one to include in my month of listening to David Sylvian.
I already really liked this song, but listening to it again made me remember what an amazing album it is. When I first listened to it I was completely blown away by it, and I still am. ‘Buoy’ was a single from the album and I bought the 12″ when it came out.
The song is a great mix between two talents. It has an earthy quality that’s emphasised by David’s voice, and it carries you on a musical journey that lilts along somewhere between contentment and melancholia. It is a beautiful song, and I really loved listening to it again.
Day 3 and this is the last track from Sylvian’s first solo album ‘Brilliant Trees’. Weathered Wall is almost 6 minutes long and is sort of divided into 2 distinct sections. Personally I like the 2nd part of the track much more, it is more musically interesting and is a richer listening experience.
Even though this is in some ways a more difficult track to listen to I found it easier to concentrate on this track whilst I listened to it for some reason. It could be that it is day 3, or it could be the music itself, or it could be a combination of the both. Who knows.
Day 2 of my listening experiment had better results I think. I found it easier to concentrate on the music today although that could be because of the music itself and the mix which I found less distracting.
Interesting that the mix can distract you from the music though, I hadn’t really given that much thought before.
As for the song, I really enjoyed it. ‘The Ink in the Well’ is one of my favourites from that album (Brilliant Trees), and is more upbeat than some of the other material. It is from the 1st side of the album, although that kind of distinction doesn’t really make sense any more. The more poppy set of tracks I guess.
Personally I liked both sides of the album for different reasons, and my next track will be from the more experimental side.
So today I started my listening project with David Sylvian’s ‘Red Guitar’. I sat doing nothing but listening with my eyes shut throughout the track. Not a way of listening that I’m used to, but one that had very interesting results.
I found myself drifting from listening and at times visualising the video to the song as well. The mix was intriguing too. As I was so focused on the track I heard the mix in quite a different way.
It wasn’t easy to stay focused on the music, and I did start to think about other things whilst listening, but even so I really enjoyed the experience and I’m looking forward to doing it again.
As for the track itself I mentioned the mix sounding different which was odd, but aside from that it was very interesting to focus that much attention on just one piece of music and nothing else. I’m looking forward to the rest of the month and the other tracks by Sylvian that I’ve selected to listen to.
More tomorrow.
I am Ashley Elsdon 