The references made on Brilliant Trees to the alumni of philosophers and artists were perceived by many as being a little pretentious, but the kinder view was that Sylvian was finding his voice. Such eminent sidekicks were a way of reinforcing thoughts and feelings he himself was coming to terms with, and he used them to help indicate the way his thought processes were developing. Sylvian explained his rationale while at the same time indicating that name-dropping was not a perfect device. “I think I’ve incorporated too many references in my work to writers and artists. But the reason for doing so was that it was my community. I didn’t have one in the physical world. So I found like minds through the work of others and I drew them into my work as a result. As a band of like-minded individuals, dead or alive, it didn’t matter. I sort of bonded with them.”⁸
          When Brilliant Trees was conceived, Sylvian was still only twenty-five. As a person he still had a lot to learn, as an artist he was at the very beginning of the “new” road, the constraints of Japan having been lifted, and allowing his freedom of thought and expression. Until this exploration and analysis had matured, however, Sylvian’s work represented a window on his questioning, and a fascinating insight into the first tentative steps that were being taken on this long journey. As time went on, life events would impinge on this journey. As we shall see, the break-up of his relationship with Fujii, a spiral into depression, his marriage and later his divorce from Ingrid Chavez, would all seriously affect him. But all things, good and bad, were seen as life affirming, and would all be thrown into the pot, mixed in, and eventually added to the richness of the ensuing work. Life was light and dark, happiness and sadness, good and bad, and an on-going experience of all these things were the fuel for Sylvian’s work.
          Sylvian’s view of his first solo offering remained positive throughout his career, not always the case when he was asked retrospectively to review his compositions over the years. A couple of decades after Brilliant Trees was released, and at a time when his musical evolution had taken him light years away from the processes used to create his first solo album, he was asked which of his projects he looked back on most fondly. His answer? “Probably Brilliant Trees — there was such a sense of adventure there, making one’s first solo recording, meeting those wonderful musicians…having never spoken to any of them before. That sense of dislocation, it frees up the minds of the musicians and brings greater commitment from them as players.”³⁷ Brilliant Trees was an important record, but more than anything else, it set up a working process that remains to this day to some extent. As a foundation stone for future work, it was solid, and it represented the blueprint for all that followed. Sylvian was in front of the eyes of his audience discovering his values for living, and seeking a philosophy that he could happily adhere to. “I started looking for spiritual depth, and I feel like I planted fresh roots in some very potent soil.”³⁸
          Sylvian suggested that Brilliant Trees was “supposed to reflect the highest level a human can attain.”³⁹ Much of his future work had this as its central objective. In common with Brilliant Trees, future solo work would also utilise collaboration as a means of musical expression, would use ambiguous lyric qualities to allude to spiritual enlightenment while at the same time appealing on a more personal level to his audience, and fuse lyric and music together to create a unique atmosphere and mood. His collaborators would change over the years as he sought out the different voices he required to create this atmosphere, but his entire solo and jointly-composed back catalogue took his audience on a personal journey of growth and development as a man and artist. Most striking of all was that Sylvian’s music now allowed him to a certain extent to reveal himself to his audience, not hide himself, as had been the case before going solo. However, while doing so, he was loosening the linkage between himself and his former cohort of fans. The hard-core Sylvian fans were about to gird their loins and be taken on the journey. The die-hard Japan fans were about to leave the fold, and seek their musical grazing fields elsewhere.

          There were layers of complexity and paradox surrounding the Rain Tree Crow project, but the one omni-present theme was Sylvian’s personal despair. It could not be lost on anyone with a passing interest in Sylvian’s career that perhaps the biggest paradox of all was that the last time he had had such a personal crisis, the result was the disbanding of Japan. At this point in his career, however, one perceived solution to his problems was bringing his ex-band members back together! Sylvian sought the intervention of a therapist to help him at this time as already mentioned, and here another layer of complexity was introduced. Analysis, as the name would suggest, allowed him to get to grips “analytically” with what was going on in his head. This was the opposite to Sylvian’s usual way of working through aspects of his life that he struggled to come to terms with. All the way through his career to this point, his default position when seeking insight and a route to some form of redemption had been increased spiritual awareness and an immersion into the lessons that spiritual learning could teach him. At this time, however, he seemed to have recognised that the spiritual route to a solution to his personal issues was perhaps not the best option. “My primary instincts are spiritual, but I think it is a mistake to jump straight into that area, because spiritual awareness is such a nebulous thing that if the mind is discoloured by experiences in this life, it is so powerful it can conjure up anything you think that you need to believe in. It’s quite dangerous in that respect. So going into analysis was a kind of clearing out process and it helped me to understand myself a tremendous amount. It’s on-going, it never ends. It’s never ‘well I’ve done it now, I understand’. The more you know, the more there is to know.”⁸⁰
          As time progressed, Sylvian found more and more that spiritualism alone could provide him with the answers that he needed. At this stage, however, with his potential focus still somewhat fluid, analysis provided a missing crutch. It also alluded to one area of Sylvian’s life where there were unresolved issues as we have seen, and these were childhood related. The desensitising aspect of his youth, at home, school, and immersed as he was in the somewhat rough and tumble environment of South London suburbia in the mid-1970s, led to him blocking off malign stimuli so as not to absorb any of the associated negativity. His analyst no doubt homed in on this area, and teased out its relevance, and the fact that Sylvian had to work through the legacy of this period of his life. Sylvian definitely recognised the importance of his childhood, and was minded to think that the related issues had at their core the role parents took on towards their children. Parents had to harden up their offspring against the potential trials and tribulations inherent in such an environment. As Sylvian saw it, he was taught to put up barriers to the soul. Doing this may well have helped to deflect some of the immediate “danger”, but it effectively put life in a holding pattern, un-real, running on autopilot, letting situations pass by or bounce off the shields that had been erected. It did not allow the conscious part of the self to come in and questions events, really look at situations for what they were, assess whether they were good or bad, right or wrong, positive or negative. Out of this analyst-led epiphany, Sylvian had a Eureka moment. “Out of nowhere it struck me that the pause for consciousness to arrive is what the artist strives to introduce into everybody’s life. The function of art in society is to create space where consciousness can be reached and you find within that space the room to ask questions.”⁸⁰
          This insight was of massive importance. It became the bedrock for all Sylvian’s subsequent artistic output, and maybe less “consciously” had been the driving force behind all his previous work. He wanted to illicit a reaction in his audience, give them an environment within which to think. Yes, occasionally he wanted to provoke a line of questioning, but from that, he wanted to allow the listener to come into contact with personal inner feelings. Such consciousness was also central to Buddhist teachings. In terms of his spiritual growth, the timing of the revelation for Sylvian, as he worked on the Rain Tree Crow project, was pivotal. He explained why. “This is an important document for me as it denotes the end of many intimate relationships, including my association with Christianity.” ³¹

          Between 1999 and 2002, we have tracked the many changes in Sylvian’s life, changes that he was in control of, changes that were positive from a personal and creative point of view, changes that set the foundation for a future with numerous possibilities that could be exploited and enjoyed. But something was going to happen that was as profoundly life changing as it was unexpected. His relationship with Chavez was about to end. Both parties retained, and continue to retain, a dignified silence as to the reasons for the breakdown of their relationship, and it is not even an area that I wish to explore. From the point of view of this book, the fact is that it happened, and the reasons why it happened should be left alone. What is of interest is how this painful turn of events affected Sylvian, and how it found voice in his work from this point on. There were some extremely interesting parallels to be drawn between this period of Sylvian’s life and the period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when his previous relationship with Yuka Fujii ended.
          As we have seen, the earlier period took its toll both personally and creatively. Sylvian as a man found himself — after a sustained spell of positive creativity with the releases of Brilliant Trees, Gone to Earth, Secrets of the Beehive, and all the results of his fruitful collaborations in the 1980s — totally at his wits end, falling into depression, and completely unable to compose. There were points when he even contemplated throwing in the towel, and turning his back on the music industry completely. “I was completely numbed by that experience. I couldn’t write about it at all. It wasn’t even an option. The whole thing took me at least five years to work through, psychologically. I don’t think I could have got through it on my own, the feeling of guilt, unhappiness, and grief were too great. When someone dies you have the actual physical loss of that person. But when an important relationship ends, that person is still present in your life to some degree, and that confuses the issue enormously.”⁷⁵
          This stood in stark contrast to the period from 2003 onwards. Testament to how much Sylvian had matured as a man — personally and spiritually — and how much he had matured as a musician, he not only managed to sustain himself better when dealing with the upset of his relationship with Chavez disintegrating, but he used music as a key to working through his issues. In other words, music was part of the solution, not part of the problem. “This time I felt better equipped to face the emotions head on…I am very involved in certain forms of meditation and ritual worship and so on, and I think having those practices gave me a relatively well balanced frame of mind which helped me to look deeper into the darker aspects of my own emotional make-up, and to emerge from it. This time, music was all I had to fall back on. It could be of service to me in the way that it wasn’t back in the ‘80s. I’d just finished work on the retrospective for Virgin. I was ready for a complete break from all that. And having built my own studio at home in New Hampshire, I was able to enter into the space that was entirely my own. I had the freedom to explore my own ideas, and without the usual time constraints.”⁷⁵

          It was true to say that Sylvian had typically been a reluctant tourer, and he felt somewhat ill-at-ease during the previous tour off the back of Blemish. While in essence he gained some enjoyment from it, he found its format restricted both himself and Jansen during the performance, as there was not much freedom for interpretation. It was not long into this tour that the brothers had just about exhausted all possible avenues of live exploration with the compositions in the set, and so the performances became routine, each night being a carbon copy of the night before. As this scenario developed, Sylvian reached the conclusion that he did not want to tour again, but was effectively talked into the 2007 tour, it being seen as a means of airing his old material just one more time. It soon became apparent that this was the wrong decision for Sylvian. The World is Everything tour ended in Japan, and Sylvian was shattered. “At the end of the last tour in 07, after the final night in Tokyo, physically unwell and mentally exhausted, a thought flashed through my mind with a sense of finality, ‘David Sylvian is dead.’ With the thought came an immense sense of relief. Obviously the thought was in reference to the persona. That person, whether it was something projected unconsciously or as a means of remaining invisible, or whether it was something projected onto me, was now ill fitting. On that tour, mid way through recording Manafon, I began to feel the gulf between myself and the persona. I no longer inhabited it.”¹²⁵
           What was reborn at this point was an artist with a clear sense of purpose musically, a focus on free improv and EAI, and a desire, it seemed, to become personally more reclusive than before. No doubt, much of this reclusivity was a product of the predicament he found himself in after separating from Chavez, but it also seemed to be a state that he chose for himself in an attempt to find the creative headroom necessary to think, gestate ideas, and concentrate on the process of artistic creativity. Whether a product of choice or necessity — or an element of both — the Sylvian that was revealed at the time of the release of Manafon was an individual whose solitude was almost complete. Here was a man who realised the importance of isolation to him but also the pain inherent in such a hermitic lifestyle. His only regular visitors were his two daughters. “I lead a very isolated existence and spend ninety percent of my days alone. It took me a while to acclimatise myself to that way of life and its quite difficult to interact with other people, let alone performing to an audience. Sometime its a solitude that feels profound and comforting and desirable, and other times its isolating and completely lonely. But I’ve always thought to produce something fresh and new or of value, you have to withdraw yourself from the common influences of society, and so I felt that withdrawing myself in this way might enable me to do away with any conscious or subconscious influences that society might have on me by living in cities, soaked in media. The further I get away from that, the more I feel that this is my true voice. Of course, I can’t take account of what other people bring into the work. But in terms of my perceptions of it, it has a clarity to it or an integrity that it might not have if I lived under any other circumstances. I’m not saying that I can continue to live this way or wish to live this way, or it may just be the way that I continue to live for the rest of my days…but this work [Manafon] was born out of that environment, it was born out of isolation.”¹⁸⁹

          The coming together of Sylvian and Fujikura with Five Lines was at a time when the discussions they were having centred around a more extensive body of work, a re-interpretation of the Manafon compositions, which was eventually released as Died in the Wool. In this context, Five Lines was a testing ground of sorts, the two protagonists sounding each other out, seeing whether there was fertile ground that they could work on together. This was quite new territory for Sylvian, but exploration was necessary as both artists came from such different backgrounds and musical genres. As Sylvian put it “it was important to know, and with great clarity, that we were speaking the same language. We were learning how to understand and interpret the mutual vocabulary.”²⁰⁴ Five Lines was in itself a good indication of the work the pair would produce together on Died in the Wool. Against a jagged but compelling classical string quartet background — a perfect foil for his vocals — Sylvian sang a lyric that poetically described his musical evolution.

Five lines flared from the ovens / He pulled the ribbons from their hair / With melodies beaten from the sheets of his mother / Songs for the end of time

          A musical stave had five lines. For Sylvian, these five lines had been broadcasting his experiences for decades, experiences that “flared from the ovens” of his life. Each musical stave traditionally had a treble or a bass clef wound among the five lines, synonymous with a degree of musical structure and convention, conventions that Sylvian had been at pains to move away from, the symbol of this move away to the extremities of musical convention being Sylvian separating the clef from the stave, “pulling the ribbons from their hair”.

          News of this new initiative had been circulating since about July 2013, as it was announced that The Kilowatt Hour would be performing at the Punkt Festival in Norway on 7th September, before embarking on a brief 5-date tour of Italy. This marked a new group collaboration for Sylvian, effectively an instrumental trio comprising himself, Mathieu, and Fennesz. The plan pre-tour was that they would meet in July and spend some of the summer in Vienna developing material for the Punkt Festival, before taking it on the road. Sylvian was full of expectation concerning the venture. “I feel very fortunate to be in the company of two musicians whom I have great respect for and whose generosity and companionship have enriched my personal and working life. We’re going to undertake a brief excursion together to see where it might lead. There’s no complacency, no shortcuts being taken. We’re looking for something unique and exciting ourselves and a fresh experience for those that attend the performances.”²³¹
          As we have seen, Sylvian, Mathieu, and Fennesz’s paths collided for the first time on Wandermüde, but this was not entirely representative of the path they were to take with The Kilowatt Hour. What was obvious, and consistent with the track that Sylvian pursued his entire solo career, was that improvisation was going to be a key element of the work the trio produced. Mathieu tried to put his finger on what they were aiming to achieve. “A basic guide for our performance is the idea of ‘eventlessness’. Right now we aim at creating a composition which is fixed to a certain degree but leaves enough space to shape in a live situation. So, while we will present a piece, this will vary slightly from show to show.”²³¹ Fennesz added his views. “I’d like to find material through improvisation. It definitely is a risky project but that makes it exciting. It’s a bit like jumping into cold water.”²³¹
           For Sylvian, what was obvious was that he wanted to recreate the excitement and spontaneity of the work he had undertaken with Czukay all those years ago in the 1980s. The fire that the work the pair undertook on Plight and Premonition and Flux and Mutability had lit in Sylvian was still burning bright some 25 years later. Czukay’s influence on Sylvian at the time in the 1980s was obvious, but neither of them would have been aware of the massive impact those days together in Czukay’s studio in Cologne would have on Sylvian’s entire career. Here he was with the Kilowatt Hour treading the same boards. “The pieces I created with Holger were works that evolved very naturally without any recourse to ‘performance’ per se. What was captured was the tentative, the unsure footing, the meandering evolution of an idea before it became solidified in the mind, subject to the process of self-editing, practice and performance in the sense of something learned by rote and repeated with emotional emphasis. We obliterated the performance element wherever it threatened to creep into the improvisations. If I carry anything over from past projects maybe it’d be this practice.”²³¹
           Sylvian was aware of the fact that Fennesz and Mathieu had a working relationship that went back almost fifteen years, and as such they had a familiarity with each other and their particular processes. Both men had established a way of working and performing in such a context that Sylvian hadn’t, and as such the goal was for him once again to be challenged, and to be forced to create a new musical language as he had done with Blemish and Manafon. The trio went into the project with no plans beyond the few concerts announced in July 2013, and so it really was an open-ended adventure that would be as stimulating for the performers as it was for the audience if it worked as envisaged.