Альбом Дэвида Сильвиана «Gone To Earth» предвосхитил эстетику пост-рока, деконструируя мужские коды 80-х

With David Sylvian often dismissed as ‘new age’, his evanescent second solo album, Gone To Earth, might be better remembered if reframed as dream pop or post rock. Jettisoning the few vestiges of rock that remained on his solo debut, 1984’s Brilliant Trees, Sylvian’s Gone To Earth reflected how, in the 80s, popular music, like the workplace, was being unmanned, rock’s dynamics deconstructed. As vocalist and focal point for Japan, Sylvian was a poster boy for this societal shift, a Catford plasterer’s son who, beautiful and fey, produced music that tended to waft and eddy rather than thrust and parry. Yet Gone To Earth’s elemental pastoral deconstructed feminised pop as well as rock, deliberately drifting into uncharted terrain that, while not followed at the time, would resurface in post rock. To provide some map references and compass readings, it’s worth deconstructing the concept of ‘rock’. As the 60s counterculture calcified after 1968’s setbacks, feminised folk rock and psychedelia were jettisoned for harder, post-Hendrix rock, reasserting masculinity in dynamics, style and content. Whether in rock’s heavy (Zeppelin, Sabbath), classic (Skynyrd, Humble Pie), prog (Yes, ELP) or good-time (Faces, Steve Miller) iterations, this was a counterforce to countercultural egalitarianism, not just in its ‘whiteness’, but in its implicit rejection of women’s and gay liberation. When rock did produce feminised forms, like glam (a key touchstone for Japan), Alice Cooper and Kiss, 80s glam metal then transfused it with testosterone. Even leavened with less macho (again African American) forms, rock acts simply welded rock dynamics onto a funk or disco chassis (e.g. Climax Blues Band’s 1976 ‘Couldn’t Get it Right’, the Stones’ 1978 ‘Miss You’), minimising their feminised facets. Punk rewrote the rulebook, not so much in its often-parodically masculine music, but in making space for women (Siouxsie, Poly Styrene), queer people (Buzzcocks, Tom Robinson) and post punk. Ditching rock dynamics, post-rock delved into dub (Slits), disco (The Clash), funk (Gang of Four), krautrock (Banshees) and jazz (Rip Rig & Panic). “Rock is obsolete” declared Jah Wobble, whose Public Image Ltd are regarded as post rock forerunners, while post punk’s subset, synth pop is not. This despite synth pop dismantling rock’s instrumental lineup, frequency palette and gender coding, from Human League to Soft Cell, Yazoo to Eurythmics – alongside New Romantic synthesists like Talk Talk and Japan. With these tendencies moulding mainstream pop, the anti-rockist early 80s was a distinctly demasculinised environment, pulsing with possibilities that far exceeded merely embracing Thatcherite commercialism. Exemplary of those possibilities, Talk Talk and Japan can be seen as complementary: born in punk, switching to synth pop, gaining commercial success then switching styles. Yet Marc Hollis is regarded as a post rock forerunner, while David Sylvian is not. Both Sylvian’s 1984 Brilliant Trees and Talk Talk’s 1986 The Colour of Spring were more organic and artier than previous work, nudging dream pop and pursuing a non-folky pastoralism (the last words on ‘Brilliant Trees’ are “taking my life back to the soil”), while still breaking the UK top 10. Just as the post rock ground was prepared on Colour’s ‘April 5th’ and ‘Chameleon Day’, so Brilliant Trees’ abstract second half – Sylvian’s collaborators including Jon Hassell and Can’s Holger Czukay – was a deconstruction of both rock and pop. Talk Talk would (eventually) produce 1988’s Spirit of Eden, while Sylvian followed up his hit album with a 20-minute instrumental EP / 40-minute cassette with the Woolworths-friendly title Words With The Shaman /Alchemy: An Index of Possibilities (1985). Consequently, Gone To Earth’s very format seems like a statement – seven epic ‘songs’ featuring the prog guitar dream team of Be Bop Deluxe’s Bill Nelson and King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, plus a second album of ambient instrumentals – or a renunciation. “Those days are gone” he intones on ‘Silver Moon’. There is a pop song somewhere in ‘Silver Moon’ with its gorgeous, always-been-there melody and chorus that coos “Baby I can tell you, there’s no easy way out”. But like all the ‘songs’ here, while ‘Silver Moon’ sticks to pop’s verse / chorus format, it possesses a diffuseness that points to dream pop, but a distance that prefigures post rock. While Japan colleague and brother Steve Jansen taps out a delicate tango variant, Sylvian’s lilting piano and Nelson’s spectral guitar arpeggios enhance the sense of languor, which is then elevated by Fripp’s vaulting dreamwork solos. Fripp’s Crimson colleague Mel Collins adds to the luminescence on soprano sax, before ‘Silver Moon’ sets in a crepuscular, matutinal haze of twinkling, fizzing Frippertronics. “Soon the guiding moonlight will be gone”. Dreams give way to waking, while beauty is fleeting: you can observe it departing in Sylvian’s appearance in the ‘Silver Moon’ video. The closest contemporary comparisons to this combination of the electronic and organic, the Romantic and ascetic, besides Colour Of Spring, were Peter Gabriel’s So, earlier in 1986, and Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love the year before. Sylvian’s ‘River Man’, possessing pantheistic commonality with Bush, also has some sonic similarity to Gabriel and Bush’s duet, ‘Don’t Give Up’, in the way Penguin Café’s Jennifer Maidman’s clicky bass bounces off Jansen’s taut drums in an inverted African funk. That we’ve had to learn to ‘hear’ all these albums through their mid-80s production is the price to pay for the period’s deconstruction of rock. Yet while Gone To Earth comes swathed in booming drums, fretless bass and electronic washes, it’s by far the least synthesised and least pop of any of these releases. Eschewing their drama for drift, Gone To Earth avoids dullness or insularity through detailing and intensity, a sonic sensuousness derived from both density and augmentation (like dream pop) and space and subtraction (pre-empting post rock). Simultaneously serene and abstracted, ‘Taking The Veil’ sets the tone and the scene. Musically, it’s a lissomely sprung funk, Jansen’s highly syncopated, heavily reverberated drums imbricating Maidman’s burbling fretless bass and Sylvian’s syncopated rhythm guitar (prefiguring Radiohead’s 1996 ‘Talk Show Host’). But where funk is sensual, even carnal, Sylvian renders it cerebral, Fripp’s crablike guitar pattern pushing and pulling at the complex rhythm. The platonic doesn’t dim the erotic, however, with the phrase ‘Taking the Veil’ suggesting both marriage and holy orders. With the chorus lyric lifted from surrealist Max Ernst’s 1930 ‘collage novel’ A Little Girl Dreams Of Taking the Veil, the track evokes the ecstasy over the agony of Ernst’s scenario, without entirely eclipsing it. On ‘Wave’ Richard Barbieri’s electronics waft through Japan colleague Jansen’s intricate, tom-heavy drum pattern, somnambulantly far behind the beat, and further abstracted by the absence of cymbals or bass. Fripp begins in surging ‘St Elmo’s Fire’ mode, chiming with Sylvian’s lyric, which while seemingly a love song (“Upon a wave of summer / A hilltop paved with gold / We shut our eyes and made / The promises we hold”) concerns “the power of divine energy embodied in human form”. Such humanism, behind the Rosicrucian mysticism (reflected in Russell Mills’ cover art), is embodied in the warmth of Sylvian’s vocal and Nelson’s sympathetically unobtrusive accompaniment. Abruptly, though, after the first chorus, the song stops, then reconfigures. Sylvian’s tinkling piano enters at three minutes and Harry Beckett’s flugelhorn becomes the main colour until, barely perceptibly, the baton passes over a minute later to Fripp’s trumpet-toned guitar, a sound he first essayed on Crimson’s 1981 ‘The Sheltering Sky’, via the Roland GR300 guitar synthesizer. The tide of ‘Wave’ goes out with a lengthy, churning electronic backwash, Fripp moving to a muted ‘St Elmo’ mode, corona discharged, energy slowly dissipating. With jazz a key source for post rock, it’s salient that ‘Before The Bullfight’ should be inspired by Miles Davis’s 1960 Sketches Of Spain – particularly arranger Gil Evans’ ‘Solea’. ‘Bullfight’ unfolds unhurriedly with almost atonal Barbieri electronics, Nelson’s dry, spindly guitar and slowly pulsing Jansen percussion. When Kenny Wheeler’s wistful flugelhorn finally enters, it’s from a distance, as if from a hill at the horizon of a hot dusty plain, echoing Sketches producer Teo Macero’s Eno-hailed methodology. The bullfight here is figurative as well as literal, fanciful as well as visceral, the track as lateral, dream-like and disorientating as a Buñuel film. Sylvian has said it’s about “a willingness to go through life accepting whatever comes your way”, and this is exemplified by the music’s insistence on immersion in the sonic moment, both sensuous and stark. Even further from pop reference points, ‘Laughter And Forgetting’ invokes Milan Kundera’s Book Of Laughter And Forgetting (1979), while furthering the album’s organic nature / human nature theme. “Running like a horse between the trees / The ground beneath my feet / Gives me something to hold onto”. With Sylvian’s languorous vocal and luminous electronic ambience backed only by Wheeler’s flugelhorn and his Azimuth colleague John Taylor’s piano, ‘Laughter’ is even jazzier than ‘Before The Bullfight’, while echoing its ‘live for the moment’ ethos. “Well, every hope falls down on its knees in time / But I’m no longer lost / Every day, every second, every hour inside.” Hope’s absence here is positive rather than negative, a question of not poisoning the present by fretting about an unpredictable future. Talking of fretting, where most tracks feature Fripp’s guitar at its most fluid and mellifluous, ‘Gone To Earth’ unearths the abrasive, almost atonal arpeggiation Fripp deployed on David Bowie’s 1980 ‘It’s No Game (No. 1)’. Given the theme of ‘Gone To Earth’ is mystically bucolic – “The rabbits have fled their burrows, gone to earth” – rather than misanthropically hermetic, the music conveys pastoralism without being preciously ‘folk’. The dissonance of Fripp’s approach invokes the harshness of nature, while Sylvian’s vocal and serene arpeggio interludes evoke its transcendence, the album’s title track presenting not just peace’s polarity therefore, but its precarity. While never this discordant, the ambient tracks are far starker than the album’s songs, while being complementary musically and thematically. These largely guitar-based instrumentals tend, as Sylvian observed, to be “static”, in contrast to Eno’s more kinetic approach on 1978’s similarly organic/electronic Music For Films, while not quite as abstracted as Eno’s pastoral-themed 1982 album Ambient 4: On Land. Still-lifes of nature, Gone To Earth’s instrumentals evoke William Wordsworth’s “spots of time”, whereby fleeting bucolic moments become epic. Yet where Wordsworth and Eno summon the past from the distance of memory, Sylvian attempts to give it immediacy. On ‘Sunlight Seen Through Towering Trees’, Nelson’s guitar glimmers between Sylvian’s dappled chords. On ‘A Bird Of Prey Vanishes Into A Bright Blue Cloudless Sky’ Sylvian deploys sounds which, like nature, are both blissful and baleful – chiming, reverberating piano and guitar decays alongside delicate feedback howls and subdued amplifier hum. It’s eerily prescient of Tortoise. The fragmentary ‘Silver Moon Over Sleeping Steeples’ trapsa transient nocturnal ambience – via feedback, electronic bursts and BJ Cole’s pedal steel – within the still, lunar clarity of Sylvian’s guitar pattern. The very staticness of these tracks exemplifies this stricture to inhabit the moment. Pursuing this theme, ‘Upon This Earth’ features Robert Graves reciting a poem in which he has a vision of his future self, heartbroken at love lost, and becomes enraged with his lover about her assumed future actions. “Would it be tomorrow / Would it be next year?” The imprecation is, again, not to pervert the present with the prospect of an unpredictable future, as the 80s’ own trajectory would soon reveal, its possibilities not just dissipating but reversing, with atavistic rock and masculinity resurgent. There is, after all, only one certain future for all of us, the knowledge of which paradoxically makes the present more precious. Sylvian’s plangent, patient guitar and piano chords exemplify this presentism, while Fripp’s trumpet-toned guitar discovers ecstasy in the chords’ interstices, living at three times the pace of the ponderously perfect music. Sylvian called Gone To Earth a “very optimistic album”, and for Wordsworth, the nature-inspired ‘spots of time’ the album invokes were a healing experience to counter contemporary, alienated, automated existence. ‘The Healing Place’ features the voice of Lake District-based German artist Joseph Beuys, who, contradicting contemporary Thatcherite materialism, insists human creativity is the “true capital”. this is perfectly expressed by Sylvian’s gently pulsing guitar figure, and Nelson’s liquid guitar obligatos. Much as healing was needed amid the harshness of the 80s, Gone To Earth isn’t simply soothing – like new age music – because, for all its beauty, Gone To Earth has an unsettling, unmooring quality which, prefiguring the post rock of the unknowable future, derives from dismantling conventional practices and presumptions. Toby Manning’s Mixing Pop And Politics is published by Repeater. This article was amended on 3 September. Sylvian’s father was a plasterer, and the artwork for the album was by Russell Mills, not Vaughan Oliver.