Blemish (album)

Blemish
Studio album by David Sylvian
Released May 2003
Recorded February–March 2003
Studio Samadhi Sound Studio, New Hampshire
Genre Ambient, electronic, avant-garde
Length 43:41
Label Samadhisound
Producer David Sylvian
David Sylvian chronology
Camphor
(2002)		 Blemish
(2003)		 The Good Son vs. The Only Daughter (The Blemish Remixes)
(2005)

Blemish is the sixth solo album by David Sylvian. Following Sylvian's acquittal from Virgin Records and free from a record contract, he built a home studio, Samadhi Sound Studio, and recorded Blemish in early 2003. The album was inspired by, and documents, the disintegration of Sylvian's relationship with his wife, Ingrid Chavez,[1] marking a turning point in Sylvian's lyrics as they became more personal and open and less oblique. Wanting to find a new musical vocabulary for himself, he recorded the album in a relatively quick, six-week duration, improvising the eight songs on the album as he went. It features guest appearances from avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey, and Austrian guitarist and electronic musician Fennesz.

The album is experimental in its use of electronics and sound and marks a stark departure in Sylvian's musical career, featuring lesser occurrences of melody and an increasingly avant-garde, ambient direction. Sylvian felt the album functioned as a cartharsis, and recording the album helped him worked through difficult emotions. Blemish was originally released via the internet only, but when the album caught the attention of distributors, Sylvian set up Samadhi Sound records who released the album commercially in mid-2003. Despite alienating several fans, Blemish was a critical success, with critics complimenting its dark, personal tone. Sylvian toured in promotion of the album in autumn 2003, while a remix album entitled The Good Son vs. The Only Daughter, containing remixes of each of the songs from Blemish remixed by international producers, was released in February 2005.

Background and inspiration

Blemish follows David Sylvian's protracted legal wranglings with Virgin Records, from which Sylvian emerged "with head held high."[2] During his later days on Virgin Records, Sylvian was "a historical oddity on Virgin's account ledger rather than a sound business investment," seeing as Sylvian had a developed cult following with very limited commercial success.[3] Though Sylvian was compiling compilation albums of his work for the label, he found it creatively stifling, and "was dying to start over again" despite having no support from the label.[4] He felt the industry would not be supportive of the work he wanted to create, and upon leaving Virgin, become more self-sufficient, building a home studio in his New Hampshire home, Samadhi Sound Studio, over the course of a year.[4] Blemish, recorded without a contract, was the first of several ongoing projects from Sylvian after leaving Virgin.[2]


Blemish documents the disintegration of Sylvian's relationship with his wife, American singer Ingrid Chavez.[1] Sylvian used Blemish to channel his emotions "as a kind of creative catharsis," in the words of Flux magazine, "using his unhappy state of mind to delve deeper into some of the darker corners of his consciousness. Once you are down, you may as well keep drilling and see how far you can go and use the experience to exorcise some hidden demons."[5] Sylvian said that he had a "sense of trauma" that needed addressing and "wanted out," adding: "I used the emotions to punch further into the darker recesses of my own mind, to see how far I could go, to see what I would find there and if and how I could give it voice."[5] Sylvian told one interviewer that recording the album worked as a style of therapy:

"I didn’t know how to handle the emotional side of things. Once I got into the studio and closed the studio door, I felt a certain sense of safety, of liberty, to deal with the emotions, emotions that were primarily negative and all to do with my relationship with my wife. I wanted to delve far deeper into them than I would in daily life. How far can you go with that sort of feeling and where does it lead you? At the same time, I’m delving into something that one should be wary of delving into, because you don’t know how readily you will be able to re-surface from it at the end of the day. There was a sort of trepidation involved."[4]

Writing and recording

Self-produced and recorded over six weeks between February and March 2003 at Sylvian's home Samadhi Sound Studio,[6] there was an immediacy to the process of creating Blemish that allowed Sylvian to not overthink the lyrics, with Sylvian recalling: "Recording was very instantaneous. You put something improvised on the guitar down on the hard drive and immediately responded to that lyrically. Within a couple of hours, you have a complete set of lyrics and a melodic line. So I'd record that on the spot, which allows me to be less cautious about what's revealed."[1] He cited it as a "very exciting" process.[7] After the rapid recording of the album, it was left "in its natural state," which Sylvain says was opposed to "producing something over deliberated and refined." Flux magazine says this improvised nature gives the album "a sincere sense of urgency."[5] Chris Jones of the BBC felt Sylvian's "singular extemporised recording processed" freed him from "any previous sense of precious perfectionism."[2]

Sylvian improvised much of Blemish solo, with the exception of three tracks with free improvisation guitarist Derek Bailey and one with electronic musician and guitarist Christian Fennesz.[2] Unlike previous solo projects by Sylvian, where he would seek out the musicians he decided beforehand would be ideal for the project, Blemish marked a new approach.[8] While wanting to work with "someone exploring the latest in virtual filtering systems," he could not find a musician that "echoes [his] own aesthetic;" instead, during the recording of the album, Christian Fennesz contacted Sylvian regarding work he wanted Syvlian's involvement in "and so, in a roundabout way," Sylvian found who he "was looking for."[8] Sylvian approached Bailey at a concert the latter was performing with Milo Fine, and asked him to play on the album, although Bailey said a year later he remained unsure why he was pursued by Sylvian.[9]

Sylvian had decided he had taken the form of pop songs to their pinnacle with his previous album, Dead Bees on a Cake (1999), and when beginning work on Blemish, Sylvian had the desire "to eradicate the past and to find a whole new vocabulary for myself. At first, you are working from pure intuition. You are not sure where you are going; later, you begin to understand where the vocabulary is leading you and how to make it speak for you in a more profound way."[4] Two weeks in, Sylvian already had four of the songs completed "and could hear where it was going," which was when he contacted Bailey, and later Fennesz.[7] Besides the new direction of his sonic experimentation on the album, Sylvian's voice, which, while retaining his signature vibrato reminisicent of Bryan Ferry,[2] was closely mic'ed, and his harmonies are intimitately double tracked.[2] Sylvian reflected on the recording sessions: "Living through these emotions was very difficult, but finding a voice for them was so cathartic, and after that six-week period, I'd felt I'd worked through some very difficult emotions. I felt an enormous amount of release."[7]

Composition

Lyrics

Written about Sylvian's divorce with Ingric Chavez, his lyrics on this album are more honest and emotionally open, with less oblique subjects than on previous albums,[2][1] despite "numerous disfigurations of clear-cut linear thought."[10] Sylvian called the album a "portrait of a person in crisis,"[5] with Flux adding it shows "a person on the edge, in a moment of deep self revision, which could conclude in self correction or self destruction."[5] Sylvian had not worked with a "complex set of emotions" in his music that had not already reached a resolution before, and this time, situated in the middle of his breakup, "there was no resolution, there was no way of projecting that onto the material- an artificial sense that everything will be all right in the end, everything resolves, everything is okay. There was none of that with the material. It was in the heat of that complexity of emotions, of trying to face them head on and not look away."[7] Sylvian described the lyrics as exploring "everything I couldn't face head on in real life," and during the writing, delved deeper into emotions "that weren't profound to begin with," such as hate,[11] to see how far he could go.[7] Sylvian explained: "The level of hate I was experiencing wasn't that intense, but I wanted the challenge of finding out what that felt like. It was like automatic writing."[11]

Sylvian felt that the expression of anger had changed as he got older, a change represented by the relevant parts of Blemish: "[A]s you get older, that gets digested and surfaces in entirely different ways. There can be microbeats in the body of a composition that express anger so much more succinctly than a power chord, or an enraged vocal. I mean, 'The Only Daughter' is a piece of murderous feeling. It could be describing a murder that's already taken place."[1] Nonetheless, Dave Gavan of The Quietus considers Blemish to be "a surprisingly recrimination-free affair as divorce albums go," highlighting the lines "The trouble is / It's impossible to know / Who's right and who's wrong" from the title track. While Sylvian denies any pathological forgiveness to the "even-handedness" of the lyric, he nonetheless conceded that "it's possible to see through the anger and know that the degree of hurt you're experiencing is colouring everything. So there IS no wrong or right at the end of it. That's obviously the case. It takes two to make a relationship and there are different needs in different people. I couldn't take myself so seriously as to think that my viewpoint was the only one."[1] The singer felt that, while the divorce was the impetus of Blemish, "I think it's got more to offer than that."[7]

Music

Blemish is a fractured,[10] stark,[10] raw and intimate experimental album,[12] described by Sylvian as "an impromtu suite of songs for guitar, electronics and voice."[2] Sylvian performs alone for half of the album, accompanied by his electronic treatments and guitar, while on the remaining songs, he is joined on guitar by either Bailey and Fennesz,[10] whose influence on the album is keenly felt.[13] Fennesz helps bring a glitch influence,[13] while the jagged guitar work of Bailey, who, in the words of one reviewer, plucks his guitars "as if their strings had been replaced by rusty barbed wire abound,"[5] is said to complement the "rougher hewn material" on the album and Sylvian's mournful voice.[2][5] Bailey's guitar is low in the mix,[9] and appear on particularly minimalist tracks.[1] Composer and writer David Toop, writing for The Wire, felt an important sense of space on the record, sensing it makes ambient use of the room it was recorded in. He explained:

"The record begins in a room, so begins as a record. Not so many recordings begin in rooms at this moment in time; they are not records so much as accumulations of data. Distinctive fluctuations of a tube amp, vibrato set to medium speed and high intensity, introduce us into the room space and its atmosphere. No gates, filtering or intrusive EQ; just the box singing to itself. No picked notes; just percussive impact now and then. Another guitar, further distant in the room, erupts in arrested distortion, clipped. The amplifiers speak, or the body of the guitar; frame work rather than systemic framework. 'I fall outside of her,' David Sylvian sings. The less 'real' silence (the room before and after music happens) surrounding recorded music, the more interesting real silence becomes."[14]

The songs on the album eschew traditional melody, as well as any standard pop song structure, with Bailey's vocals instead being the sole line of melody and counterpoint on the album that holds the music together.[5][3] This is a departure from earlier Sylvian recordings, though Sylvian's signature upfront vibrato vocals remain.[12] Most of the songs are based around a single chord, though, according to reviewer Chris Jones, the material avoids becoming drone music due to the close attention "being repaid by a swarm of insectoid-glitches."[2] Biographer Martin Power writes that the music on the album is often little more than "an echoing guitar chord or spare keyboard flourish."[3] Meanwhile, Nick Southall of Stylus Magazine felt the melodies that do appear "are pulled apart so slowly and deliberately that you can see the joints and mechanisms of pop music, the purposeful analogue crackle becomes a dovetail for a small song made long, the dry, dawdling dramatics of his voice, at once ancient and modern, become a cog-wheel for a pop-opera soliloquy."[15] Chris Dahlen of Pitchfork also felt the album helped combine Sylvian's ambient music and song-based work.[7]

While clues concerning the album's troublesome background are apparent throughout Blemish, Dave Kellman of AllMusic said "it's all left to be pieced together and interpreted by the listener," with the messages being obscured by "meticulously organized sounds," like handclaps, rattling shopping trolleys and fragments of Bailey's delicate guitar work, as well as "numerous disfigurations of clear-cut linear thought."[10] While Sylvian's vocals are front and centre, with them being mixed extremely loudly until they took on a "confrotational" and "physical presence" when Sylvian played them back, Blemish is also the first album in which Sylvian distorted and chopped up his voice in a new, unnatural fashion.[7] Bailey himself said of the album a year later that he felt Sylvian "works it quite well compared to what I do. He doesn't sing the same as what I play. [...] My impression is that his voice is so distinctive all the pieces sound the same - a very special voice and special words, but my impression is they're all the same."[9]

Songs

"Blemish", which sets the tone of the album,[10] is a minimal and cerebral track hints at the album's core "emotional trouble with the opposite sex."[12][2] Throughout its near-14 minute duration, it features heavily echoed "noise fibers" reveberating and warping, swelling and receding "at a disquieting but sunken volume," while Sylvian, in his upfront vocals, sings lines like "I fall outside of her" and "Life's for the taking, so they say, take it away."[10] Tiny Mix Tapes felt the track highlights Sylvian's voice and also "emanates with the experimental style of both Fennesz and Bailey," despite neither of them appearing on the track.[13] During the pauses between words, Toop noted "brief moments of difference tones, a low frequency bulge in the fabric," and feeling the song to embody the "room" sound he feels the album contained, notes each sound on the song becomes close, "or very close: the voice, small blemishes of noise, amp vibrato, a drifting, wavering tone, tiny inferences of digital environments. Nothing is covered, removed, detached, enhanced. The voice is a naked man, seated in a room unfurnished except by tremulous, broken sound waves. The room is an ear."[14]

Derek Bailey (pictured in 1991).

One of three songs featuring Bailey on guitar, "The Good Son" has been said to seem "almost sarcastic in its approach to familial turmoil."[2] Bailey's guitar work comes in "prickles and sudden spasms" and, according to Kellman, "carry and push, rather than support, Sylvian's voice."[10] Feedback conversation "between another guitar and amp" in the back of the room can be heard.[14] Toop writes that it "begins in another room" than "Blemish," and found Sylvian's lyrics to be him working in his "physical discomfort zone:" "Stripped of soundbite and spin, smooth oiled reassurances, the dialogue makes no concessions to empathy yet unearths a communication."[14] On "The Only Daughter", Sylvian's vocals are chopped and snipped on lyrics such as "She was, she was, a friend of mine, do us a favour, your one and only warning, please be gone by morning," while the song's ambience is cut by "a faint crackle" and "distant tones floating in a misted landscape."[14] In his Sylvian biography, Power felt the song's subject concerns "a life poisoned and subsequently freed from the expecations of service."[3]

The oscillating "The Heart Knows Better" contains a relatively simplistic message of redemption.[2] It features a shuddering, struck open guitar chord and "vibrato turned to slow."[14] "She Is Not" is another song to feature Bailey, while, in the words of one reviewer, "Late Night Shopping" contains "mantra-like intonations," which, although initially appear to be at odds with "the mundanity of its subject matter ('We can make a list, or something...')," are in fact part of "the strange sense of agoraphobia that seeps in with the lines: 'We can take the car. No one will be watching...' It's both creepy and strangely mesmeric."[2] It features Sylvian's double-tracked voice, a three-note bassline and handclaps, while squeals and creaks can be heard in the song's "empty spaces."[14] According to Nick Southall of Stylus Magazine, the inclusion handclaps help squeeze the song "back into a recognisable shape."[15]

The final song to feature Bailey's guitar work, "How Little We Need to Be Happy" has conversational lyrics, while Bailey's guitar work is more "fulsome" and "less dry" according to Toop, shaping the words by "sniffing a harmonic implication out of blunted chords that shuffle in line, old men for a few steps, then shatter in mirror shards."[14] Beginning with a sustained tone,[14] the pivotal "A Fire in the Forest" closes the album in a "battered sense of optimism."[8][10] Featuring Fennesz's arrangement, the song consists of "twisted fragments and soft beams of nice," with a melody barely surfacing, while Sylavian sings of his "search to reach the sunshine that awaits him above grey skies."[10] Toop felt that "[t]his is a song of verses that become choruses,"[14] while Craig Roseberry of Billboard described the song as "tranquil, poetic and wistful."[12]

Release and promotion

Blemish was only initially available on the internet only, via Sylvian's personal website.[2] He decided to pursue this as he felt it would have been described within the music industry as "a difficult album" that would discourage distribution, believing creating a website, in which he would release Blemish without distribution, would still cater for those interested enough to find it.[4] After the initial reviews of the album were promising and generated lots of interest, however, distributors became interested in the album, and the idea of creating a personal record label which could release the album on a wider scale grew.[4] Eventually, Sylvian's newly established Samadhi Sound record label released Blemish worldwide on 24 June 2003.[16] The album artwork, designed by Yuka Fujii with artwork from Atsushi Fukui,[6] features an illustration in the inner sleeve of Sylvian pushing a shopping cart through a forest covered in slow.[15]

In the autumn of 2003, Sylvian launched the A Fire in the Forest tour in promotion of Blemish, playing in the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands with a band line-up of Steve Jansen and Masatksu Takagi, using only keyboards, laptop computers and a single guitar.[3] While recreating the songs on the album with great care and "little intensity," some critics were distressed by some of the performances, including Nick Hasted of The Independent, who felt the band's September performance at London's Royal Festival Hall was marked by "a sense of almost catatonically muted distress."[3]

On 7 September 2005, Samadhi Sound released The Good Son Vs. The Only Daughter - The Blemish Remixes, a remix album of each of the songs on the album remixed by different producers from around the world, a decision made by Sylvian who wanted the international selection of remixers to reflect Samadhi Sound's "global" image.[7] Sylvian was happy with the remix album, saying that unlike other albums of the type, which he found to only be moderately successful in that remixers would often prefer to work on their own material rather than be paid to remix someone else's work, The Blemishes Remixes gave him and the label an opportunity to build up relationships with musicians such as Burnt Friedman and Akira Rabelais that could ultimately lead the path towards future collaborations.[4] He felt the remix album helped explore the "emotional core or aspects" of the original songs on Blemish and place them into new contexts in order to see "how they resonated."[17]

Reception and legacy

Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
SourceRating
Metacritic76/100[18]
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic[10]
Magnet7/10[18]
Mojo7/10[18]
Stylus MagazineC[15]
Tiny Mix Tapes[13]
Uncut[19]

Blemish was released to generally favourable reviews from music critics, many heralding Sylvian's unexpected new direction, and finding it to be dark in tone.[17] At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 76, which indicates "generally positive reviews," based on 6 reviews.[18] Uncut rated the album four stars out of five, saying the "unexpected" album was Sylvian's best work since Brilliant Trees (1984) and "an extremely moving and potentially radical record," and calling the Derek Bailey collaborations "astonishing" and "brilliant."[19] Magnet wrote: "Faced with conventional, if not threadbare, tunes, Sylvian becomes grand in comparison, humming and mumbling through the subtlest opera of tweaked, quaking noises."[18] Mojo made note that the album was "much sparser and looser than we are used to from David Sylvian."[18] Nick Southall of Stylus Magazine gave Blemish a score of "C" and wrote that "Blemish is not sadness or happiness; it is strange observation and relapse,"[15] while Under the Radar were less receptive, rating it two stars out of five and saying "[h]is heart-on-a-sleeve earnest emotionalism falls short of being impressive."[18]

Rating the album four and a half stars out of five, Andy Kellman of AllMusic called Blemish a "work of beautiful, desolate fragility," and "an unforeseen detour taken by David Sylvian, who has made eight of his most bare, anguished, and intense songs, all of which are neither pleasant nor the least bit settling."[10] David Toop also praised the album's usage of room space in The Wire.[14] Chris Jones of the BBC was favourable, saying "Sylvian's forged a work that startles with its originality."[2] Tiny Mix Tapes felt "[i]t is here that the focus is more congruent with what we’ve come to appreciate about Sylvian’s previous work," while being unsavory towards the moments when the album "is allowed to wonder."[13] Craig Rosberry of Billboard felt that "although several entries tread a thin line between self-analysis and self-indlugence, the standouts brilliantly convey the album's pervasive themes of fractured relationships, emotional turmoil, redemption, truth and spiritual enlightenment."[12]

The Wire later ranked the album at number 2 in their list of the 50 best albums of 2003.[20] Sylvian felt the lack of lyrical conceit on Blemish was key to its success, calling it his most "unguarded" work, "minimal in design."[3] Nonetheless, many fans of David Sylvian felt puzzled by Blemish. Sylvian told one reviewer that some fans shared Sylvian's cathartic experience of the album when listening to it, whereas others found it to be "my most inaccessible of recordings. Some seriously disliked it."[17] He reflected that "Blemish is an album that people have to work at. That people are prepared to do just that, to spend some time getting to grips with it – well, that’s an act of true generosity on their part."[4] While comparing the album to other similarly-themed albums like Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks (1975) and Neil Young's Tonight's the Night (1973), Flux Magazine reflected that the album was "innovative" and "pioneered a sound."[5] Jess Harvell of Pitchfork reflected upon Blemish as a "small masterpiece,"[21] while Chris Dahlen of the same website later said it "may be the most powerful album he's ever recorded, the rare case where an artist uses his maturity to show more pain than he had in his youth."[7]

Track listing

All tracks written by David Sylvian, except as noted.

No.TitleLength
1."Blemish"13:42
2."The Good Son" (Derek Bailey, Sylvian)5:25
3."The Only Daughter"5:28
4."The Heart Knows Better"7:51
5."She Is Not" (Bailey, Sylvian)0:45
6."Late Night Shopping"2:54
7."How Little We Need to Be Happy" (Bailey, Sylvian)3:22
8."A Fire in the Forest" (Sylvian, Christian Fennesz)4:14
Total length:43:41
Vinyl and Japanese CD bonus track
No.TitleLength
9."Trauma"5:42
Total length:49:23

Personnel

  • David Sylvian – vocals, producer, engineer, mixing
  • Derek Bailey – guitar
  • Christian Fennesz – arranger, electronics
  • Toby Hrycek-Robinson – engineer
  • Yuka Fujii – art direction, design
  • Atsushi Fukui – artwork, cover art

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "David Sylvian Interview: From Japan To Manafon, The Man Revealed", The Quietus, 12 October 2009
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Jones, Chris (2003). "David Sylvian Blemish Review". BBC. Retrieved 3 September 2017.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Power, Martin (13 September 2004). David Sylvian: The Last Romantic (3rd ed.). United Kingdom: Omnibus Press. ISBN 1844495876. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Cowley, Jason (March 2005). "Q & A WITH JASON COWLEY". David Sylvian. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "David Sylvian's new release – Sleepwalkers". Flux Magazine. 9 January 2011. Retrieved 4 September 2017.
  6. 1 2 Blemish (liner). David Sylvian. Samadhi Sound. 2003.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Dahlen, Chris (12 December 2005). "Interview: David Sylvian". DavidSylvian.
  8. 1 2 3 Clarke, Jude (5 March 2012). "Interview: David Sylvian". Music OMH. Retrieved 4 September 2017.
  9. 1 2 3 Watson, Ben (24 May 2004). Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation. London: Verso Books. pp. 366–367. ISBN 1844670031. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Blemish at AllMusic
  11. 1 2 Coleman, Nick (27 September 2003). "David Sylvian: the Q interview". The Independent. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 Roseberry, Craig (20 September 2003). "Music Billboard Picks". 115 (38): 46. Retrieved 4 September 2017.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 Amneziak, Amneziak (2003). "David Sylvian Blemish". Tiny Mix Tapes. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  14. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Toop, David. "THE WIRE - DAVID SYLVIAN "BLEMISH"". Samadhi Sound. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  15. 1 2 3 4 5 Southall, Nick (1 September 2003). "David Sylvian - Blemish - Review - Stylus Magazine". Stylus Magazine. Archived from the original on 2 November 2007. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  16. ↑ Morris, Chris (21 June 2003). "The Indies". Billboard. 115 (25): 42. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  17. 1 2 3 "18 QUICK QUESTIONS TO DAVID SYLVIAN". David Sylvian. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  18. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Blemish by David Sylvian". Retrieved 19 September 2016.
  19. 1 2 "David Sylvian - Blemish". Uncut. 1 September 2003. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  20. ↑ "2003 Rewind". The Wire. December 2007. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  21. ↑ Harvell, Jess (29 September 2009). "David Sylvian: Manafon Album Review". Pitchfork. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
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