David Sylvian
Approaching Silence


Released 0000 on Virgin
Reviewed by XK, 24/05/2001ce


Approaching Silence by David Sylvian.

An emotional poetic review...

Track 1. The Beekeepers Apprentice ( 32 min 52 sec)

Put this baby on - Walk write rite.

Hardly there this piece / peace.

Puts me directly into a mediative and reflective trance-like state that frames the mind. It twinkles like the ideas it inspires and passes, like afternoon September sunlight rays that break through giant cracks in dark and gathering clouds - Ethereal natural sky crowds - filled with changing strangers faces: Gone Gods lost - swollowed up by time and fickle man mind, till ´ the One´ fused all and hid its face, but said was in our hearts.

Clouds: massive and in silent pain move with electric blue and shocking wound - behind and high above its dense gray low skin ceiling - Pregnant heavy in pre-strom labor - filled with waiting rain.

Searching golden streams from the heavens themselves, that touch the Earth - feel for the curve of her - Our spinning Mamma - illuminating shapes and isolated forms: Oceans of emerald rushing field tides - Rolling backwards hills - patchwork sown, with hedgerow edge - Remote and scattered sleeping villages and farms - divided by the curling path of trees, once forests long ago - filled with Wolf and mighty Bear - Magic spells with silent Heathen stares.

I am lost in deep Dorset countryside heart and glide on highest hilltop side - ´Pilsdon Pen´ Above the map of county barrier - tourist sign posts pointing south and twisting narrow pot hole roads and iron gates - ´No entry´. I am where the distant horizon line is a shimmering sea of crystal Sapphire blue - Beautiful. With a detailed view for miles out in all directions on ancient hill fort - Home.

Mysterious magical mushroom circles on dewy grass - yellow nipple headed sparkling tips which I bend and pick then eat and taste the soil. Running dog ahead of me cuts a path through grass with black flag ears blowing back - Follows herd of teenage cattle till they stop and stand and watch us both in a long and curious black and white - hundred horned surrounding line - lifting hoof and belching mist - bright wide and beautiful eyed - wet nosed and wondering - as though waiting for my words. Like a priest or poet I am up here, and stand before them then spill and clear my cluttered antenna tuning tropical fruitcake mind in strange and abstract rhymes - prophetic - problematic - loose lonesome long musings murmured - to twitching pointed ears. Sometimes even sentences fall corrupted and obscene and bellow from my soul, like I was one of them - secret words always - the feelings plain as the eye can´t see.

Memories turn - twist in a trance - a series of internal images.

It´s raining, or it has been and will be soon again - A thousand pinpricks of tiny shining lights are reflected back in every blackberry in the bush - Cobwebs reach between them all - golden fragile strands - holding precarious in my freshly peeled pupil magic mushroom eyes, the whole world together.

My mind threads its way - Winding whistling wind in curling folds of ears - then breaks and drifts away - Following a Rooks pitch path of scattered flight - like small black kite on the end of invisible line - caught and held in breeze. Shadow cast on the sky ceiling, it lifts then dives on twisted wings and blown in aimless empty space direction in ark like arch that´s serpentine - Not a single detail seen in this living isolated day darkness - like a floating fluctuating hole, more real than surrounding sky of shifting darkening clouds. Only in its silhouette can it seemed to be, until eventually she blurs with the view on a low wing of loose feathers and lands in the ancient arms of a crisp burgundy leaf Oak tree branch heights far below, to join its kin with rattling death call - Silence.

Track 2. Epiphany ( 2 min 24 sec)

This is a short piece. The break and shift in gear - opens doors and release´s fears - pause. Words here scattered - remote - out of range - some distinct - others from unknown places - foreign faces - crying voices - distant woman sobbing for an eternity - bereaved. Church bells ring from crumbling empty towers of silence - poison font water - Calling dogs and passing trains... All ships drift into the night and a blinding moonless darkness - laughing.

Track 3. Approaching silence. ( 38 min 17 sec)

The most beautiful and dramatic.

I am away by now and this track is in total sync with the typing of words and sentences and the flood and flow of imagery within me - swelling with its phrasings. It surges and wells like inside waves breaking on these digital beaches, but not of water - of pure spirit.

One long endless chord that builds slowly and steady into massive creative calls of the deeply personal - Past spills itself on the screen from long lost dreams - unlocking rusted locks with brand new silver shining keys in long dimly lit corridors that stretch in both directions to pin pricks of perspective in the distance. Far off radio tunes itself in search of a voice - Redemption through impulse finds it´s way up and out to the surface, then drowns me.

What comes from me through this (music?) - Seen sometimes in the arrival of silent mails such as this - and other poetry or falling petals read - past and still to come.

This though, slidess... Hiss of pebbles - gone.


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