I saw David Sylvian for the first time at Sheffield City Hall in, I think, the first half on 1988. There was something that I 'got' about him that evening, and I wish I'd written it down, because now it's like a dream: the more I try to think about it, the further it disappears into thin air. It was something to do with how the music was on the edge of being ambient, but it wasn't ambient; it was just that what was 'figure' and what was 'ground' in the music kept shifting. You couldn't tell whether the shift was in the music or just the way your mind was shifting (like Zeno said, "Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving").
Sylvian himself achieved a remarkable bit of self-effacement. From being one of the most recognisable male faces, his presence became so ego-less that, at that City Hall concert, I couldn't tell which one was him until he started to sing.
This album was the first of two I got in 1999 as a pre-recorded mini-disc, a format that I abandoned, along with everyone else, very quickly. As a consequence I mainly listened to it on my portable mini-disc player while walking round Sheffield, which, hearing it now in my living room, is probably the least well-suited well to this album. Its pleasures and rewards are in its details, which you miss when you're crossing the road looking out for traffic.
Like Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian chooses his collaborators impeccably. Unlike Peter Gabriel, I think he gets the best out of them, too, without either imposing his approach on them or just pasting their signature sounds into his songs. I think he will end up at the end of this century a cult gnostic figure like the cult gnostic figures he himself seems to reference (I don't know if he's one of those Gurdjieff followers, but that's the kind of person I have in mind).
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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