Released on September 13th, 1986, David Sylvian’s third solo album, Gone to Earth, is celebrating its 35th anniversary today.
Issued
as a double album, it included a set of vocal songs on the first LP
paired with a set of instrumental pieces on the second. Virgin records,
at the time of the album’s production, weren’t interested in Sylvian’s
instrumental works, but they agreed to release them provided that David
funded their production himself. As such, the instrumental music was
recorded during studio off-times, before or after the main sessions were
done and paid for out of pocket by David. The album features
significant contributions from both Robert Fripp and Bill Nelson as well
as appearances from former Japan band mates, brother Steve Jansen &
Richard Barbieri. The vocal album represents a continuation of the
styles and themes begun with Brilliant Trees in 1984.
Overall,
Sylvian wasn’t particularly focused during the recording of this album,
with the initial phase being something of a struggle to find a way to
pull together all the work he’d been doing. He was in a process of
starting a number of different projects without a clear intention of
where it was all going to end up. Eventually, he got to the point where
he was able to coral all the disparate threads he’d initiated into
something reasonably coherent. This is what necessitated the conception
of a double album so that he could find a home for the instrumental
works he’d become quite enamored with. Initial recordings were begun at
Eel Pie Studios in Oxfordshire throughout 1985 and the album was
completed during the first half of 1986 at The Manor in London.
Despite
its somewhat unfocused genesis, the album garnered critical praise in
the UK press upon its release with Sounds' Chris Roberts saying: “It's
the perfect realization of artist converting image to mood, subverting
fantasy to super-reality. Delicate, but with the strength of legions,
it's an '80s masterpiece and conceivably his finest approximation of
distilled beauty ever... [Gone to Earth] is almost as breathtaking as it
is life giving." Personally, I find it has held up exceedingly well
over the years, unlike a lot of ‘80s music, which suffers from
production techniques and styles which all-too-often leave their stamp
in the form of over-compressed drums and plastic sounding mastering.
Gone to Earth escapes the bonds of its era and still sounds contemporary
today.
