Marking its 35th anniversary today is the debut collaborative work between former CAN member, Holger Czukay, and former Japan front-man, David Sylvian, with Plight & Premonition being released on March 21st, 1988. At a time when ambient music was still finding its audience, the album became a critical foundation stone for the genre as it would develop throughout the coming decade.
The genesis of this album came about quite by chance. David had originally traveled to Germany to record a vocal part for a solo album Holger was working on at the time. However, that plan became sidelined and never actually materialized as the duo found themselves distracted by other indulgences which manifested without any real intent. The first night David was in town, after going out for dinner, they returned to Inner Space studio and Sylvian began to wander about the studio, improvising absentmindedly on various instruments. Holger, ever the musical opportunist, had a habit of recording everything that happened in there. David wasn’t even aware that he was being recorded most of the time and Holger would have him move on to something else whenever it seemed like he was beginning to become self-conscious of his performing process. Over the course of the next couple of nights, they compiled enough raw material for Holger to then cobble together two side long instrumental compositions. By the time they were finished recording, it was time for David to head home and there was no time left to record the originally intended vocal track.
The recording sessions were held late in 1986 and the duo completed final mixing by February of 1987, but the album wasn’t released until March of 1988. Virgin Records ended up issuing it on their low-budget subsidiary, Venture Records. A companion album, Flux + Mutability, was released in 1989, though the artists were less enthusiastic over the results on that album than for the first. The spontaneous manifestation which made the initial project so magical simply wasn’t present for the second album and they found themselves struggling to recreate the lack of self-consciousness that gave the first album its organic charm. The two albums were eventually re-issued as a combined set with a slightly different mix by Sylvian for Plight & Premonition. I’ve always ranked it as one of my all-time favorite ambient albums. I think it sets a standard for the genre which would give it a timeless quality. There’s nothing about it that betrays any sense of the passage of time or placement within any era.
