Questa è la trascrizione dell'intervista trasmessa il 24 Aprile 1999 su BBC Radio 3.

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David Sylvian has recently released a new solo album - his first solo style project since Secrets Of The Beehive in 1987. We've spoken to Sylvian before on Mixing It around the time he collaborated on the Rain Tree Crow album in 1992. So this time we thought we'd give the guy a break and let him talk to somebody else - a fellow musician. We asked Clive Bell to interrogate David Sylvian on the subject of the arrestingly titled Dead Bees On A Cake.

CB: Well, congratulations on the new album. This is your first album since 1987's Secrets Of The Beehive and I understand you had a certain amount of struggle getting this going.
DS: Well, the writing came relatively easy and was written over a very short period of time. It was the recording process that was riddled with obstacles, of one kind or another, that I had to overcome. I guess to lay it out I started recording in New York with Ryuichi as co-producer on the project...

CB: Ryuichi Sakamoto?
DS: Yeah... and after about three weeks work we really only had about four days work down. Which is very unusual for Ryuichi and I - we work very well together - but the co-production thing wasn't working so I went on to do another week in New York with another series of musicians including [Marc] Ribot, Chris Minh Doky and a few others, but, again, I still felt that the majority of the sessions weren't giving me what I was looking for. So I moved onto Real World setting up a whole new set of sessions, with a new group of musicians, and again, after about a month's work, I walked away feeling that the basis of the album still wasn't there. Again I had beautiful contributions from Kenny Wheeler, Talvin Singh and a number of other people but the basis wasn't there for me. I returned to Minneapolis where I had my own studio. Everything had been recorded onto the hard drive. This gave me great flexibility when editing and resampling the material - which I spent a great deal of time doing, just trying to achieve what had eluded me in the studio environment.

CB: Was there a sound in your head that you were aiming at or was it just dissatisfaction?
DS. It was more to do with performances and arrangements of parts, and getting the sympathetic performances, getting the emotional content just so. As I said, all the compositions were right there from the beginning so I knew what I was looking for from each piece. Each musician didn't get given a whole lot of room to manoeuvre within the compositions themselves.
Even on a couple of occasions when I worked with some wonderfully proficient musicians that did actually make more than decent contributions I felt that the emotional power had eluded the performance somehow, or hadn't pinned it down. So although I'm a less than proficient player I ended up replacing their performances with my own.

CB: The emotional content of some of the songs seems to be a very positive thing about finding personal joy or contentment and yet the album as a whole is often quite dark
DS: Yeah. I go along with Tarkovsky when he said that you sometimes have to focus on the shadow to emphasise the light - that's an approach I've taken throughout my work.

CB: One of the things I really like about the album is that you've got this gritty, often bluesy sound which is quite shadowy, but then over the top you're singing about "collapsing into joy" and lines like this...
DS: Right.

CB: ...so you get a really nice tension there that you've got a dark context for a happy result.
DS: Well I don't think we ever experience one emotion in a pure sense, its mirror opposite is always present, and there is a whole complexity of emotions surrounding it, and the song to work well has to embrace all of that. You can't anticipate what frame of mind a listener is going to be in when they approach a piece of music, so it has to embrace them regardless, so they can open to the work and ultimately the work can then work on them, do its thing.

CB: This is the first time you've completely produced your own solo work and you seem to have gone for a more gritty or earthy production style. Some of the tracks Midnight Sun and Godman - these are quite rough. And of course you've got Marc Ribot who worked a lot with Tom Waits and contributed a lot to his very gritty sound...
DS: That's right.

CB: ...Were you listening to Tom Waits production style?
DS: I wasn't listening to any particular artist or body of work during the making of the album. In fact I'd moved to Minneapolis and it was something of a retreat from all of that for me. I felt I had this cultural overload living in London and moving to Minneapolis sort of cleansed the system to some degree. I wasn't listening to a whole load of music. People have referred to the influence of Miles Davis' electric period in All Of My Mother's Names and it's an obvious reference but again I hadn't listened to that body of music for a number of years. What I think happened was that there was a period of digesting all of these influences over a period of time until it surfaced in my work quite naturally, and unselfconsciously.

CB: Do you ever see it in terms of your own work, and maybe Ryuichi Sakamoto's work too, being quite clean, and that you need other people to come in and dirty it up a bit for you. Does it ever strike you that way?
DS: Yes, actually it does. Working with Robert Fripp had something of that element to it. Finding myself in an environment of really Robert's making and trying to respond well to that provocation.

CB: When you get someone like Kenny Wheeler in the studio and he's playing over your track there's a lot of space there - there's a kind of transparent feel that he leaves a lot of space. How long does it take you with him to reach that kind of transparency?
DS: I think with Kenny you have to work quite quickly. He's liable to get bored if you keep retreading the same ground. So I'll take a number of performances from him and then I'll edit that performance - if I haven't got something in a complete take I'll edit that performance into a form that pleases me. That is often the case. I tend to "comp" most people's work, including my own. It happens. Ribot's solo on the album are complete performances that he gave me. Frisell's solo on Heartbeat [?] is a complete solo but most of the time I'm "comping" from a series of solos.

CB: Marc Ribot is making a big contribution to the feel of the album right from the start - that wah-wah guitar at the top of the album, I guess that's him.
DS: That's Ribot. The wonderful thing about Ribot is that he is a wonderful listener as well as an exceptional guitarist. I only had one afternoon with him in New York very early on in the recording of the album, and he gave me so much to work with within that afternoon, you know.

CB: All his stuff was done in one afternoon?
DS: Yeah.

CB: That's unbelievable.
DS: Yeah.

CB: I was very struck by Alphabet Angel. You're sort of painting in the background with sounds and washes. It seems a track like that links directly back to Ghosts, the... err... Japan song... And feels very personal to you. Is that right?
DS: Absolutely, yeah. The song is about my relationship to my first daughter, Ameera. I compare it to Laughter And Forgetting from the Gone To Earth album. Structurally it's very similar. But yeah, obviously, the influences go back to a piece like Ghosts. What I'm doing with that discolouration, if you like, in lending these strange harmonics to the piece, is to create a greater emotional depth to the piece. If you take away those elements the piece becomes quite gentle, quite sweet.

CB: It seems that the new album relates quite directly to the first one: Brilliant Trees - in that you've got a set of collaborators who are all making a big contribution, you've got a lot of songs there...
DS: I also relate this album back to Brilliant Trees, in some way, and I think that's because with the ending of the band Japan there came a point where I'd reached some kind of obstacle and a moment of breakthrough was about to come. You know, I'd written Ghosts and I saw the potential there and there seemed to be this leap in consciousness - which allowed Brilliant Trees to come to life - and new ideas forming, which was glorious. And a similar situation took place prior to writing and recording this album.

CB: There are also some Indian elements on the new album. The song Krishna Blue is a very multi-layered track. Could you talk a bit about how you built that up?
DS: I think the first contribution was Ryuichi who played a sample...

CB: Was it a flute sample?
DS: ...Yes...

CB: That's very nice that.
DS: ...Yes. And he needed to supplement that at some point, which came later in recording. I'd recorded a tabla player in New York but again the feeling of the track didn't come together for me, so I needed to replace that tabla track when I got to Real World. So Talvin [Singh] came in, performed on the track. He suggested Deepak Ram as a contributor. So I got that while I was at Real World. Actually I resampled Talvin's performance and rearranged the part slightly when I got back to Minneapolis. There was a contribution from Ingrid [Chavez], my wife, as vocalist and at a later stage I recorded Bill Frisell in Seattle. So it was a slow process of building up this picture, of creating a diversity, a density, of layers if you like.

CB: It's a rich, creamy sort of track now.
DS: Yes. There's a sensuality about it which I like.

CB: You've got the Indian teacher and singer Shree Maa on Praise, which is almost the last track.
DS: Yes, well, Shree Maa's a rather remarkable woman. She was born into a wealthy family of renown in India. At a young age she moved away from the family, walked into the forest, which is obviously quite a dangerous thing for a young girl to do, but felt she was in God's embrace and devoted her life to God. She felt protected. In '97 she travelled across America for the first time and she came to stay with us for about a week, bringing about 13 people with her, transforming our home certainly into a place of worship for that period of time. It was a beautiful experience - very intense and at the end of each morning's pujah [?? sorry] she would sing this song of praise to the three aspects of the divine mother. And her voice used to resonate throughout the house. It was a beautiful sound - very, very moving, very touching - and she graciously allowed us to record her and chose this piece herself to perform. And ultimately I felt it was OK to incorporate it into the album. To be able to sing with that purity, that pure devotion that is so present and palpable in her voice: in some way she represented the goal.