Blemish (album)

Blemish follows David Sylvian's protracted legal wranglings with Virgin Records, which ended when Sylvian was released from his contract.[1] During his later days on the label, Sylvian was seen as "a historical oddity" on their roster as opposed to "a sound business investment," seeing as he had a developed cult following but had very limited commercial success.[2] Although the musician was compiling compilation albums of his work for Virgin, he found it a creatively stifling process, but despite wishing to "start over again" had no support from the label.[3] He felt the industry would not be supportive of the work he wanted to create, and upon leaving Virgin, become more self-sufficient, building a home studio in his New Hampshire home, Samadhi Sound Studio, over the course of a year.[3] Blemish, recorded without a contract, became the first of several ongoing projects from Sylvian after leaving the label.[1]

Blemish documents the disintegration of Sylvian's relationship with his wife, American singer Ingrid Chavez.[4] Sylvian used Blemish to channel his emotions "as a kind of creative catharsis," in the words of Flux magazine, using his unhappiness to "delve deeper into some of the darker corners of his consciousness. Once you are down, you may as well keep drilling and see how far you can go and use the experience to exorcise some hidden demons."[5] Sylvian said that he had a "sense of trauma" that needed addressing and "wanted out," adding: "I used the emotions to punch further into the darker recesses of my own mind, to see how far I could go, to see what I would find there and if and how I could give it voice."[5] Sylvian explained to how the album worked as a style of therapy:

"I didn’t know how to handle the emotional side of things. Once I got into the studio and closed the studio door, I felt a certain sense of safety, of liberty, to deal with the emotions, emotions that were primarily negative and all to do with my relationship with my wife. I wanted to delve far deeper into them than I would in daily life. How far can you go with that sort of feeling and where does it lead you? At the same time, I’m delving into something that one should be wary of delving into, because you don’t know how readily you will be able to re-surface from it at the end of the day. There was a sort of trepidation involved."[3]

"It was very cathartic. It's an odd one to talk about, because obviously I was going through a break up of a marriage and that was very painful, but as I got into the studio and shut the door I would allow myself into the darkest recesses of my heart and my mind to uncover what was there. And I would feel that to be quite dangerous in life – it's not something I would encourage – but in the creative process it seems incredibly liberating to be able to access these more negative darker emotions and acknowledge them. So I worked on the album daily for I think it was six weeks, and each day I was more or less writing a track, and I'd flesh it out over time, and at the end of each day I'd listen back to what I'd done and feel elated by what I heard, which was an odd way to relate to the content of the material because of its nature in essence. But I felt like, Gosh, this doesn't sound like anything I've ever done before, or anything I'd heard before, so it felt very exciting.

So once I'd left that wonderful cocoon in which one could explore these emotions, I entered back into the real world of those emotions, and it was still an extremely difficult time, but as I think it was Robert Lowell said, ugly emotions produce beautiful poetry sometimes, and that's definitely true of Blemish."[6]

Blemish was produced by Sylvian and recorded over six weeks between February and March 2003 at his Samadhi Sound Studio.[7] There was an immediacy to creating the album that allowed the singer to not overthink the lyrics; he described the recording as very instantaneous: "You put something improvised on the guitar down on the hard drive and immediately responded to that lyrically. Within a couple of hours, you have a complete set of lyrics and a melodic line. So I'd record that on the spot, which allows me to be less cautious about what's revealed."[4] After the rapid recording of the record, it was left in its "natural state," which Sylvian says was opposed to "producing something over deliberated and refined." Flux magazine says this improvised nature gives the album "a sincere sense of urgency."[5] Reviwer Chris Jones felt Sylvian's "singular extemporised recording processed" freed him from "any previous sense of precious perfectionism."[1]

Christian Fennesz was one of Sylvian's collaborators on Blemish.

Sylvian improvised much of Blemish alone, with the exception of three tracks with free improvisation guitarist Derek Bailey and one with electronic musician Christian Fennesz,[1] who joined the recording sessions two weeks after it began, by which point Sylvian had already completed four songs.[8] He wished to work with a musician who was exploring modern virtual filtering systems, but was unable to find someone that fit his aesthetic; instead, during the recording of the album, Fennesz contacted Sylvian regarding work he wanted his involvement in, "and so, in a roundabout way," Sylvian found an ideal collaborator for the record.[9] This was unlike Sylvian's earlier previous solo projects, where he would seek out the musicians he decided beforehand would be ideal.[9] Meanwhile, he approached Bailey for the album at a joint concert he was playing with Milo Fine; although Bailey agreed, he was unsure why Sylvian pursued him.[10]

Sylvian had decided he had taken the form of pop songs to their pinnacle with his previous album, Dead Bees on a Cake (1999), and when beginning work on Blemish, he had the desire "to eradicate the past and to find a whole new vocabulary for myself. At first, you are working from pure intuition. You are not sure where you are going; later, you begin to understand where the vocabulary is leading you and how to make it speak for you in a more profound way."[3] In addition to the new sonic experimentation on the album, Sylvian's voice, while retaining his signature vibrato reminiscent of Bryan Ferry,[1] was closely microphoned, and his harmonies were intimately double tracked.[1] Sylvian reflected on the recording sessions: "Living through these emotions was very difficult, but finding a voice for them was so cathartic, and after that six-week period, I'd felt I'd worked through some very difficult emotions. I felt an enormous amount of release."[8]

Blemish was only initially available on the internet, via Sylvian's personal website.[1] He made the decision believing the album would have been described within the music industry as "a difficult album" that would discourage distribution, and felt creating a website that could release Blemish without outsider distribution would still cater for those interested enough to find it.[3] However, after the promising initial reviews of the album generated much interest, distributors became interested in Blemish and Sylvian's idea of creating a personal record label which could release the album on a wider scale grew.[3] Eventually, his newly established Samadhi Sound record label released Blemish worldwide on 24 June 2003.[17] The album artwork, designed by Yuka Fujii with artwork from Atsushi Fukui,[7] features an illustration in the inner sleeve of Sylvian pushing a shopping cart through a forest covered in snow.[16]

In late 2003, Sylvian embarked on the A Fire in the Forest tour in promotion of Blemish, playing in the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands with a band line-up of Steve Jansen and Masatksu Takagi, using only keyboards, laptop computers and a single guitar.[2] While recreating the album's songs with great care and "little intensity," some critics were distressed by some of the performances, including Nick Hasted of The Independent, who felt the band's September performance at London's Royal Festival Hall was marked by "a sense of almost catatonically muted distress."[2]

On 7 September 2005, Samadhi Sound released The Good Son Vs. The Only Daughter - The Blemish Remixes, a remix album of each of the songs from Blemish remixed by different producers of different nationalities, a decision made by Sylvian who wanted the international selection of remixers to reflect Samadhi Sound's "global" image.[8] He was happy with the remix album, saying that unlike other albums of the type, which he found to only be moderately successful in that remixers would often prefer to work on their own material rather than be paid to remix someone else's work, The Blemishes Remixes gave him and the label an opportunity to build up relationships with musicians such as Burnt Friedman and Akira Rabelais that could ultimately lead the path towards future collaborations.[3] He also felt the remix album helped explore the "emotional core or aspects" of the original songs on Blemish and place them into new contexts in order to see "how they resonated."[18]

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	76/100[19]
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[11]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[20]
Magnet	7/10[19]
Mojo	7/10[19]
Stylus Magazine	C[16]
Tiny Mix Tapes	[14]
Uncut	[21]

Blemish was released to favourable reviews from music critics, many heralding Sylvian's unexpected, darker new direction.[18] At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 76, which indicates "generally positive reviews," based on six reviews.[19] Uncut hailed the "unexpected" album as "an extremely moving and potentially radical record," calling the Derek Bailey collaborations "astonishing" and "brilliant," and named it Sylvian's best work since Brilliant Trees (1984).[21] Magnet wrote how Sylvian became grander when "[f]aced with conventional, if not threadbare, tunes," describing Blemish as "the subtlest opera of tweaked, quaking noises."[19] Mojo described the album was "much sparser and looser than we are used to from David Sylvian."[19] Nick Southall of Stylus Magazine described Blemish is neither a sad or happy album but a "strange observation and relapse."[16] Under the Radar were less receptive, saying Sylvian's "heart-on-a-sleeve earnest emotionalism falls short of being impressive."[19]

Andy Kellman of AllMusic called Blemish a "work of beautiful, desolate fragility," and "an unforeseen detour taken by David Sylvian, who has made eight of his most bare, anguished, and intense songs, all of which are neither pleasant nor the least bit settling."[11] In The Wire, David Toop praised the production's inventive use of ambient room space.[15] Chris Jones of the BBC said the album "startles with its originality,"[1] while Tiny Mix Tapes said the record has a more congruent focus than Sylvian's earlier music, while being unsavoury towards the moments when the album "is allowed to wonder."[14] Craig Rosberry of Billboard felt that "although several entries tread a thin line between self-analysis and self-indulgence, the standouts brilliantly convey the album's pervasive themes of fractured relationships, emotional turmoil, redemption, truth and spiritual enlightenment."[13]

The Wire ranked the album at number 2 in their list of the 50 best albums of 2003.[22] Sylvian felt the lack of lyrical conceit on Blemish was key to its success, calling it his most "unguarded" work, "minimal in design."[2] Nonetheless, many of his fans felt puzzled by Blemish; Sylvian explained how he felt some fans shared his cathartic experience of the album when listening to it, whereas others found it to be "my most inaccessible of recordings. Some seriously disliked it."[18] He reflected that "Blemish is an album that people have to work at. That people are prepared to do just that, to spend some time getting to grips with it – well, that’s an act of true generosity on their part."[3] While comparing the album to other similarly-themed albums like Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks (1975) and Neil Young's Tonight's the Night (1975), Flux Magazine reflected that the album was "innovative" and "pioneered a sound."[5] Jess Harvell of Pitchfork reflected upon Blemish as a "small masterpiece,"[23] while Chris Dahlen of the same website later said it "may be the most powerful album he's ever recorded, the rare case where an artist uses his maturity to show more pain than he had in his youth."[8]

• David Sylvian – vocals, producer, engineer, mixing
• Derek Bailey – guitar
• Christian Fennesz – arranger, electronics
• Toby Hrycek-Robinson – engineer
• Yuka Fujii – art direction, design
• Atsushi Fukui – artwork, cover art