Seven years after the release of Exorcising Ghosts, Japan recorded a new studio album, but under the new moniker Rain Tree Crow. I felt I was going through some inner changes which I found hard to encapsulate in my own songwriting, and I wanted to put myself in a situation where I would have to respond immediately without thinking about the situation to see what would surface. Then I could kind of glean an understanding of what was going on there and try to adapt that and develop it - whether this was along the lines of lyrical content or musical content. Through the course of his three solo albums ( Brilliant Trees ('84), Gone to Earth ('86), Secrets of the Beehive ('89)) and his experimental works with Holger Czukay ( Plight and Premonition ('88), Flux and Mutability ('89)) Sylvian involved an ever wider range of musicians in his work and, as a result of his relationship with Yuka Fujii, began experimenting with improvisation as a form of performance and composition. And it is largely as a result of this continued interest in improvisation that 1991 will see the first studio release from Japan in a decade - although to find it you'll have to look under "Rain Tree Crow" rather than Japan. Following a brace of albums, he made with Holger Czukay and the short-lived but fertile Rain Tree Crowperiod Sylvian worked on purely ambient music and began to explore a fruitful liaison with Robert Fripp. After working with Fripp in the studio and on stage Sylvian returned to his solo career with Dead Bees on a Cake (1991) where the recipe includes Bill Frisell’s dobro, Talvin Singh’s tables and lots of Marc Ribot’s extraordinary electric, acoustic and slide guitar genius. Recorded here, there and everywhere – well Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, Box in Wiltshire, Napa, CA, Minneapolis and Seattle – this is an approachable jazz-fusion affair. The ensuing Approaching Silence (1999) is an ambient compilation featuring Fripp and is a wise choice for those seeking something sonically unique. Everything and Nothing is a quite superb compilation of a quite different sort. Here you find old Sylvian and Japan favourites, cuts that didn’t quite make Dead Bees… and Sylvian’s contributions to the hard to find Marco Polo album by world music duo Nicola Alesini and Pier Luigi Andreoni. As a studied look at what was then a twenty-year stint with Virgin, it’s hard to fault. If nothing else the album was a wake-up call to those who’d missed out the first time, or simply didn’t grasp how good all this music was. Speaking of the booklet, it was also a nice surprise to realise that the liner notes were by @Paul Rymer of this parish, who had been a helpful guide when I was first building a YMO collection - a collection which inadvertently led me to Japan!

It is the recorded medium that is important in that it has the potential to reach so many people. The live performance is far more transient, obviously. But it's a different kind of experience and maybe shouldn't compare in any way. Let's say that what I have got to date from live performance is nowhere near as profound as what I can take from recording and writing material. The only person I've found to agree with me on a certain approach to writing is Scott Walker in a comment he made to me: I mentioned something about recording an album being very difficult and very painful, and he said 'that's the way it should be, if it isn't there's something wrong'. That's what I've always felt to be true, but a lot of people I've worked with don't share that. It is important, because the actual process of writing and recording, although it is a by-product of your life's experience, it itself becomes a life experience through the process of making it. It becomes part of your learning process. The process of making a record is normally very difficult; very challenging and emotional on all different kinds of levels, but by the time you complete a project it holds within it that experience. That emotional depth is captured in the work somehow. And that can be brought out through the excavations of the listener if they care to probe that deeply.His debut solo proper, Brilliant Trees, includes contributions from Ryuichi Sakamoto, trumpeter Jon Hassell and Can bassist Holger Czukay. In many ways, it’s reminiscent of the contemporary albums being made by Talking Heads and David Byrne. Using the same core Sylvian’s Alchemy – An Index of Possibilities is a welcome return. It was originally only available as a Japanese CD or a cassette. Again the delightful blend of world music, ambient sound and prepared tapes are well ahead of the herd. By now, Sylvian was being taken seriously and any of the lingering glam/new romantic trappings, a hindrance in the first place, had long since gone. Robert Fripp plays the guitar on the sublime ‘Steel Cathedral’s and the three-part instrumental ‘Words with the Shaman’ features Soft Machine bassist Percy Jones. This is heady stuff. I worked on this piece obsessively, trying to make some sense of the structure of it, but the band themselves found the piece complete as it was. I was working alone and also against everyone else because they weren't really in favour of me taking it any further. The vocal went on at the very end because I was trying to avoid putting a vocal on it at all, then I got Bill (Nelson) in to play some guitar. Once I'd got Bill's guitar on, it began to fall into shape. I could see there was a structure with the right dynamics to make it work for me, but there wasn't a dynamic peak as such so I had to put the vocal on. I had the idea, but I had to get to that point where I recognised it was absolutely necessary."

s Tin Drum really nails the group’s determination to fuse eastern and Western music and make full use of the emerging programme orientated sounds. An adventurous, farsighted experiment for sure, this album contains Japan favourites like ‘Still Life in Mobile Homes’, ‘Visions of China’ and ‘Ghosts’, which vindicated the in house method when it soared into the top five. The album also charted high and went Gold and in fact, has since been posthumously awarded BBC Radio 6 Music’s ‘Goldie’ for being the best album of 1981. It’s every bit as good as that prestigious gong would indicate. This idea of the composition and that this is going to tape and is permanent is something I feel I ought to get away from. I ought to somehow be more immersed in the event itself rather than removing myself in some sense and objectively analysing what's going on as it happens. It's a silly thing to do really, but it's the way I work. It's the way I've always worked, and it's very hard to get out of the habit. The vinyl itself is thin as chuff, quite flimsy but the sound is awesome. Really punchy, bright and clear.

Companies, etc.

I was far happier with my performance on Beehive than anything I'd done previously. That album was far more lyrically based, therefore the emphasis was on the voice. The pieces were short and to the point; that was a different way of approaching the same problem, but the instrumental work is still very important. That's the area in which I see the most potential for working within a group format - whichever that group may be. I find I know exactly what I'm doing when I write a song; I know where its value lies and how to develop that. I can do that with instrumental pieces, but I get far more satisfaction out of the give and take situation which exists within a group." I would say that the next step was so unclear", he responds, "There were so many avenues I could walk down, that I thought the best thing to do was just jump in at the deep end, into a project I had no preconceived ideas about material-wise, content-wise to see what would happen. So it's not so much helping a pre-conceived form of composition or content, it's really to move away from having the room to think about what one wanted to do, and go ahead and put myself into a project where I had to go through with it no matter what happened. You take the first step and from that moment on, you've got to work through the whole process of making the album." But sitting with keyboards and a vocal mic was a large part of Sylvian's role. The keyboards in question were a Korg M1, Roland D50, "very occasionally" a Prophet VS and a Kurzweil 250. Of the Prophet VS he says: "I've had that for some time and I've been meaning to try it. It seemed to have a limited scope". The Kurzweil, on the other hand, served to "supplement a few of the acoustic sounds".

Part of Sylvian's readiness to provide vocal melodies relates to the success of the songs on Secrets of the Beehive. MOVING ON TO THE MORE PRACTICAL aspects of Sylvian's music, his move towards improvisation has brought about various changes in his playing. Instead of spending time writing material, he now finds playing for his own pleasure a rewarding experience - though the predictable acoustic piano or electronic keyboard are not his chosen medium. While all this might reasonably lead you to believe that Sylvian's only "solo" live outing to date will also be his last, there's more encouraging news.

Statistics

Returning the conversation to the progress of Sylvian's career, I find that the sense of optimism that characterised our last conversation has been replaced by the sort of confusion that accompanied the dissolution of Japan. Exorcising Ghosts was compiled and produced in consultation with lead singer David Sylvian two years after Japan dissolved. It features three recordings from the band's early career on the Hansa Records label (such as 1979's Quiet Life) but mainly focuses on material from their two studio albums on Virgin Records; Gentlemen Take Polaroids (1980) and Tin Drum (1981). Exorcising Ghosts is a compilation album by the British band Japan, released in November 1984 by record label Virgin.