A Victim of Stars 1982-2012

David Sylvian's voice bears such a calmly forceful cadence, full of carefully enunciated words that trail off into a pristine nasal murmur, that he can dart between genres and surface with music positioned resolutely in his own sound world. The former Japan singer has spent a great deal of time reflecting on his solo output in recent times. In 2010 he released a retrospective of his non-album collaborative work, Sleepwalkers. If that record was a treat for fans, A Victim of Stars feels like a crack opening in the door for anyone left behind, a way to get a feel for Sylvian's far-reaching mood swings since Japan disbanded in 1982. It's neatly ordered, beginning with a hint of the early trappings of his solo career via a version of his former band's "Ghosts"; taking in a smattering of material from his full-length albums; and closing with a new song bearing a title that summarizes the divisive areas of exploration that break-up his career arc: "Where's Your Gravity?" Sylvian's voice is a unique beast, pitched somewhere between the type of feigned disinterest typical of all the Ferry and Bowie acolytes the New Romantic movement produced, but with greater cracks and world weariness appearing with age. By the time A Victim of Stars lands on "Small Metal Gods" from 2009's excellent Manafon, there's a buckle and strain to his singing, a distinct warble in his throat, a palpable swoop down toward earthier terrain. But it's still grounded in the unreal, demonstrating Sylvian's preference for keeping his audience at arm's length. If there's one element of style that remains in place on this compilation, it's the tendency to untether his voice, to leave it floating in space, while the instrumentation-- sometimes fussy, sometimes so minimal it's barely a whisper-- politely searches for space around it, as though the singer is performing an awkward first dance with his own work. Dialing back from "Small Metal Gods" to the material from 1984's Brilliant Trees is like taking a leap from someone at peace with their place on the planet to someone still figuring out who they are. But even the shift from "Pulling Punches" to "The Ink in the Well" (the first two tracks from Trees) is substantial, with the former all 1980s lipstick traces and watery slap bass, while the latter is sunk in a bed of acoustic thrumming and gently brushed drums. Both are perfect ease-in access points to Sylvian's solo work and among the best-known material here. But a better early warning of what was to come is "Forbidden Colours", Sylvian's 1983 collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto. It's a fully formed piece of orchestral pop, with Sylvian taking on the mantle of wraithlike torch singer-- the vantage point from which he's clearly most comfortable as a performer. One of Sylvian's biggest detours from that mode of operation was Secrets of the Beehive (1987), a largely acoustic-driven work represented by a clutch of songs here. On "Waterfront" from that album it's easy to detect the Scott Walker influence that continually reemerges in his career, while "Let the Happiness In" is the kind of low-key, jazz-inflected ballad that would fit easily into Mark Hollis' solitary solo album. Fellow outliers such as Walker and Hollis are the kind of company Sylvian has comfortably kept throughout his solo work, and, like them, he has often deviated tangentially in pursuit of untried provinces; Secrets of the Beehive was followed by two protracted instrumental collaborations with members of Can, Plight & Premonition (with Holger Czukay) and Flux and Mutability (again with Czukay, along with Jaki Liebezeit, Marcus Stockhausen, and Michael Karoli). It would have been difficult to bring in such work on A Victim of Stars, on account of the sheer length of the material in those collaborations. As such, it's important to note this is only a small part of Sylvian's story, a few splintered factions that hint at fuller, more expansive stories told elsewhere on his full-length recordings. But as a handhold into those tales this works surprisingly well, occasionally even dipping into the uninhibited environments Sylvian likes to extend to, such as the subdued funk of the nine-and-a-half-minute opener to 1999's Dead Bees on a Cake, "I Surrender". It also highlights his immaculate taste in collaborators, with earlier work alongside Sakamoto and Robert Fripp complemented by Blemish-era compositions marked by the spooked-out electronics of Christian Fennesz and Derek Bailey's guitar passages. The ghostlike curls of feedback on "Late Night Shopping" from that record are the perfect place to drop Sylvian's voice, where his tenderly accented tones lightly vacillate between calm and disquiet. Sylvian's partnership with Fennesz now stretches over a number of recordings, with both clearly sharing an appreciation for abstraction in art. It's an impulse that loops back to the earliest song present here, "Ghosts", which fleetingly lapses into glitch-heavy electronics at crucial junctures in its evolution. It's not easy to string a single narrative from A Victim of Stars-- Sylvian's career is in a permanent state of flux and reinvention. But he works best when his songwriting is pulled away from the concrete, when there's open-endedness for him to spin his focus around. But nothing here is ever wholly drawn into that world. Sylvian's role often feels like that of a curator, tugging in elements of free improvisation but never letting it overshadow, lest his absorption with songcraft, opulent orchestration, ambient electronics, and dozens of other impulses suffer. A Victim of Stars doesn't offer much to anyone already immersed in that world. For everyone else this is an engaging scratch at the surface of a wide-open mind.