Exorcising Ghosts

Product Information

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). 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.

I want to tour again, and I see myself touring possibly next year. I've got some projects to get through this year which will keep me in the studio, and I'm not sure when I will get around to doing an album - whether it's my own album or this group concept album - but whichever it is, I will tour with it. The problem is that the recorded work always takes priority. If I have ideas for something, I desperately want to jump into it right away rather than go on the road." Anyway, the reason I came here to mention this double vinyl offering was to say that the pressing does sound excellent. That was one of the most difficult pieces for me", comments Sylvian. "It surfaced, I think, on the second day of recording and it was the only piece where the band were totally confident that a piece would work. On all the other pieces there was somebody who was a little unsure about whether it was working. 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."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." Sylvian seems to find the experience of recording music a more valuable one than that of performing it. I’ve only recently discovered Japan/Sylvian, mostly by chance - I found a copy of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Heartbeat album in a charity shop earlier this year, and absolutely loved Heartbeat (Tainai Kaiki II) with Sylvian’s vocals.

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. it's seemingly just thrown together to churn-out another compilation and make some more money for Virgin Records. 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! 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.It was mainly my interest in this method of composition: improvisation", he begins. "I began to feel that there was possibly more to be gained at this moment in time by putting myself into situations where I would be forced to respond on the spur of the moment to what was happening in the studio or a given environment. That if I was to rely on my compositional techniques - as they eventually become, no matter how you try to evade these things - I might miss certain developments in my work, or that the developments might be rather too slow. Exorcising Ghosts reached No. 45 in the UK Albums Chart [4] and was certified Gold (100,000 copies) by the BPI in February 1997. [5] Perhaps most encouraging of all is Sylvian's reaction to the suggestion that there might be an end to his involvement in making music, that at some point, he might feel he has said all he has to say. His response is not to recognise the question: "There can't be an end in sight. It would be self-defeating to think that there was an end." Last interviewed in MT (E&MM) in September '86 following the release of Gone to Earth, Sylvian commented on the subject of a possible reformation. Then he regarded it as a romantic rather than practical idea, and admitted that it had been discussed on several occasions: "It almost came off', he revealed, "but there wasn't enough conviction and now I'm happy that it didn't. I'm sure that it'll be talked about again in another five years but I hope it'll always be talk because I don't think it would be a good thing." 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.

Unfortunately there wasn't enough time to mature musically throughout the tour. We did to a certain extent of course, but all the time there were technical problems and organisational problems, and to deal with that at the same time as knowing you'd got a performance that evening is hellishly difficult to go through.

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.

Exorcising Ghosts is the definitive compilation of an era-defining band. It features recordings from the albums Quiet Life, Gentlemen Take Polaroids and Tin Drumas well as a selection of rarities including “A Foreign Place” and “Life Without Buildings”, the 1981 remix of “Taking Islands in Africa”, “Voices Raised in Welcome, Hands Held in Prayer” from 1983’s live album Oil On Canvas and the extended 12″ mix of the 1981 single “The Art Of Parties”. Exorcising Ghosts is a compilation album by the British band Japan, released in November 1984 by record label Virgin.

Track listing

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". If it was 'New Moon at Red Deer Wallow' alone that came out of these sessions I'd be happy. It would justify the recording process, it would justify this project." Generally my disappointment came from being too muddled", he offers in explanation. "The emphasis wasn't on songs on that tour, I was trying to create an atmosphere in a hall, and I thought it was going to be relatively easy to do that because it was something I thought I knew how to do. Although it was successful to a certain extent, I thought there wasn't enough dynamics, there wasn't enough colour. Occasionally too much happened, it could have been pared down.