Customer Reviews

Camphor

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When David Sylvian's twenty year relationship with Virgin Records came to an end, he delivered two compilations to them drawn from his catalog, a vocal compilation ("Everything and Nothing") and an instrumental one ("Camphor"). Both were initially released as limited editions with bonus discs and eventually saw wider release without the bonus disc. Together, they provide a fantastic overview of the bulk of Sylvian's work, and while some of his decisions (particularly with respect to the Japan material) may irk some of his longtime fans, the value of these sets-- both to the unitiated and old hands, is difficult to estimate.

"Camphor" is the instrumental piece, a single disc compilation of mostly instrumental works drawn from Sylvian's solo catalog and work with Rain Tree Crow. Along the way, there's a pair of songs not before commercially available (both were released on a CD Sylvian sold on tour the year before this came out) and three remixes.

The CD paints a fairly interesting picture of Sylvian as an instrumentalist-- right away it's pretty clear this eschews the usual ambient atmosphere with "All of My Mother's Names", a feature for guitarist Marc Ribot from 1999's "Dead Bees on a Cake". Ribot coughs up a churning freak of a solo that defies expectation and predictability and still, nearly 8 years after I first heard it, I'm in awe of the piece. But it's not ambient, and while the album will drift in an out of ambient sounds (i.e. "Answered Prayers", "A Brief Conversation Ending in Divorce"), the real beauty of the record is the breadth of diversity of the work on it, be it the rolling funk of Rain Tree Crow's "Big Wheels in Shanty Town", the traditional ambient sounds of "The Healing Place" or the noise excursion of the title track.

Of the new songs, "The Song Which Gives the Key to Perfection" is a Hindu chant gently delivered by Sylvian (and his only real vocal on the record) over a mild drone and electric piano. It works out to be a lovely piece, admittedly perhaps not everyone's (including my) cup of tea, but it's a nice enough listen. "Camphor" mixes a traditional ambient sound with what processed effects and noise and what sounds like someone spinning a radio dial. It's quite an intriguing performance, although admittedly some of its strength is in wrapping up in 3 minutes-- had it gone on long, I could see it getting annoying quickly.

The remixes are interesting-- two of them are remixes of vocal pieces-- "Wave" from "Gone to Earth" essentially ends up being presented as throbbing synths and Robert Fripp's superlative guitar playing (his performance on "Wave" is some of his best) and works nicely on its own. "Mother and Child" is equally intriguing, replacing Sylvian's vocal with a superb trumpet performance by Nils Petter Molvaer but otherwise largely leaving the original alone, although it seems Ryuichi Sakamoto's Cecil Taylor-esque soloing comes a bit more to the fore. Again, it works fantastically and proves quite effecting and powerful. The third piece is a slice out of one of his works with Holgar Czukay-- "Plight" gets edited from over 15 minutes to under 3-- the little pieces works ok, but it's more like an interlude than anything else.

Like any compilation, I could certainly argue the track listing (the inclusion of "Praise", a chant by Sylvian's guru and the notable lack of the stunning "Gone to Earth" piece, "Camp Fire: Coyote Country", which flattens me everything I hear it), but all in all, like its counterpart "Everything and Nothing" served for Sylvian's vocal work, "Camphor" is a fine compilation of his instrumental work. The limited edition bonux disc contains remixes of three pieces from the Sylvian/Czukay albums-- "Plight" and "Premonition" both get full treatments whereas "Mutability" gets trimmed down to just over 5 minutes. I listened to "Plight and Premonition" recently and quite honestly didn't note dramatic differences with the remix,but "Mutability", originally clocking in at over 20 minutes, was a piece I could never deal with because it couldn't sustain my interest, benefits from conciseness. Still, the bonus disc is likely only of interest to diehards and it's probably not necessary to seek it out.

Regardless of edition, for those new to Sylvian's work, "Camphor" is a fine introduction to his instrumental side during his tenure with Virgin. For older fans, this set may not be as valuable, but the music contained within is superb.

Aaaaarrrrrrggghh. I can't believe I blithely purchase everything with David Sylvian's name on it. With the exception of a remix or two (Wave is nice, but did I really need another version?) and 'The Song Which Gives The Key To Perfection', I already have everything from other sources. Conceptually, it doesn't even work as a collection because there is no flow or consistent tone to the pieces. Ambient here, vocal there, experimental after that. Bleah.

In the same purchase from Amazon, I also ordered JBK 'Playing in a Room With People', so it was kind of a double whammy for me. Now I have 'Big Wheels In Shanty Town' on three CDs. If JBK and Sylvian love this piece so much to release it three times, perhaps this is proof that they should record another album together.

After Everything and Nothing, Approaching Silence, and now Camphor, I'm ready for some new music.

I should have heeded the reviews instead of buying every compilation Sylvian puts out. Guess I liked Everything and Nothing so much I thought this would feature a good mix of old and new instrumentals, plus a lot of remixes. Boy, was I wrong.

There's very little new here, aside from slightly reworked, prettier versions of Wave, a more accessibly jazzy Mother and Child, and The Healing Place. And that's it, out of 13 songs! Oh, yes, there's a new Indian praise hymn The Song Which Gives the Key to Perfection, and Camphor, which Sylvian used as the introductory music to his live concert tour this year. But if you bought the souvenir tour CD, you already own those tracks.

Not to mention the bonus CD features Plight and Premonition, not one of my favorites among Sylvian's admittedly spotty instrumental work.

If you're a diehard Sylvian fan like I am, you'll find all the rest of the songs from this compilation on Rain Tree Crow, Dead Bees On a Cake, Plight and Premonition, Flux and Mutability, and the instrumental side of Gone to Earth.

All I can say is, this is Sylvian's most disappointing output to date. Heed my advice: save your money for Everything and Nothing or the real album to come-- something I should have done.

An ok but not stellar introduction to Sylvian's instrumental work. Another reviewer tore this as not succeeding as an ambient collection -- since several of the tracks are far from "ambient" this is not surprising. Perhaps, if Sylvian had stuck to a purely ambient retrospective this would have worked better. As it is, he has co-joined the squawk of his Miles-as-Pimp-era composition All My Mother's Names with serene and often beautifully woven pieces like Answered Prayers and Plight, and thrown in some of his arty but annoying stuff for good measure (Camphor, A Brief Conversation). The instrumental takes on songs are fine, and again I'm reminded what a phenomenal album the Rain Tree Crow project produced, but somehow it doesn't all hang together and there isn't much justification for material like The Song Which Gives the Key to Perfection when so much other material is around. Interested listeners would be better directed to some of the source material: Flux and Mutability is readily available as a budget item, the second half of Gone To Earth is hard to find and expensive but contains the best encapsulation of Eno's music for films next to the master himself, and the Rain Tree Crow album is superb.

I am really a devout Sylvian listener. Although I prefer his vocal works I decided to buy this collection of instrumentals.

"All of My Mother's Names" has been reworked here. A little different from the version on DEAD BEES but I like this one really.

A different version of "Wave" is also a bit different but sounds really good.

"Mother and Child" originally a vocal from SECRETS is worked beautifully as a jazz instrumental. Gorgeous! My favorite piece on the CD!

A 2 miniute segment of "Plight" appears, my first real intro to Sylvian's instrumental pieces. Ghostly and sparce with lots of distant vocal samples via Holger Czukay's dictaphone.

Really I like much of this except one piece was dissapointing. Now I like atonal stuff like Usserchevsky and Cage, stuffed pianos and live sheep on stage kinda stuff. But "Camphor", the title piece, goes along nice enough but has this irritating dissonence that sounds like chainsaw ripping up a speaker! No lie...do not listen with headphones. If aliens came and erased this one track then the CD would be a perfect treat.

The oddest thing here though is the artwork! What is this? Mushrooms on the moon? Kinda cool though. But Sylvian and avant-guarde kinda go together well.

Buy, enjoy.

My recomendations:
CAMPHOR
SECRETS OF THE BEEHIVE
DEAD BEES
ALCHEMY

ELECTRONIC MODULATIONS:VINTAGE VOLTS
a collection of avant-guarde atonal works by Cage and Usserchevsky and the like. But no live sheep...

...but you let me down! And it isn't that I'm not a fan of ambient music--I am (I have about 500 ambient CDs, out of a collection of 1500 CDs total). But Mr. Sylvian, your ambient output is spotty. Flux and Mutability is great. Alchemy: An Index of Possibilities (hard to find, fans, I know) is very good. The instrumental tracks on Gone to Earth are wonderful. (So much so, I've thought about paying some obscene price on eBay for the Japanese import double CD of Gone to Earth which includes all the tracks as the original LP.)

But Plight and Premonition is so-so. Side B of Brilliant Trees was kinda boring, as was all of Approaching Silence. (I wasn't able to afford Ember Glance. Sorry.)

As for Camphor...the new tracks are good. But they're too lively to fit well on an "ambient" album. They should have been on an album by themselves. With the rest of the material here--mostly those same Gone to Earth tracks (some reworked), and also a few Rain Tree Crow tracks--the new stuff doesn't sound right. It's all jumbled together; it doesn't flow.

At least on disc one, the reworkings are interesting. But the bonus disc--oh, David, why didn't you leave Plight and Premonition alone? They're not too badly mangled (and Mutability, also here, may be untouched) but these funny little whooshes and blips are NOT improvements.

Ambient compilations just don't work. (The Ambient Expanse, a Steve Roach-directed collaboration with several separate artists, is the only counterexample which comes to mind.) But if you had to give us a sort of new stuff/old stuff jumble, why oh WHY couldn't you have given us the Gone to Earth tracks that aren't available on any but the Japanese CDs? (The titles are, for the curious: "Silver Moon Over Sleeping Steeples", "Camp Fire: Coyote Country", "A Bird of Prey Vanishes into a Bright Blue Cloudless Sky", and "Sunlight Seen through Towering Trees".)

Everything and Nothing was a great compilation. It worked. Camphor, sadly, does not.

"Everything and Nothing" is a much better Sylvian compilation, but "The Song that Gives the Key to Perfection" is nearly worth the price of this set alone. It's a stunning, haunting, spacious setting of a Hindu sacred text, with bare, exquisite accompaniment. I listened to this track after the death of a good friend and gained much solace from it. It's as sincere and as profound a track as you will find in modern music.

Wonderful compilation. Highlights include Plight (the spiralling of winter ghosts) on disc two, Upon This Earth, Praise, and The Song Which Gives the Key to Perfection.

Beautiful pieces of music. You may call some of the pieces instrumental and others may be called ambient (see other review) or even vocal (disc 1, track 4) but overall it's a very fine output from Sylvian that floats effortlessly from your speakers into your heart.

When David Sylvian's twenty year relationship with Virgin Records came to an end, he delivered two compilations to them drawn from his catalog, a vocal compilation ("Everything and Nothing") and an instrumental one ("Camphor"). Both were initially released as limited editions with bonus discs and eventually saw wider release without the bonus disc. Together, they provide a fantastic overview of the bulk of Sylvian's work, and while some of his decisions (particularly with respect to the Japan material) may irk some of his longtime fans, the value of these sets-- both to the unitiated and old hands, is difficult to estimate.

"Camphor" is the instrumental piece, a single disc compilation of mostly instrumental works drawn from Sylvian's solo catalog and work with Rain Tree Crow. Along the way, there's a pair of songs not before commercially available (both were released on a CD Sylvian sold on tour the year before this came out) and three remixes.

The CD paints a fairly interesting picture of Sylvian as an instrumentalist-- right away it's pretty clear this eschews the usual ambient atmosphere with "All of My Mother's Names", a feature for guitarist Marc Ribot from 1999's "Dead Bees on a Cake". Ribot coughs up a churning freak of a solo that defies expectation and predictability and still, nearly 8 years after I first heard it, I'm in awe of the piece. But it's not ambient, and while the album will drift in an out of ambient sounds (i.e. "Answered Prayers", "A Brief Conversation Ending in Divorce"), the real beauty of the record is the breadth of diversity of the work on it, be it the rolling funk of Rain Tree Crow's "Big Wheels in Shanty Town", the traditional ambient sounds of "The Healing Place" or the noise excursion of the title track.

Of the new songs, "The Song Which Gives the Key to Perfection" is a Hindu chant gently delivered by Sylvian (and his only real vocal on the record) over a mild drone and electric piano. It works out to be a lovely piece, admittedly perhaps not everyone's (including my) cup of tea, but it's a nice enough listen. "Camphor" mixes a traditional ambient sound with what processed effects and noise and what sounds like someone spinning a radio dial. It's quite an intriguing performance, although admittedly some of its strength is in wrapping up in 3 minutes-- had it gone on long, I could see it getting annoying quickly.

The remixes are interesting-- two of them are remixes of vocal pieces-- "Wave" from "Gone to Earth" essentially ends up being presented as throbbing synths and Robert Fripp's superlative guitar playing (his performance on "Wave" is some of his best) and works nicely on its own. "Mother and Child" is equally intriguing, replacing Sylvian's vocal with a superb trumpet performance by Nils Petter Molvaer but otherwise largely leaving the original alone, although it seems Ryuichi Sakamoto's Cecil Taylor-esque soloing comes a bit more to the fore. Again, it works fantastically and proves quite effecting and powerful. The third piece is a slice out of one of his works with Holgar Czukay-- "Plight" gets edited from over 15 minutes to under 3-- the little pieces works ok, but it's more like an interlude than anything else.

Like any compilation, I could certainly argue the track listing (the inclusion of "Praise", a chant by Sylvian's guru and the notable lack of the stunning "Gone to Earth" piece, "Camp Fire: Coyote Country", which flattens me everything I hear it), but all in all, like its counterpart "Everything and Nothing" served for Sylvian's vocal work, "Camphor" is a fine compilation of his instrumental work. The limited edition bonux disc contains remixes of three pieces from the Sylvian/Czukay albums-- "Plight" and "Premonition" both get full treatments whereas "Mutability" gets trimmed down to just over 5 minutes. I listened to "Plight and Premonition" recently and quite honestly didn't note dramatic differences with the remix,but "Mutability", originally clocking in at over 20 minutes, was a piece I could never deal with because it couldn't sustain my interest, benefits from conciseness. Still, the bonus disc is likely only of interest to diehards and it's probably not necessary to seek it out.

Regardless of edition, for those new to Sylvian's work, "Camphor" is a fine introduction to his instrumental side during his tenure with Virgin. For older fans, this set may not be as valuable, but the music contained within is superb.