During the flurry of recording activity which took up most of 1985, Sylvian was carefully seeding his second solo album with the help of a couple of new collaborators. For Gone To Earth he got in touch with guitarists Robert Fripp and Bill Nelson, both of whom had played key roles in defining progressive rock. Gone to Earth, a double album containing seven vocal tracks and ten instrumental pieces, attracted the same critical acclaim as Brilliant Trees when it was released in September 1985.
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Packaging 8 panel digipak with 5th colour metallic sepia / gold on digipak and CD body. With instrumental tracks added and includes remixes of 3 tracks. Previously unseen photos (some treated) by Yuka Fujii and also Alastair Thaine photo. Poster booklet using gloss art paper also included. Non-standard sepia gloss CD tray x 2. |
Tracklisting CD 1 1. Taking The Veil 2. Laughter And Forgetting 3. Before The Bullfight 4. Gone To Earth 5. Wave 6. River Man 7. Silver Moon 8. Riverman (Remix) * (Remixed by David Sylvian and Richard Moakes) 9. Gone To Earth (Remix) * (Remixed by David Sylvian and Richard Moakes) 10. Camp Fire: Coyote Country (Remix) * (Remixed by David Sylvian and Richard Moakes) |
CD 2 1. The Healing Place 2. Answered Prayers 3. Where The Railroad Meets The Sea 4. The Wooden Cross 5. Silver Moon Over Sleeping Steeples *(previously on vinyl / cassette versions and Weatherbox) 6. Camp Fire: Coyote Country *(previously on vinyl / cassette versions and Weatherbox) 7. A Bird Of Prey Vanishes Into A Bright Blue Cloudless Sky *(previously on vinyl / cassette versions and Weatherbox) 8. Home 9. Sunlight Seen Through Towering Trees *(previously on vinyl / cassette versions and Weatherbox) 10. Upon This Earth |
Going on to 'Gone To Earth' you worked closely with Robert Fripp and Bill Nelson. Was there anything, either mistakes or good practice or ideas or anything that you learnt from recording 'Brilliant Trees' that you either did apply or you maybe should have applied looking retrospectively?
DS: I took the same approach which was to bring in these new musicians often meeting for the very first time and speaking for the time on the floor of the studio and that seemed to work again in the context of 'Gone To Earth'. I mean I should of had a clearer vision for the record, I think, initially I started out recording 'Steel Cathedrals', 'Words with the Shaman' and then three tracks from what became 'Gone To Earth' as an album project. And I was working on all of this material and when I got it to a point of completion I realised that no way did it hold together as an album and so I removed the vocal material and used that as the basis for what was to become 'Gone To Earth'. So in a sense I was kind of making it up as I went along, it wasn't an overall vision I didn't know where I was heading with the material when I started writing it. So I basically used the three tracks that I had which was 'Wave', 'Before The Bullfight', and 'Laughter and Forgetting' as the cornerstones of the album in a sense and continued writing from that point. At the same time as I was doing that I'd found this new gadget, this box which you could multi-track instruments on, mainly used for guitars, and I was writing luke based pieces on this machine. And thoroughly enjoying it and somehow I felt there was a connection between what I was doing with these little instrumental guitar pieces and the songs that I'd been writing for 'Gone To Earth' so I decided that I would pull them together and make them part of a double album project.
What was it like for example when you meet someone like Robert Fripp for the first time, would that be a nervous type meeting?
DS: I'm generally nervous when I meet most people (laughs). It did seem out of the ordinary. Was it nervous? Yeah I mean it's a little intimidating sometimes to work with people you have such respect for, obviously. But it was made very easy; he made the whole process very straightforward, very easy. I remember the first thing we did was to record some Frippatronics which he set in motion and said 'you know we can leave it running for about the next fifteen minutes shall we go have tea?' You know so that we just left the thing in record and went off and had a chat about you know Goerjeff and all the rest of it which was something else that fascinated me. And that's where things sort of became very easy, you know, everything seemed to open up. Often it's the anticipation of meeting people that you respect and admire that builds up this nervousness but as soon as you're one to one with them that dissipates and you find you're relating.
So you didn't feel it wasn't tricky if Robert Fripp had an idea and you said 'don't think that's gonna work'?
DS: No, never an issue for me to tell someone that an idea isn't working.
There are a number of remixes on both discs, what makes you decide to re-interpret the track because obviously it's not all done but some are.
DS: Yeah sometimes you feel that there's an alternate perspective to be taken on the mix or it wasn't mixed in quite the way you originally foresaw it or that it underplayed certain elements that you thought were key to the composition. So you go back and have another track.