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David Sylvian & Robert Fripp, The First Day

While many of Sylvian's fans dismiss this album as too too abrasive and too pretentious, especially in contrast to Sylvian's quieter solo efforts, I think it's brilliant. The live document of this album's tour, Damage, was my introduction to David Sylvian ten years ago, and I was led to it by a series of King Crimson- and Fripp-related releases. I was drawn to the punishing rhythm section and its marriage to Fripp's excoriating guitar sound, the way that Sylvian's normally mellow, intimate voice was here set against a musical backdrop that was anything but.

Lyrically, Sylvian touches on Eastern themes of rebirth and transcendence, and our struggle to reconcile modern Western life with spiritual wholeness, despite their seeming mutual exclusivity. The characters in the early songs here commit earthly transgressions and struggle to resist the temptations and pitfalls of everyday life, while the second half of the album opens up into longer, less rigid, more instrumental structures that suggest that very transcendence we're hoping for.

Perhaps the pivotal moment comes at the album's midpoint, halfway through "20th Century Dreaming", as the heretofore schizophrenic, atonal armature of the song begins to break down into a stream of ambient sweeps and cyclical bass figures suggesting the river Sylvian sings about as he delivers the fateful aphorism: As the river runs, tumbles and turns / you know you shouldn't stay or play the game again / but it could be different this time: you may win. "Darshan" is a spiritual plane inhabited by stream-of-consciousness vocal samples, sporadic rapid-fire bursts of guitar, and Fripp's mounting soundscapes, all of it suggesting the noumenal elusiveness of the very ideals Sylvian hopes to celebrate and we all hope to attain. So by the time we come out the other side of "Darshan", we are rewarded with the beautiful ambience of "Bringing Down The Light", far from the more earthly, corrupt themes introduced at the album's beginning.

All this is by way of saying that this album had a very cleansing, therapeutic effect on me during the first year or so that I listened to it. It got me through a lot of the triumphs and setbacks of my first year at college. The spring of my freshman year, when I was confused and considering transferring, I would put this album in my DiscMan and walk down to the river behind Lawrence's campus and walk across one of its many bridges, stopping midway to look down at the churning and probably very polluted waters by the paper mills, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do.

Was I unhappy because I was at Lawrence? I was not. Was I unhappy due to problems that were universal, endemic to any college experience, regardless of where it took place? I was. Therefore, I should stay at Lawrence. Succeed in spite of these obstacles, not fail because of them. Stay and face my silly coming-of-age demons. So that's what I did, and it's one of the best decisions I ever made, because I stayed at Lawrence and flourished. More or less.

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