Is there something literary in the air out in the left field? Kate Tempest as a close runner up for the Mercury Prize while other streetwise spoken word artists like George The Poet wait in the wings; a forthcoming album by electronica doyenne Jan St Werner being held together by sinister narration by American rock dark lord Dylan Carlson of Earth; and this single hour-long piece of Beckettian beatnik rambling by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Franz Wright over piano plinks and plonks from John Tilbury and ambient soundscaping by experimental producer and guitarist Christian Fennesz – all overseen by perpetual Bohemian David Sylvian.
Sylvian has, over the past three decades, carved himself out a space as an elegant aristocrat of the stranger territories in music culture – bringing in venerated collaborators from the worlds of electronica and free improv, questing for spaces outside standard structures, but always with a sense of elegant good taste: and so it remains here. there's a light... is a follow-up to Wright's Kindertotenwald (“Dead Children Forest”) performances of last year, backed by Sylvian, Fennesz and another sonic experiementer, Stephen Matthieu, and it it is a thing of gently disturbing humour, of weirdness that is not affected but hard-won through life experience, of mordant musing on life's smaller but darker ironies. It smells of coal and leather, it looks at you through heavy-lidded eyes, it drifts into companionable reveries, before doing scary things to make sure you're still listening. If you want a slightly raddled, slightly disturbing uncle of an album at whose knee to sit, you found it right here.