Part of Sylvian's readiness to provide vocal melodies relates to the success of the songs on Secrets of the Beehive. And so the present and the recent A Victim of Stars (1982 – 2012), another primer to what has been a truly extraordinary career bearing in mind where Sylvian and Japan started out – basically as two-chord wonders. He isn’t that now. What could be construed as the best of his work, though that’s in so many other places too, A Victim of Starsis a triumph. Apart from a slew of defiantly modernist compositions from the vaults It also includes the newly recorded ‘Where’s Your Gravity?’ It sets the seal for now on a body of work that improves with time. I would say that the next step was so unclear", he responds, "There were so many avenues I could walk down, that I thought the best thing to do was just jump in at the deep end, into a project I had no preconceived ideas about material-wise, content-wise to see what would happen. So it's not so much helping a pre-conceived form of composition or content, it's really to move away from having the room to think about what one wanted to do, and go ahead and put myself into a project where I had to go through with it no matter what happened. You take the first step and from that moment on, you've got to work through the whole process of making the album." 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." Seven years after the release of Exorcising Ghosts, Japan recorded a new studio album, but under the new moniker Rain Tree Crow.

MOVING ON TO THE MORE PRACTICAL aspects of Sylvian's music, his move towards improvisation has brought about various changes in his playing. Instead of spending time writing material, he now finds playing for his own pleasure a rewarding experience - though the predictable acoustic piano or electronic keyboard are not his chosen medium.While all this might reasonably lead you to believe that Sylvian's only "solo" live outing to date will also be his last, there's more encouraging news.

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.The vinyl itself is thin as chuff, quite flimsy but the sound is awesome. Really punchy, bright and clear. His debut solo proper, Brilliant Trees, includes contributions from Ryuichi Sakamoto, trumpeter Jon Hassell and Can bassist Holger Czukay. In many ways, it’s reminiscent of the contemporary albums being made by Talking Heads and David Byrne. Using the same core Sylvian’s Alchemy – An Index of Possibilities is a welcome return. It was originally only available as a Japanese CD or a cassette. Again the delightful blend of world music, ambient sound and prepared tapes are well ahead of the herd. By now, Sylvian was being taken seriously and any of the lingering glam/new romantic trappings, a hindrance in the first place, had long since gone. Robert Fripp plays the guitar on the sublime ‘Steel Cathedral’s and the three-part instrumental ‘Words with the Shaman’ features Soft Machine bassist Percy Jones. This is heady stuff.

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.

Oil On Canvas is a live album that was released after the band had split up in 1982, their passing much mourned by an increasingly devoted fan base. It sold over 100,000 copies. Two years later Sylvian sat down and assembled the fine compilation Exorcising Ghosts, a précis of Japan to date, including rare B-sides, remixes and instrumentals. A must-have for those with an interest in this idiosyncratic and complex group. True to the traditional artistic stereotype, Sylvian's satisfaction with any of his endeavours is balanced by his dissatisfaction over their shortcomings. Given that the project could not have come about without his full co-operation, and that he's already on record as saying "One of the most important lessons I was reminded of was that being in overall control of a recording should rarely be relinquished. Group decisions are invariably of a compromised nature", had the project been a success or a failure? His reply, however, is uncompromising. Sadly, however, the project seems unlikely to yield anything more than one album and the possibility of a single. The reasons for this are shrouded in personal politics within the group (see Steve Jansen's comments elsewhere in this issue).

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. I felt I was going through some inner changes which I found hard to encapsulate in my own songwriting, and I wanted to put myself in a situation where I would have to respond immediately without thinking about the situation to see what would surface. Then I could kind of glean an understanding of what was going on there and try to adapt that and develop it - whether this was along the lines of lyrical content or musical content. 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.I am always disappointed in some respects with the work that I do. I always feel that it falls short of its original potential in some way, but maybe that's what spurs me on to try again and again. What I tend to find is that, as much as I like some of the songs on the album, it's the instrumental pieces that justify the album's existence. It was on the instrumental that we really worked together as a four-piece. That was the aim of the project: to get the full potential from these four musicians working together in a really collaborative sense. I found that with the songs, I could see references to my own work far clearer than I can in the instrumental work, so I kind of feel that the emphasis should be placed on the instrumental work. Exorcising Ghosts is a compilation album by the British band Japan, released in November 1984 by record label Virgin. 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). 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.