DAVID SYLVIAN & HOLGER CZUKAY: FLUX + MUTABILITY

The more accessible half of Holger Czukay's two ambient collaborations with David Sylvian followed closely in the footprints of its sibling album "Plight & Premonition", released one year earlier. Both recordings created a delicate, dreamlike aura bathed in lush yet understated atmospherics. But the additional support here by Czukay's bandmates from CAN turned this session into an unofficial Inner Space reunion (the finished album hit the market exactly one month before the final Can LP "Rite Time").

Like its predecessor the new album was more of a sustained mood piece than a true compositional effort, with every instrument and effect layered carefully and creatively into a fragile web of musical clairvoyance. Sylvian's primary contribution had to be the drifting heat-haze synth bed. Czukay provided the distinctive pinpoint guitar accents and his patented sampling cues: stray Middle Eastern radio signals; a snippet of Latin high mass, and so forth.

All beautiful stuff, well beyond the Peak of Normal. And the overall effect is more spellbinding than the similar abstract doodles of Sylvian's many other off-trail solo soundscapes. But because the music was more obviously grounded here than on the mirror-image "Plight" album, it lacked the same air of timeless mystery. My own assessment was in fact completely turned around after revisiting the music two decades later. This one had more of an immediate impact than its older brother, but in the long run didn't have the same legs.

Author and professor David Toop said it best, in his liner notes for the recent (and recommended) double-disc compilation of both albums in one package: the later album is "perhaps more satisfying for those who like to have a road to follow."