David Sylvian Announces first album in over a decade ‘The Distance Between the Killer and the Killing’ Out 26 February 2027

David Sylvian
Announces first album in over a decade
‘The Distance Between the Killer and the Killing’
Out 26 February 2027 via new label NANOQ
Pre-order here



credit: samadhisound.


Composed of sessions recorded between 2012 - 2025, David Sylvian’s new album, ‘The Distance Between the Killer and the Killing’ is based on recomposed improvisational sessions with a variety of artists ranging from Otomo Yoshihide, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bilianna Voutchkova and Miako Klein, to Jamie Drouin, Lance Austin Olson and more. The 46 minute instrumental is unlike anything tackled by Sylvian before and - released on 26 February via the freshly minted NANOQ label - is the official follow up to his 2009 album ‘Manafon’.

Japan made Sylvian famous in the late seventies and early eighties. The image was bright and stylized, difficult to separate from him. The irony of it is that this group’s later music had already begun to pare that image away. “Ghosts,” an unlikely hit in 1982, reduced almost everything around the voice: sparse electronics, a pulse, long stretches of exposed space.

‘The Distance Between the Killer and the Killing’ is the far edge of a way of working Sylvian has developed over the subsequent years. Between 2003 and 2014, Samadhisound, the label he founded, released records by Harold Budd, David Toop and Toshimaru Nakamura, as well as one of Derek Bailey’s final studio recordings. His solo albums have always drawn other musicians in. Sakamoto and Czukay are already there on Brilliant Trees, his first solo record, in 1984.

A perfect example would be the story of Blemish. In 2003, holed up in his own studio for six weeks, Sylvian recorded an unflinching account of a marriage coming apart. Yet the record was never solitary. Derek Bailey appears on three of its songs, his free-improvised guitar recorded elsewhere and sent to Sylvian to work with. Christian Fennesz had reached out while the album was being made. Sylvian sent him “A Fire in the Forest” and Fennesz sent it back, transformed.

Sylvian’s own releases have become rarer. What continued underneath is hard to measure – until today. ‘The Distance Between the Killer and the Killing’ sounds nothing like a return. More like another displacement and, altogether, an anamnesis. The material is cut and worked until separate times begin to inhabit one another. Voices that belong to no one in particular pass through instruments, electronics, reverberation. And Sylvian is here, arranging distances. This is perhaps the quieter paradox of his work. The less insistently he occupies its centre, the more phosphorescent the trace of him, like a presence the recordings hold and give back once the source eludes us.