David Sylvian & Holger Czukay Plight & Premonition (1988) {virgin} [re Up]

Grönland Records reissue by two unique musicians whose paths originally crossed in the early-eighties while working on Sylvian’s debut solo album, Brilliant Trees. In 1986, David Sylvian and Holger Czukay - founding member and bassist in legendary German Kosmiche band Can - were ostensibly reconvening for Sylvian to record a vocal for Czukay's forthcoming album Rome Remains Rome. But on arriving at Czukay's studio - a former cinema in Köln - Sylvian began playing freeform, improvising on readily available instruments located in the studio itself. No sooner had Sylvian, on whatever instrument he’d been applying himself, start to structurally define/refine the performance than Czukay would stop the recording he’d surreptitiously been making. Czukay had attempted to capture the process of creation without a musician's inclination for refinement. This process, drawn out over two nights, gave birth to the duos first, full-fledged, collaboration, Plight and Premonition.

Following the extremely warm reception given his self-named band's well-deserving debut album, Holy Diver, Ronnie James Dio figured there was no point in messing with a winning formula, and decided to play it safe with 1984's sophomore effort, The Last in Line – with distinctly mixed results. Although technically cut from the same cloth as those first album nuggets, fist-pumping new songs like "We Rock," and "I Speed at Night" curiously went from good to tiresome after just a few spins (a sign that the songwriting clichés were starting to pile up…read on); and the otherwise awesome, seven-minute epic, "Egypt (The Chains Are On)," inexplicably lost it's strikingly sinister main riff halfway through, in what sounds like a mastering snafu of some kind.