condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (general wear)
Released 21 March 1988 on Venture Records (the experimental subsidiary of Virgin that handled the more out-of-mainstream end of the Sylvian catalog) as VE 11, Plight & Premonition is the first of two collaborative albums by David Sylvian and Holger Czukay of Can. Recorded at the Can Studio in Cologne late in 1986 (with "Premonition" completed in February 1987), the album is a key ambient document of the late 1980s and a key text in the unbroken line that runs from Brian Eno's Music For Airports through Plateaux Of Mirror, On Land and Gone To Earth's instrumental sides to here.
Two pieces, both over fifteen minutes long. "Plight (The Spiralling Of Winter Ghosts)" opens with Sylvian's prepared piano floating in slow constellations against Czukay's shortwave radio samples, vibraphone and treated organ. "Premonition (Giant Empty Iron Vessel)" extends the method across a longer, more architectural sustained tone-field. There are no vocals, no rhythms, no traditional song structures. Sylvian had originally come to Cologne to record vocals for a track Czukay was working on; instead the two simply moved around the studio room from instrument to instrument and let the tape capture what emerged. Czukay's method (he often preferred not to tell collaborators what was being recorded) shaped the entire session.
The original vintage Venture / Virgin UK pressing on VE 11, in the elegant minimal sleeve. Plight & Premonition is a key late-1980s ambient document and the opening of the Sylvian-Czukay collaboration that would shortly extend to Flux + Mutability (1989).
