Blemish is the sixth studio album by British singer-songwriter David Sylvian, released in May 2003 on Sylvian's Samadhisound label.

Following his release from his contract with Virgin Records, Sylvian built a home studio, Samadhi Sound Studio, where he recorded Blemish in early 2003. The album was inspired by, and documents, the disintegration of Sylvian's relationship with his wife, Ingrid Chavez, marking a turning point in Sylvian's lyrics as they became more personal and open and less oblique. Wanting to find a new musical vocabulary for himself, he recorded the album in a relatively quick, six-week duration, improvising the eight songs on the album as he went. It features guest appearances from free improvisation guitarist Derek Bailey and electronic musician Fennesz.

The album is experimental in its use of electronics and sound and marks a stark departure in Sylvian's musical career, moving in an ambient direction and featuring fewer occurrences of melody. Sylvian felt the album functioned as catharsis, and that recording the album helped him work through difficult emotions. Blemish was originally released via the internet only, but when the album caught the attention of distributors, Sylvian set up Samadhi Sound records who released the album commercially in mid-2003. Despite alienating several fans, Blemish was a critical success, with praise given to its dark, personal tone. Sylvian toured in promotion of the album in autumn 2003, while a remix album entitled The Good Son vs. The Only Daughter, containing remixes of each of the songs from Blemish remixed by international producers, was released in February 2005.

Background and inspiration Blemish follows David Sylvian's protracted legal wranglings with Virgin Records, which ended when Sylvian was released from his contract. During his later days on the label, Sylvian was seen as "a historical oddity" on their roster as opposed to "a sound business investment," seeing as he had a developed cult following but had very limited commercial success. Although the musician was preparing compilation albums of his work for Virgin, he found it a creatively stifling process, but despite wishing to "start over again" had no support from the label. He felt the industry would not be supportive of the work he wanted to create, and upon leaving Virgin, become more self-sufficient, building a home studio in his New Hampshire home, Samadhi Sound Studio, over the course of a year. Blemish, recorded without a contract, became the first of several ongoing projects from Sylvian after leaving the label.

Blemish also documents the disintegration of Sylvian's relationship with his wife, American singer Ingrid Chavez. Sylvian used Blemish to channel his emotions "as a kind of creative catharsis", in the words of Flux magazine, using his unhappiness to "delve deeper into some of the darker corners of his consciousness. Once you are down, you may as well keep drilling and see how far you can go and use the experience to exorcise some hidden demons." Sylvian said that he had a "sense of trauma" that needed addressing and "wanted out," adding: "I used the emotions to punch further into the darker recesses of my own mind, to see how far I could go, to see what I would find there and if and how I could give it voice." Sylvian explained to how the album worked as a style of therapy:

Writing and recording Blemish was produced by Sylvian and recorded over six weeks between February and March 2003 at his Samadhi Sound Studio. There was an immediacy to creating the album that allowed the singer to not overthink the lyrics; he described the recording as very instantaneous: "You put something improvised on the guitar down on the hard drive and immediately responded to that lyrically. Within a couple of hours, you have a complete set of lyrics and a melodic line. So I'd record that on the spot, which allows me to be less cautious about what's revealed." After the rapid recording of the record, it was left in its "natural state," which Sylvian says was opposed to "producing something over deliberated and refined". Flux magazine says this improvised nature gives the album "a sincere sense of urgency." Reviewer Chris Jones felt Sylvian's "singular extemporised recording processed" freed him from "any previous sense of precious perfectionism".

Sylvian improvised much of Blemish alone, with the exception of three tracks with free improvisation guitarist Derek Bailey and one with electronic musician Christian Fennesz, who joined the recording sessions two weeks after it began, by which point Sylvian had already completed four songs. He wished to work with a musician who was exploring modern virtual filtering systems, but was unable to find someone that fit his aesthetic; instead, during the recording of the album, Fennesz contacted Sylvian regarding work he wanted his involvement in, "and so, in a roundabout way," Sylvian found an ideal collaborator for the record. This was unlike Sylvian's earlier previous solo projects, where he would seek out the musicians he decided beforehand would be ideal. Meanwhile, he approached Bailey for the album at a joint concert he was playing with Milo Fine; although Bailey agreed, he was unsure why Sylvian pursued him.

Sylvian had decided he had taken the form of pop songs to their pinnacle with his previous album, Dead Bees on a Cake (1999), and when beginning work on Blemish, he had the desire "to eradicate the past and to find a whole new vocabulary for myself. At first, you are working from pure intuition. You are not sure where you are going; later, you begin to understand where the vocabulary is leading you and how to make it speak for you in a more profound way." In addition to the new sonic experimentation on the album, Sylvian's voice, while retaining his signature vibrato reminiscent of Bryan Ferry, was closely microphoned, and his harmonies were intimately double tracked. Sylvian reflected on the recording sessions: "Living through these emotions was very difficult, but finding a voice for them was so cathartic, and after that six-week period, I'd felt I'd worked through some very difficult emotions. I felt an enormous amount of release."

Composition Lyrics Written about his divorce with Chavez, Sylvian's lyrics on Blemish are more honest and emotionally open and less oblique than on previous albums, despite "numerous disfigurations of clear-cut linear thought," according to critic Andy Kellman. Sylvian, who described the record as a "portrait of a person in crisis," had not worked with a "complex set of emotions" that had not already reached a resolution in his music before, and this time, situated in the middle of his breakup, "there was no resolution, there was no way of projecting that onto the material- an artificial sense that everything will be all right in the end, everything resolves, everything is okay. There was none of that with the material. It was in the heat of that complexity of emotions, of trying to face them head on and not look away." Sylvian conceived the lyrics to explore "everything I couldn't face head on in real life" and delved deeper into emotions "that weren't profound to begin with," such as hate, to see how far he could go. Sylvian explained: "The level of hate I was experiencing wasn't that intense, but I wanted the challenge of finding out what that felt like. It was like automatic writing."

The musician felt that the expression of anger had changed as he got older, a change represented by the relevant parts of Blemish: "[A]s you get older, that gets digested and surfaces in entirely different ways. There can be microbeats in the body of a composition that express anger so much more succinctly than a power chord, or an enraged vocal. I mean, 'The Only Daughter' is a piece of murderous feeling. It could be describing a murder that's already taken place." Nonetheless, Dave Gavan of The Quietus considers Blemish to be "a surprisingly recrimination-free affair as divorce albums go," highlighting the lines "The trouble is / It's impossible to know / Who's right and who's wrong" from the title track. While Sylvian denies any pathological forgiveness to the "even-handedness" of the lyric, he nonetheless conceded that "it's possible to see through the anger and know that the degree of hurt you're experiencing is colouring everything. So there IS no wrong or right at the end of it. That's obviously the case. It takes two to make a relationship and there are different needs in different people. I couldn't take myself so seriously as to think that my viewpoint was the only one." The singer felt that, while the divorce was the impetus of Blemish, "I think it's got more to offer than that."

Music Blemish is a fractured, stark, raw and intimate experimental album, combining Sylvian's ambient and song-based work. Sylvian, who called the album "an impromptu suite of songs for guitar, electronics and voice," performs alone for half of the album, accompanied by his electronic treatments and guitar, while appears on the remaining songs with either Bailey and Fennesz. The latter musician helps bring a glitch influence to the record, while the jagged guitar work of Bailey, who, in the words of one reviewer, plucks his guitars "as if their strings had been replaced by rusty barbed wire abound," is said to complement the "rougher hewn material" on the album and Sylvian's mournful voice. Bailey's guitar is low in the mix, and appear on particularly minimalist tracks. Writer David Toop felt an important sense of space on the record – which makes ambient use of the room it was recorded in – explaining:

The songs on the album eschew traditional melody, as well as standard pop structures, with Sylvian's vocals instead providing the sole line of melody and counterpoint to hold the music together. This is a departure from earlier Sylvian recordings, though his signature upfront vibrato vocals remain. Most of the songs are based around a single chord, although according to Jones, the material avoids becoming drone music due to the close attention "being repaid by a swarm of insectoid-glitches". According to biographer Martin Power, the music is often little more than "an echoing guitar chord or spare keyboard flourish," while reviewer Nick Southall says the melodies "are pulled apart so slowly and deliberately that you can see the joints and mechanisms of pop music, the purposeful analogue crackle becomes a dovetail for a small song made long, the dry, dawdling dramatics of his voice, at once ancient and modern, become a cog-wheel for a pop-opera soliloquy."

While clues concerning the album's troublesome background are apparent throughout Blemish, Andy Kellman of AllMusic said the messages being obscured by "meticulously organized sounds," like handclaps, rattling shopping trolleys and fragments of Bailey's delicate guitar work, as well as Sylvian's non-linear lyrics. While Sylvian's vocals are front and centre, with them being mixed extremely loudly until they took on a "confrontational" and "physical presence" when Sylvian played them back, Blemish is also the first album in which Sylvian distorted and chopped up his voice in a new, unnatural fashion. Bailey himself said of the album a year later that he felt Sylvian "works it quite well compared to what I do. He doesn't sing the same as what I play. [...] My impression is that his voice is so distinctive all the pieces sound the same - a very special voice and special words, but my impression is they're all the same."

Songs