Blemish

Blemish was recorded over six weeks in February and March 2003 at his own Samadhi Sound Studio in New Hampshire, after he left Virgin. It documents the end of his marriage to Ingrid Chavez, and Sylvian described it as a portrait of a person in crisis. He wrote and recorded a song a day, laying down an improvised guitar part and responding to it lyrically within a couple of hours. He wanted, he said, to eradicate the past and find a whole new vocabulary. Derek Bailey plays on three songs and Christian Fennesz arranged and added electronics to one, joining two weeks into the sessions. The rest Sylvian improvised alone, and he called it an impromptu suite of songs for guitar, electronics and voice.

The album was first available only on the internet through his website, but distributors took notice and Samadhi Sound released it worldwide on 24 June 2003. Uncut named it his best work since Brilliant Trees, and The Wire ranked it second among the 50 best albums of 2003. Metacritic averaged 76 from six reviews, and Pitchfork's Jess Harvell later called it a small masterpiece. Sylvian said some fans disliked it. He toured it in autumn 2003 as A Fire in the Forest, with Steve Jansen and Masakatsu Takagi, and the remix album The Good Son vs. The Only Daughter followed in September 2005.