ALWAYS EVERYTHING

RICHARD SKELTON // CLOUWBECK

Good friend of AE James Balf takes an early morning tryst round the music of Richard Skelton, whose excellent Landings album came out at the start of the year on Type, and whose From Which The River Rises (as Clouwbeck) is creeping into the wider world as we speak.

Clouwbeck ~ From Which the River Rises by sustain-release

—-

Proper murky, greyed out autumnal colours. Fog. Landscapes. Richard Skelton thrives in an area where dense collages of sound and that organic shapeshifting nature of, well, nature, take hold. Just look at that artwork – it’s pretty much what comes into view out of my car window every morning as I transcend hills and look over plateaus. Spectacular views obscured by the atmosphere’s other ideas. Bleak, ghostly landforms fighting for attention through the cloud and fog, plants echoing a vague hue of green in the meagre repressed light they’re offered. I swear the atmosphere here is against the whole idea of photosynthesis…

Skelton takes these fogged-out instrumental sessions of cello and string and plays them relentlessly, building layers of sound like some sort of post-rock/ambient beast, thriving in the freedom that only the modern classical/Boomkat sphere can bring. Niche as it sounds Landings deserves an audience outside of that. Big time. It’s the soundtrack to the mornings you missed while you where busy sleeping or waiting for the light to come up. It’s the country flexing itself in the morning dew while those early shimmers of light slowly start to energise the life around them. You can feel the cold fresh air fill your lungs, the deep warm breath filter out slowly. It’s like the whole album takes place in that transitional period between sunlight hitting the ground and you actually feeling its heat. Cold shivers of strung instruments itch urgently into loops and layers, carving out dramatic glimpses of landscapes you’ve passed through. The unyielding atmosphere is urgent yet blissful, like you’ve come to a halt in that car journey I vaguely mentioned above and got out.

You stop and see that this previously fleeting set of landforms, colours, climate, is a new existence, a harsh but strangely beautiful place that echoes calm as much as it does hostility. In short, you’re going to get cold, but if you look a little further you’re going to find a whole different experience that’s ripe for exploration.

>Find more about Richard Skelton here<

James