CLOT Magazine Mix

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I was recently asked to make a mix for CLOT Magazine. The result is an hour of music loosely constructed around absences, vacancies, and dereliction. The above image is of a deserted church located deep in the north Cumbrian interior, now falling into disrepair. I pass by the building on a regular basis, as I traverse the labyrinthine back roads between Scotland and England. Fittingly, therefore, all the music in this mix is sourced from vinyl — the sound of cracks and pops attesting to a kind of degraded materiality.

Perhaps predictably, the first recording that came to mind was Nico’s ‘No One Is There’ — a favourite song with a haunting melody, and my selection moved out from there, looking for records that had similar resonances, regardless of their provenance or genre. I was therefore interested to discover overlaps between the Baroque inflections of Boismortier’s ‘Concerto for 5 Tenor Recorders’ and the synthetic swells of Vainqueur’s ‘Elevation’, or the howling sonorities of Gareth Davis’ clarinet and Jandek’s cracked harmonica.

The whole mix is held together by the rich field recordings of Joshua Bonnetta’s ‘What Lies in It’, a document of a Californian ghost resort, Salton Sea. In turn, various segues are made with Alan Lomax’s recordings of human voices, many of which crackle and blur with their own disintegrating physicality. These are various documents of (primarily North American) languages and dialects: Blood (00:50), Stoney (07:50), Beaver (17:48), English (25:45 & 36:00), Achumawi (48:45) and Nenet (54:05). Given this proliferation of languages, in the end Nico herself has gone — vanishing through the cracks in her own song to leave only its refrain, looping eternally.

00:00 Joshua Bonnetta — What Lies in It (Shelter Press)
01:05 Tirath Singh Nirmala & Richard Youngs — A2 (Untitled) (HP Cycle)
05:40 Stephen Vitiello — Shake (Farpoint Recordings)
19:05 Baby Ford — New York (Rhythm King)
19:37 Gareth Davis & Steven R Smith — Westering (Important)
23:46 Jandek — Harmonica (Corwood Industries)
29:06 Félicia Atkinson — The Owls (Umor Rex)
36:35 Nico — No One Is There (Refrain) (WEA)
39:00 Musica Dolce — Concerto for 5 Tenor Recorders in D Minor (Adagio) (Grammofonfirma BIS)
40:30 Vainqueur — Elevation (Version 3) (Chain Reaction)
50:10 Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang — Orcus Pellicano (Editions Mego)
55:00 Joshua Bonnetta — What Lies in It (Shelter Press)

Till Fabrics

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Till Fabrics is the first in a new series, Moraine Sequence, an ongoing series of recordings influenced by research into glacigenic landforms. MS01 features two longform works, ‘Till Fabrics (+)’ and ‘Till Fabrics (-)’, both of which essay a kind of auditory deconstruction of morainic landscapes. Here can be heard the effects of attrition and ice weathering over millennia, as evidenced in low-end synth debris suspended in a shimmering matrix of violin and cello regolith.

Originally released as a white cassette with on-body printing in a white card enclosure, accompanied by a download card featuring unique verso artwork. The recordings are now available in digital format.

Front Variations

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QUOIN 4 (2018)
Richard Skelton Front Variations

Worldwide coordination of glacier monitoring began in 1894 with the creation of the Commission Internationale des Glaciers (CIG), now the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), but the monitoring of individual glaciers, such as Leirufjarðarjökull in Iceland, began as early as 1840. The long-term aim of such endeavours was to gain insight into the processes of climate change.

Quoin 4 presents a combination of data sourced from the WGMS along with aerial photographs from the US Naval Oceanographic Office to highlight ice-sheet recession over the past 100 years and more. ‘Front variation’ refers to the recorded difference in position of a glacier’s front edge – a positive figure indicates glacier advance, whereas a negative figure indicates glacier retreat.

 
The music that accompanies this volume of Quoin was composed using only sine waves – the purest and simplest periodic oscillations or tones. These tones were then subjected to increasing amounts of feedback in order to simulate the so-called ice-albedo feedback mechanism. This is the process whereby the action of melting glaciers reduces the global surface area of ice, thereby reducing the amount of solar radiation that glaciers reflect, which in turn increases global temperatures and causes further glacial melting. Ring modulation and distortion were also used to further deteriorate the sound signal.

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Quoin is the exclusive publication for friends and patrons of Corbel Stone Press. To find out more, visit:

https://www.corbelstonepress.com/quoin-4

The Look Away

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‘I am north of where I was. Go north. That was
the imperative. Always north. Although the why
of it is no longer clear.’

A wounded man in a fugue state hides out in a deserted north-country shieling, convinced that he is pursued. Over the days and weeks that follow, as no one comes to claim him, his mind turns from his pursuers to the hills themselves, and their other-than-human inhabitants. Gradually he is caught up in a drama that can have only one conclusion.

‘As if Samuel Beckett had written The Goshawk’
(Mark Valentine)

Central to the book is a map of northern England which has a real-life existence, and can be examined in detail via the National Library of Scotland.

Originally produced in a highly limited hardcover edition by Corbel Stone Press, The Look Away is now available in paperback from via the new imprint, Xylem Books. Copies are available from Corbel Stone Press, or through bookstores.

‘The Look Away is a bold, poetic meditation on the power of nature to forget, to erase the past, and to renew, even if that renewal is unforgiving and indiscriminate. I have rarely read anything so emotionally compelling in so unusual a form.’ (Brian Lavelle)

Music for Cubby’s Tarn

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Richard has provided the soundtrack to an exhibition by photographer Joseph Wright at the Grizedale Centre, Cumbria:

Cubby’s Tarn Exhibition
Grizedale Forest Centre
Nr. Hawkshead, Cumbria
LA22 0QJ

18th October – 31st December 2017

Three Short Films

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Dissolve Our Maps

Julian Hyde has been tracking the unregarded edgelands of that jewel in England’s crown, the Lake District, for over ten years – picking over the frayed seams and exposing the cracks that Cumbria’s tourist industry would rather you didn’t discover. This short film presents isolated fragments of Hyde’s decade-long walk to nowhere, tracing and retracing an elliptical path along the ‘unseen realm between the main road and the church’, recapitulating in his own words an oblique narrative of hope and despair, clarity and blurred vision(s).

No Frontier

‘No Frontier’ is a short film exploring the psychological effects of travel, climate change, remoteness and isolation. Filmed on the eastern fringes of Iceland during a time when the artist had no permanent address, it is a travelogue of motionless, lingering images that are ambivalent in tone and entirely devoid of human figures. The film’s sense of unease is compounded by a series of captioned, first-person texts, adapted from the Poetic Edda, which essay a kind of psychological disturbance that is both deeply personal and reflective of a more widespread cultural trauma. ‘No Frontier’ was produced for ‘Frontiers in Retreat’ – an international artist residency programme exploring multidisciplinary approaches to ecology in contemporary art.

In Pursuit of the Eleventh Measure

‘In Pursuit of the Eleventh Measure’ is a short film drawing elliptical threads between Scandinavian water folklore, religion and Iceland’s hydro-electricity industry. Filmed in Seyðisfjorður, Iceland, the soundtrack is composed of various recordings from Fjarðarselsvirkjun, the fjord’s power plant. ‘Eleventh Measure’ was produced for ‘Frontiers in Retreat’ – an international artist residency programme exploring multidisciplinary approaches to ecology in contemporary art.

Return of The Inward Circles

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And Right Lines Limit and Close All Bodies

1. Lye not in fear
2. The soul subsisting
3. In an hydropicall body
4. Scaleby, x
5. Nitre of the earth
6. Necks was a proper figure
7. If the nearnesse of our last
8. Scaleby, xi

Notes: Bury. Obliterate. Rediscover. Telluric currents. Chthonic energy.


 
Scaleby

1. Scaleby, i
2. Scaleby, ii
3. Scaleby, iii
4. Scaleby, iv
5. Scaleby, v
6. Scaleby, vi
7. Scaleby, vii
8. Scaleby, viii
9. Scaleby, ix

Notes: Funerary landscapes of northern Britain. A Cumbrian ‘bog body’, found 1845, ‘wrapped in what appeared to be the skin of a deer’.

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Pre-order the CD of And Right Lines here:

http://corbelstonepress.com/andrightlines.htm

Both albums are released in April.

Musica Subterranea

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In January 2014 I buried a violin at a secret Newcastle location in the name of art. Previously, such activities were enacted as private gestures and referred to obliquely in writing, such as the poem Bond, from Landings. An instinctive act – following the impetus of a sacral, rather than cranial, brain – the gesture felt like an attempt to connect with telluric energies and edaphological processes, to open the creative act to external influence; a literal surrender of the materia musica in the hope that they may return transformed. It is worth reiterating that a physical transformation was not the original aim or desire. Like the principle of ‘contagious’ or ‘touching’ magic, the duration of interment was of secondary importance.

When thinking about this process for an AV Festival commission, however, a longer duration was felt to be more relevant to the festival’s theme of ‘extraction’. A period of one month was chosen, and I interred the violin, not without some ambivalence. Returning a month later, the instrument had formed a physical bond with the soil itself, and the disinterment took on the appearance of an archaeological dig. I wrote, without irony, that “in no other circumstance have the funerary aspects of this process been brought alive in such an emphatic way.” I also wrote that ‘extracting’ sounds from the violin would be like “interrogating the dead”. Listen for yourself:


 
The instrument was exhibited on a table in an anteroom of Brinkburn Priory, Northumberland, with a black tablecloth concealing a speaker system beneath playing the music on a loop. This created the effect of the music rising up through the table and animating the violin’s corpse, which, displayed in anatomised form, reminded me of an archaeological exhibit.

interdisinter-brinkburn-2

(Ie:)

skeleton-1

Two years later and there is still so much to work through. The violin-corpse, like so many archaeological artefacts, is now carefully shelved in an archive; not a living “storeroom in the peat”, but a dry, climate-controlled repository, clearly labelled for future reference. But for what purpose?

Twelve months later I released the album Belated Movements for an Unsanctioned Exhumation, August 1st 1984. The first composition, ‘Petition for Reinterment’, expresses an ambivalence about the exhumation, preservation and exhibition of bog bodies such as Lindow, Grauballe and Tollund Man. Do we have a right to discontinue their centuries-old, crushing embrace with the soil?

It only occurs to me later that there is an implicit self-reproach here. What about the violin whose body I bequeathed to the soil, albeit only for 30 days? If I always intended to recover it, is it subject to the same moral governance? Does its otherness, its non-humanness, grant it any special privilege, or conversely, does it grant me the right to exploit it as I see fit? Curiously, some people have expressed their distaste that I would subject a violin to such an ordeal. None of them seem in the least bit disturbed that we should cut down a tree in order to manufacture the violin in the first place. Perhaps a return to the soil – to pedogenesis and to telluric processes – is its most fitting and natural fate?

(Photos: copyright Colin Davison / AV Festival)

The Cult Revived

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thecultrevived-1-6

The Cult Revived is the working title to an ongoing piece of research that draws together many of the strands from my recent work, stretching from Landings (2009) to Moor Glisk (2012), Nimrod (2014), Ferae Naturae (2015) and Beyond the Fell Wall (2015). It is a proposed ‘linguistic excavation of northern Britain’, although the scale of such an enterprise is perhaps too large for a single work. Initial areas of interest include: archaeology (particularly early hominins); geology, edaphology and taphonomy; funerary landscapes; history relating to animal persecution; mythology relating to animal veneration (particularly horned and antlered deities); earth cults; vegetation and fertility rites, folk-ritual and magic, including masks, shamanism, apotropaia and therianthropy.

Perhaps in acknowledgement of its over-ambitious scale, I have decided to publish both research and work-in-progress in the form of a blog, and a series of printed publications. The first booklet, picking up where ‘Belated Movements’ left off, examines the discovery of a ‘bog body’ at Scaleby, Cumbria, in 1845:

http://thecultrevived.tumblr.com/tcr1

Beyond the Fell Wall

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A couple of years ago, or more, I was approached by Little Toller Books to write something for their Monograph Series. As it transpired, the book that was to become Beyond the Fell Wall evolved out of the opening lines of a poem which I had just then begun:

to put down words
about this landscape
as if they were stones

It was as if the book already existed, “written in the scattering of boulders across the field’s page”, and it was simply my task to diligently observe, to record, to translate. It proved to be a more difficult proposition than I anticipated, however. Two years later, and I wrote the following lines:

The making of a wall: stones added to stones.
Align yourself with them. Imagine their position as the result of deposition. The work of an unseen river; their direction, a tracery of its current, its objective.
Place your thoughts with them. Release them. Let them be gradually laid to rest. With others.

This surrender to natural processes perhaps best describes the process of writing:

These thoughts, laid down incrementally, though my own are also the product of path, of streambed, of hedgerow. They are equally prompted by the rises and hollows of the land itself, its myriad rhythms, as they are the transits of the mind.

In opening myself to external influence, to both the unseen and the unheard, the book therefore feels both familiar and strangely other. There are parts which I find uncomfortable – which evoke a strong emotional response. My particular thanks are therefore extended to Adrian at Little Toller, for both his patience in allowing me the time to write, and his belief in the manuscript that I finally sent him, some two or three years later.

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Beyond the Fell Wall will be published this autumn. It is vividly illustrated by Michael Kirkman.

FellWall-Jacket

Here’s the official synopsis:

Richard Skelton has spent nearly half a decade living in a small valley, high in the Furness hills of Cumbria, in northern England. It is a region of crags and exposed, weather-worn rock, of bracken, grassland and bogs, scattered with the remains of prehistoric settlements. “Life up here,” he writes, “amidst elemental nature and the tumbled stones, seems more precarious, and therefore more precious.” Beyond the Fell Wall is a distillation of his thoughts and observations from his brief tenure here, informed by his daily wanderings along its network of paths, the banks of its streams and the edges of its walls. It is also a poetic enquiry into the inanimate life of a landscape – its unheard melodies and unseen movements, its supernatural and heretical voices. It considers both vast geological epochs and brief moments of intimacy, conjuring both the imaginary and the real, which, in a place such as this, effortlessly elide. At its heart is the fell wall itself – a vast, serpentine entity; a vessel for lives, stories and myths; the dark centre about which all of life and death revolves.

Of the Elm Decline

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Of the Elm Decline

Towards a new versification: A line crossed, back and forth. Figures – datum and metaphor. Object and subject, inextricably enmeshed. The line scores, stitches, encloses, underpins. The bi-polar problem: Organic/inorganic, sentience/unconsciousness. The poem as interim report, the table as imaginative prism.

Of the Elm Decline is published in Memorious Earth : A Longitudinal Study.

Archive, Sound and Landscape

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landmarks-landscapes

Over the years, quite understandably, Landings has received publicity almost exclusively as a musical work – but when interviewed I have always tried to situate the recordings within a more diverse series of activities which began in 2004/5 and continue to this day. Despite an exhibition of both sound and text at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in 2011, the ‘larger work’ of Landings has received relatively little attention. I’m therefore rather grateful to the work of two writers who have recently entered into a more holistic engagement with it.

The first is Robert Macfarlane, whose generosity to the work of others is evident in all of his books. In his most recent, Landmarks, he provides a keenly observed close reading/listening, remarking that “both sound and text are devoted to a kind of echo-location, used to measure the relations of distanced entities”. He goes on to describe how “the book possesses an archival intensity: long lists of the names of farms once active on the moors, retrieved from historical maps; or lexicons of Lancashire dialect terms, presented as litanies spoken against loss”.

The second is Martyn Hudson, whose in-depth academic paper features in the current issue of Landscapes journal. He too identifies the archival impulse at work within Landings, observing that “the entirety of Skelton’s corpus refigures the relationship between artistic practice and the detritus of the land and the lives lived upon it … his work is an inventory and a recalling of others – the revenants of the past who became emblematic of the lost of the moor.” He concludes by stating that Landings “provides the index by which the multiple narratives of the moor can be told, but also the beginning of a more comprehensive way of thinking about the deep mapping of land forms and the histories in which they are situated”.

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The issue of naming, and specifically of multiple names or pseudonyms, continues to be of interest to music journalists. Between 2005 and 2011 I used seven different names for the music I published via Sustain-Release. At the time I didn’t think that my use of multiple names was particularly novel, or desirous of attention, but it did at least serve the purpose of foregrounding the textual element of the work. In a recent interview, I described the act of naming as a form of dowsing. The work “moves along its own dark channels, and the act of naming is like trying to delimit flow or current patterns”. Continuing the riverine metaphor, I also described name-giving as a means of bringing the work to the surface. The first time that Landings broke ground was in 2006, with the composition ‘Stolen Ground’ – prefiguring my later concerns with theft and trespass.


 
Until that point it had seemed nebulous – the act of naming and the resultant exposition conferred a certain fixity, even if, in so doing, it diminished or reduced what the work could be. What was once subterranean, hidden, manifold, became exposed, visible, singular. Yes, I had found a channel, but if I was under any illusion that I had found the river, then there were clear reproofs:

“What have you given, that you have not already stolen? Flaunted desolation. Made your woe-songs in dull chambers, with dull strings. But our song is the river, the song of all deaths, the song of passings.”

It often strikes me that our most significant ‘works’ are those which are in some way unrealised. They resist any attempt to conform to a predefined outline or ideal, or to manifest in an articulate and precise way. They don’t quite align, are unruly or incoherent. Perhaps it falls to the work of future archivists to sift through our unfinished corpora, piecing them together into new, undreamed of configurations?