Overlooked Albums #2: Richard Skelton - Landings

 

 

 

Originally released on his own Sustain-Release Private Press as a limited edition Book & CD package in 2009, Richard Skelton's Landings was re-released as a standalone CD by the ever-wonderful Type Records in early 2010. This support may or may not have resulted in the record's rise beyond experimental music's ever-wavering high watermark to the attention of the online music media, garnering a number of supportive mentions towards the tail end of last year. That said, it is also the sort of music that can easily slip off the radar, hence the need for this article. In preparation, I contacted Richard and asked him if he would mind answering a few questions, to which he kindly agreed. His responses have been subsequently incorporated within as well as choice quotes from the written element of Landings, which are reproduced here with the author’s permission.

 

Something that I found especially striking as a lover of words, was that the original self-release comes as a lovingly fashioned Book and CD package. Turning the pages to read while the first achingly drawn notes of the sweepingly emotive Noon Hill Wood cry out is an all-too rare experience. Following the rise and fall of the music by reading its creator's underlying thoughts and inquisitive exploration of the history of the land becomes an almost symbiotic undertaking. When an artist works within different disciplines, their works are often completed in one or the other: writing or music, illustration or poetry, photography or sculpture. Here, Lancashire native Skelton presents a compendium of thoughts, poem fragments and musical compositions that together form a blissful soliloquy; a fascinating view into one man's inner world as he processes numerous emotions by engaging deeply with the land around him, questioning and exploring, incorporating it into his being until the lines between what is his and what belongs to the earth dissolve like the mist that hangs over the moors.

 

The music he created as a result of these regular immersions, much of it recorded in and around northern England's oft neglected West Pennines, is so intrinsically linked to the words of the book that had they remained hidden amongst a stack of personal notebooks we would have been denied a vital element of this artwork. Reflecting his relationship with the land across which he walks, each informs the other. Each helps the other to understand its own place more clearly: "During my childhood the foothills that make up the West Pennine Moors were something of a fixture on the horizon. Distant, but ever-present, nevertheless. A reminder that there was something else out there. That it wasn't simply endless suburbs; concrete, metal and glass.”

 

Skelton's first wife Louise, to whom this record is dedicated, passed away in 2005, and it seems only natural that part of a complex grieving process would take the form of long excursions into nature. To places they had been, revisiting moments they had shared.

 

 

As a result, Landings was written "in the shadow of bereavement. It was a labour of love." Clearly, this is an intensely personal work and as such there is a subtle voyeurism to its exploration that is unavoidably entrancing to the outsider. We look in on this world and we want to understand, to empathise, to wonder how we would cope if put in the same position. "Part of the process, for me, was a feeling of complete dislocation, and a consequent desire to anchor myself. To root myself in the physical. In landscape."

 

Although Landings marks the culmination of four years of recordings and writing, Skelton himself is no newcomer. He has been releasing music under a variety of neogolistic pseudonyms for over five years, of which Heidika, Carousell, Harlassen and A Broken Consort are just a few. Alongside Marking Time (Preservation, 2008), Landings is the only other work to be released under his name. As he points out: "Music is essentially aetheric and abstract. A name – along with the accompanying artwork, text and packaging – creates a world for the music to inhabit. The music comes first and then the name suggests itself." On this occasion however, "As the music was an attempt to distill a real landscape, and the text described my own reflections on the landscape itself, it seemed natural that the project would bear my own name."

 

In his own words, Landings is "an attempt to imaginatively engage with a landscape, to connect with a place and its history in a way that is filled with gesture and ritual." And ritual, whether deliberate or naturally evolving, certainly contributes to the faded twilight air of surreality that surrounds this album from the first note to the last. The whole project could very easily have slipped into a rather self-absorbed mire in the hands of one less genuine, less aware. It’s a testament to his skills as a composer that moments of that nature never occur. Consequently it is a feeling of purity and honesty that permeates most deeply. As his walks became a provider of the solace he sought, Skelton recounts his desire to give something back to the land that is healing him:

 

 

With much of the music recorded on location in the early hours the morning when all was quiet, “the only encounters I had were with animals. Cattle and horses are particularly inquisitive.” That age-old association between man and the land, emotions and their expression, is compounded on record by an honest, open orchestration and a flowing, immersive listening experience that has the power to transport the listener deep into the world of its creator. Midway through Scar Tissue, distant birdsong can be heard, lending a rhythmic hand as watery guitar lines sway uncertainly as if flustered by the wind, embarrassed by the wider spaces they inhabit. Rusting, bowed strings rise and fall during Threads Across the River, tugging at the heart, followed by the hazy thickness of Green Withins Brook where much emphasis is placed upon the echoing reverberations of tone and the layers of droning harmonics, a feature that recurs throughout the record.

 

 

Undertow glides along with washes of plaintive cello and what could be the high-pitched cries of crows, picking at a dead sheep carcass. It is suffused with a feeling a hope that continues throughout the remainder of the record. Voice of the Brook howls and wails its twisted lullaby, feral and alive. Pariah revisits Scar Tissue's pensive guitar before dissolving into the final glowing triumvirate which throbs with fizzing intensity: the culmination of all that has come before; a strong and moving testament, an imperfect statement of devotion, a pathway through the wreckage.

 

 

 

 

In dealing with loss in this way, Skelton deepens his connection to the world around him: "What I found compelling were the traces of humanity I found there – the scars of centuries of human habitation. My own questions about transience and memorialisation were answered in the path of a river, the flight of a kestrel, or the contours of a broken wall. "

 

In his quest for understanding, Landings demonstrates the importance of continuing the development of our relationships with place, and with the natural world. How many of us are aware that the rise and fall of the river mirrors our own internal struggles, that the changing of the seasons can mark a transformation in our own cycles of growth and development? A bond once highly cherished is commonly forgotten.

 

It’s an inherently spiritual quest: to understand the places we find ourselves occupying, to deepen our connection to them and to honour them somehow. There follows the desire to leave our own mark upon the land, to incorporate it into our world, and to make the unfamiliar familiar once more.