Mountain*7 - for the person with nothing better to do

Artist: Clouwbeck
Album: From Which the River Rises
Label: Sustain-Release

"I am haunted by waters" – Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

Richard Skelton’s recorded work has always had something of the alchemical about it; and as he refines and perfects his explorations and processes it’s tempting to think he’s approaching some grand unveiling, where he’ll reveal a chamber of relics, residues of captured moments, of transmutations, crossings over he’s made – crossings between the material and the non-material, between self and place. His latest release – From Which the River Rises, his third as Clouwbeck - is specifically about a relationship with water; and on it, Skelton’s is acting as pure conduit, dissolving the boundaries between himself and the flow of the river, and seeking to evoke the very tissue of experience, both in the sense of a relationship built up over time, and in the raw moment of being.

Always the Yarrow…

The river in question is the Yarrow, a river that runs across the West Pennine Moors in Lancashire. It formed one of the central obsessions for Skelton on his last album Landings and also featured heavily in the text that accompanied that record. In those combined mediums, Skelton explored the landscape in an intensely personal way, creating a kind of mythic internalised map, which he then projected outwards, remapping the terrain, and in some way re-claiming that terrain for his own purposes. It was a form of conjuring. On From Which the River Rises, Skelton takes a (moving) element of that landscape and seeks to know it and to make it known - to transmute its power into another medium. Kathleen Jamie has said of poetry that it is ‘a sort of connective tissue where myself meets the world’ and that she uses it to try to tease at that frail and febrile relationship, that most impenetrable of boundaries. Gerard Manley Hopkins was the great master of this, the shapes and sounds of his word hoard coming as close as it could ever be possible into making forms and media coalesce. Skelton is arguably coming closer than ever to achieving this with music.

If I spent enough time by its banks, could I get to know the river?

From Which the River Rises is made up of two long tracks, ‘Come the Aegir’ and ‘The Water’s Burden’, and you sense that this move into longer song forms has been shaped by hours of studying the Yarrow in all its moods and moments. As such instead of the at times microcosmic atmospheres of Landings or even previous Clouwbeck releases such as Wolfrahm, From Which… is dominated by long and sweeping bowed drones, which, on ‘The Water’s Burden’ collect and eddy around a bass undertow of simple piano figures. There is the signature Skelton tremble to the timbres, but there is a definite drawing out, a sense of shape and tumult with long periods of studied calm and quiet giving way to gradual intensities of volume and weight. And it’s these tumults that dominate the piece as a whole. In one sense they invoke the Yarrow in full spate and are an invocation of the sublime – at volume they are difficult to listen to, you might even say harrowing – but they also invoke something more subtle, something hinted at in the text of Landings.

Come down by the banks of the river. Place your hands in the water. And hold them there. Slowly let the cold take you. Close your eyes and yield. And just as this river has found its way into the landscape, century over century. Find your hands and arms between rock and stone. Find your place through touch and instinct. And I promise that just before the pain becomes unbearable. Before your body begins to shake uncontrollably. A deep stillness will wash over you. And you will forget. And by the banks of that river. The pain will slowly, imperceptibly subside. The gift of stillness will gradually pass. And your muscles will move again.

It was this passage that I first thought of when I heard From Which the River Rises, and more specifically, the opening track 'Come the Aegir' (for the record, the Aegir is a figure from Norse mythology, a personification of the ocean but the word also references a tidal bore that occurs in the Trent River in Lincolnshire). Whilst the tracks does seem to reference an oblique rising and falling of a period in the life of a river and indeed different tracts of the same moving body of water, it might also reference this sequence of events as described in Landings – the rise and falls of the bowed drones mimicking, transmuting the effects of the intense cold on the motions and whorls of the body.

If I spent enough time by its banks, could I get to know the river?
Its rapid tracts. Its sudden lulls.
Its changeling colour. Its constant cold.
If you placed me along its length, blindfolded, could I tell you where,
just from its sound?
Would that be enough?

And it's this subtlety I find so astonishing in Skelton's work – this ability to evoke and invoke in such a meticulous and sustained fashion. The urge to document in such a way – this process of sustained watching of 'looking narrowly' - and to recreate these periods of scrutiny in another form is where the notion of alchemy comes into things. In some way it is a form of disappearance, as the artist seeks to absent himself, and simply become a medium of transmittance. It is enough that on this document Skelton seems within the bounds of achieving something like his stated aim, to get close to answering that final question – would that be enough? But imagine if we could listen closely and for long enough, and we could be laid blindfolded along the length of the Yarrow and know from these trembling recreations that we were in its misty grip, aligned with its contours and in thrall to its silvery sighing voice. That would be something would it not?

Clouwbeck ~ From Which the River Rises by sustain-release

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 10:51 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Image by Dan Morelle

It has been awful quiet in these parts. I'll confess to a certain amount of lassitude certainly, but really life has got in the way in all its prickly forms. Not least a hideous dose of uvula pustules (or tonsillitis to the school nurse) which left me feeling like I had a hedgehog nesting to the north west of my larynx. Not much fun. I did hear this cracking show on Radio 4 whist I was off though - Chris Watson's Search for the Nightingale's Song. He does seem to be everywhere at the moment (the interview in a recent issue of The Wire is really something and it's led me to TC Lethbridge, more of which another time) - and with good reason. His method seems simple and yet there is something close to perfection in his (and his equipment's) output. His recording of the nightingale is a signature occurrence - thorough, rapt and so clear and pure at times as to sound artificial.

A few years ago I was walking down by the River Test near King's Somborne. It was late April and getting very close to the arrival dates for our intake of nightingales. It was humid for April, the air clammy and dense; and one particular field, set just back from the river, was boisteros with bird song, the air full of the criss-crossings of repeating figures of trills and whistles. From what I could make out the bulk of the noise could only have been coming from two or three locations, and despite never having heard nightingales in the field before, I was convinced these had to be them. It was an intense barrage of noise, at times like extended raygun peals, at others like some cracked and slipped motorik - always fading away into a single reedy note before the next barrage began. It wasn't song so much as textile, a swarm of threads knitting the air around me. I was mesmerised.

Unsure of myself however, I spoke to a friend who worked for the RSPB. He was free and suggested we could go back to the same location and clear the matter up for certain. These could be very adroit song thrushes, after all. So back we went. It was some 10 days later and the air had cooled and thinned. The low scrub where I'd heard the singing, still leafless at this stage looked dirtier in the lessening light. There was a heavy silence, punctuated by the occasional blast from a desultory song thrush. A series of weak trills and bleeps - where were the fireworks? I was a little sheepish to say the least, and though we waited for the best part of an hour, nothing appeared. I started to think it must have been an aural hallucination, maybe I'd ingested some ergot? Then he had an idea.

At the time I was driving a Volvo 340, an utterly graceless squashed whale of a car, replete with the turning circle of an arthritic brontosaurus. Indeed so heavy was the steering that the previous owner had affixed one of those snooker ball sized black knobs (hereafter to be called the knob of joy) to the steering wheel to help him get the fucker round car parks and the like. I hadn't removed it. My mate, for his job (so he says) happened to have all four CDs of Jean C. Roche's monumental All the Bird Songs of Britain and Europe ('396 chants en 4 CDs') on his iPod and we figured if we could get the car close enough to the field and play the iPod through the car's (frankly superb) stereo we might be able to lure the birds from whence they may have fled. I pictured us huddled safe inside the car whilst hordes of these light brown beauties danced across the thick metal roof... So there we are, furtively pulling up to a gate, throwing the doors wide open pouring the recorded psychobabble of the nightingale into the milky light of evening. We pause it frequently, partly out of embarrassment, partly to hear if our sonic fiction is having any effect? The air remains shallow of song. We turn it up as loud as we dare - loud enough to scare a fallow deer that had been sheltering in an adjacent field. It must have thought this was the nightingale apocalypse. We try for a full five minutes before shame and bemusement takes hold. Nothing. Not even a rasping blackbird.

I'll never know if they were nightingales buried in that low thorny scrub. Something tells me they were and that maybe they'd been spooked, or were just passing through to other known haunts. Whatever their reasons, they'd flown and to this day I've still not heard a nightingale sing in the wild. Thankfully, I have Chris Watson to listen for me.

Download: Chris Watson - The Hunt for the Nightingale's Song

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 21:52 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Brian has a thing about trees. Can’t stop looking at them. I’ve been abroad with him when he’s been in rapture over an avenue of pine tress. ‘Look at them, Bill,’ he’d say. ‘Aren’t they beautiful! People don’t appreciate beauty these days. They look at everything but they don’t really see. Who really looks at trees and sees their shapes and colours? They’re magic! That’s what it’s all about! - Bill Clough talking about his brother, Brian.

Ah now, this is the stuff - a blog dedicated to biographies of great British trees. Little more needs to be said. Go see.

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 17:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A ruined dwelling on North Rona

I also wanted to share this - a Radio 3 feature with the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie on the remote, and now abandoned, Scottish island of North Rona. The stars of the piece are the Leach's petrels that nest on the island and fill the air with their soft bubbling laughter, and Jamie's exact language and warm lilting tone.

Posted by poacher in Podcasts, Spoken Word at 20:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Richard Skelton
Album: Landings
Label: Type

This is also up at TLOBF.

Thing-poems of the moor…

Landings is Richard Skelton’s second release for Type, after last years Marking Time. He has behind him an array of releases, put out under various pseudonyms: Clouwbeck, A Broken Consort, Carousell, Riftmusic. All of these releases have been on small labels, or on Skelton’s own Sustain/Release imprint, and are invariably in tiny print runs. They are all constructed from comparatively little, and are incredibly hard to describe – field recordings, a bowed string, a violin scrape, the arched wheeze of a concertina – yet they feel at times as grand as someone capturing the sweep of time, and the tiny movements of vibrating molecules. Skelton’s releases worry at similar themes: how we reconcile our self to place; how we track our passing through intimate and strange landscapes; how we cope with the climactic intrusions of grief. Landings follows these themes and with the accompanying text draws everything into sharp focus. It is the culmination of years of the near-obsessive recording of Skelton’s collaboratory relationship with the West Pennine Moors around Anglezarke. It is a conjuring, a chronicle of a disappearance, an insight into the process of healing. It feels like something of a summation. It is extraordinary.

All of Skelton’s work to date has been an explicit response to the death of his then wife Louise in 2004. His body of work – both the recorded medium and the exquisite packaging each release comes in – is a memorial to her passing and an act of remembrance. Landings, and the text that accompanies it (which appeared online as an ongoing diary between 2005-2008) is direct and nakedly open response to this event. In his relationship to the moors around Anglezarke, he has forged a collusion with the land that has allowed him to explore the inner landscape of his own grief. There is a kind of projection at work here, an outward mapping of the traumatic space, in which Skelton has sought to lose himself completely. Instead over time- and without wishing to presume too much – what seems to have occurred in this collaboration with the brows and slacks of the land, is both an intimate knowledge of place, and an intimate knowledge of self. The sparse text of Landings, and the exquisite, gripping nature of the recorded music is our privileged glimpse into this sacred process.

Skelton’s method in exploring and cataloguing his experiences of the landscape around Anglezarke was to attempt to become a kind of conduit – both for his own responses, and in the more complicated space of interaction between place and self. Initially, he would make field recordings of the ambient sounds – the whine of wind through a ruined farm, the grakking calls of rooks – and then augment these with his own instrumentation. This gave way to him actually making recordings in situ, using the moors as an open-air studio. Occasionally he would leave a dicatophone in the trees, returning the recordings to their original source – what he called ‘returning the music back to its birthing chambers’; or he would secrete a diary beneath stones – a votive offering. Over time though, he realised his methods were obscuring and obstructive, as if this method of recording the intimacies were somehow mediating his ‘true’ experience of the landscape. Instead, Skelton trusted to his imaginative recall, and instead used elements of the landscape to aid this collusion at one remove: a bone plectrum, the scrape of tree litter on metal strings.


Anglezarke (image by fleabo)

This gradual exploration and layering of experience, both sonic and actual, is a fundamental aspect of the music on Landings. It is mirrored in the accreted layers of sound, which at times become almost textural, tactile. On a track like ‘Thread Across the River’ (where Skelton comes closest to sounding remotely like anyone else, in this case Set Fire to Flames, another project that was set up as a collaboration with place, this time a derelict mansion in Montreal – though there is something of Eno in ‘Green Withins Brook’s broad chords, and if Landings has an antecedent, then Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land is probably it) there is a simple layering of bowed cello and violin but they are treated in such a way as to sound like natural phenomena. This effect is added to by the way the track gives out to the thin cries of meadow pipits and the haunted, bubbling uprush of curlew calls. The closing track, ‘The Shape Leaves’ – which refers back to a CDR release from 2005 – comes as if from behind a curtain of moorfog, a distant piano figure beneath bowed strings, eventually giving out to an eddying storm of cymbals before returning to the murk. In truth, individual examples are largely useless, as the whole record is so of its own sound world, and so wound into the whole act of its creation, that these qualities are suffused and implicit. If you were to try to figuratively pull up one corner of it, you’d find the rest attached.

With Landings, Richard Skelton has created something vast, resonant and timeless. The work and drive behind it has created a document that requires a new kind of categorisation. It has gravity in the very real sense of that word; indeed, at times it seems to possess its own geography. It is a Romantic document, a record of an intimate relationship with place and a minutely observed mapping of the local – it might come to be put alongside Richard Long, Gilbert White, Alice Oswald, Ted Hughes. It’s also an almost unbearably moving chronicle of a grief observed. Sometimes you just have to stand back and admit a certain privilege at coming into contact with something. This is one of those times.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 15:26 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Paul is a friend who is working in Abu Dhabi and he shot this footage from his hotel balcony. It is a thing of complete simplicity and is no less than dazzling.

Arriving in Abu Dhabi my initial reaction, standing on the balcony of my hotel room on the 20th floor, was disorientation and near-vertigo. Laid out before me was a building site on a scale I had never seen before; a small island was under construction.

This was “a room with a view” of a very different kind. Not some picturesque vista illustrating historical achievement but a vast, stark scene of becoming; a display of the knowledge, effort and will required to alter the landscape and create a new world.

The Alva Noto track 'Xerrox Monophaser 2' that forms the soundtrack to this, fits so perfectly it feels built for the task. Uncanny. Xerrox Vol. 2 is out on Raster Norton and well worth getting.

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 09:41 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Late August sunshine, the first walk for ages. I head out of the Victoria Inn in West Marden, trailed by a small cloud of chutney-maddened wasps, up a steeply inclining lane. There is a brief passage of unsteadiness as my feet arch over old stones and I wait for the muscles to remember. It comes, eventually.

I walk, no cower through a farmyard. No matter how many times I do this I feel like an interloper. These places hold a special, eerie power born maybe of old public information films, but also from something deeper, something to do with the fact that all this machinery – the ribcages of old ploughs, the fluted cones of grain dispensers – seems forever unused, hung in a state of paralysis.


North Marden

I lose the path for a time and come across a pheasant enclosure. The first intimation is the small green feeders, arranged around the place like small, squat rockets; then the intense activity in the surrounding scrub, dense beneath oak trees: the odd frantic scitter here and there, the rising screeches of near by alarm calls. As I approach a huge fenced area, elaborate with pheasant-only gateways, the activity increases with literally dozens of birds emerging all around me, rushing for the impossible entrances, babble-shrieking into the air. The interior is thick with ferns and bracken, the torpid air alive with the movement of bodies.

Beyond the woods I enter a field of corn, its colour in the sun is harsh to the eyes. I pass across a sunken track, the shaded areas clagged with mud, pools of water lie in the great tractor wheel depressions. On a dim, clammy path with a broad swathe of young sweet chestnut poles on my right, a scraggy fox passes 10 feet in front me, following its twitching nose.

North Marden Church: the interior is thick with shadow, the walls white cold, heavy with memory. The chancel with its softly semi-circular rear wall seems to draw the light. You sit briefly, creak the pews and leave. Outside, a bench stretches most of the distance of the outer wall of the nave. As I lay back, I hear the distant roar of farm machinery; I catch a sharp stab of sun off a reflective surface. I awake to a top-heavy hollyhock I hadn’t noticed before, now swaying in a light breeze. The sky has thickened with grey.

North Marden barely exists – two farms, a collection of flint-clad houses. I hear my hollow footsteps as I walk along a newly tarmaced road. At a crossroads, a fresh cut field is alive with hundreds of rooks and jackdaws. Something spooks them and they rise as one – grakking and popping in high devilling swirls.


Up Marden

I come to Up Marden Church at the end of a pitted lane. It sits in a broad patch of bright green grass, a stand of yews to the right hand side, a knot of oaks to the rear. One of the church’s cold flint walls – giving way to planked wood and a squat, square tower - backs on to the field of corn I’d shielded my eyes from earlier. The interior is unlike any church I have been in before – spare, spartan even, the white walls of the chancel brilliant in the afternoon sun. That great reverential church-going weight is absent, instead there is a simple sense of shelter, of the sanctity of accumulated belief. I experience a kind of pain in leaving.

A good portion of the path back is a long slog up to Telegraph Hill. As I tire I think of the dead August air, absent of the piped silver of bird song, the only company the occasional explosive wren or the propulsive tick of an angry robin. The background hum is all of farm machinery as the long haul of harvest is begun; sometimes as I pass a field being cut, the air thickens, swarming with seed heads and crop debris. As I descend back into West Marden I come to a point where four paths intersect. Above is a great upright crescent of pillowed cloud. I stop to let a great clattering combine harvester cross, the driver, high in his cabin, nods a greeting.

There is an interesting piece on the downland churches by Simon Jenkins. It originally appeared in the New Statesman, this PDF version is available online.

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 11:59 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A strange, haunting video shot by Jorge Ballarin in Berlin, featuring disconnected and grainy images of the city - mainly by night. On their own the images would be enough but with Leyland Kirby's (otherwise known as The Caretaker) 'a longing to be absorbed for a while into a different and beautiful world' as a soundtrack it becomes a thing of quiet beauty. The track is taken from a triple LP/CD set, due out on Type in October. You can hear various samples of it on Kirby's excellent website - History Always Favours the Winners and at the older Brainwashed site, where you'll also find various of his other recordings available as free downloads.

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 14:19 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

On re-reading this on a recent trip over to Ypres and Passchendale, aside from the awe at the naked descriptions of horror and carnage, what I was most astounded by was Remarque's, at times, near-schizophrenic appreciation of nature. It's clear that in his hyper-sensitive state Remarque/Bäumer was able to observe minute changes in the world around him - in both tone and atmosphere - as if the usual aspects of time and space had come unmoored. The passage below is from the section of the book in which Bäumer is guarding Russian prisoners a few miles behind the front line.

Most beautiful are the woods with the line of birch trees. Their colour changes with every minute. Now the stems gleam purest white, and between them airy and silken, hangs the pastel green of the leaves; the next moment all changes to an opalescent blue, as the shivering breezes pass down from the heights and touch the green lightly away; and again in one place it deepens almost to black as a cloud passes over the sun. And this shadow moves like a ghost through the dim trunks and rides far out over the moor to the sky - then the birches stand out again like gay banners on white poles, with their red and gold patches of autumn-tinted leaves.

Posted by poacher in books quotes at 12:38 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Shepperton

It's great to see that the mighty Ballardian has resurfaced after a Simon's PhD-induced hibernation. The second part of his excellent photo essay on Shepperton is up now and more than worth a stroll around. He nails the heart of Shepperton to a ouija board with ease - its plainness, its odd air - as if posioned by the psychic emanations from the studios... We also linked to the first part of this essay back in April of last year.

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 11:04 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)