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)

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Posted by poacher in poetry at 09:38 | 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)

Belly of the Whale. Image by Robin Friend


Greenhouse. Image by Robin Friend


West Country. Image by Robin Friend

"The landscape is in danger of losing its capacity to keep secrets from us."

We've not had much in the way of photography on here recently, but I came across Robin Friend today (courtesy of youyouidiot) and wanted to share. His photographs have got a damp melancholy to them, and feel both secretive and oddly voyeuristic, as if Friend were trying to restore some of the secret nature he sees as being leached away from our relationship to landscape. You can more of his work at robinfriend.co.uk and youyou has an article on Friend in this month's Hotshoe magazine.

Posted by poacher in photography at 12:37 | 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)

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)

When the air is thick and the sky overcast, we need not walk so far. We give our attention to nearer objects, being less distracted from them. I take occasion to explore some near wood which my walks commonly overshoot.

What a difference it makes between two ravines in other respects exactly similar that in the one there is a stream which drains it, while the other is dry!

I see nowadays in various places the scattered feathers of robins, etc., where some hawk or beast of prey has torn them to pieces.

I step over the slip-noose which some woodling has just set. How long since men set snares for partridges and rabbits?

Ah, my friends, I know you better than you think, and love you better, too. The day after never, we will have an explanation.

Henry David Thoreau

Posted by poacher in books quotes at 12:41 | 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)