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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)

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)