Walking on Anglezarke Moor the other day, I was once again reminded of Richard Skelton’s music which, for several years, was informed by, and often recorded in, this wild and beautiful landscape. His album Landings is something of a culmination and definitive document of this period of his life, when he made some beautiful recordings that presented, I believe, a sense of place and feeling unsurpassed in the experimental music genre (yes, more so then Eno’s On Land).
The music itself is very organic, built out of strings that are bowed, scraped, caressed and layered into moving, melancholy and deeply beautiful poems to landscape and memory, grief and love. Field recordings are incorporated, but never in an intrusive way. The textures are pleasingly gritty, and the production is detailed and highly crafted, but never so polished that it overwhelms the music. Where so much ‘ambient’ music seems to be almost a by-product of the techniques used to produce it, this is music first. It’s human, it’s full of feeling, and it’s highly recommended. It’s worth reading Skelton’s ideas about music and landscape, but it’s not necessary to appreciate the music he makes.
infolding 