Hallock Hill

Carousell, “Black Swallow,” Black Swallow and Other Songs (Sustain-Release, May 2009)

Memory brings us those welcoming and unsettling moments in our lives, within a present bending. Moments of introspection or retrospection can pull one away from the present, aft towards a distance that was, but in its way never was: for this present lens has distorted that time, made it into something new. The present is always new, though its filters cause refractory bends that cast shadows.

Perhaps more than any other cycle in his oeuvre, Black Swallow and Other Songs reveals Richard Skelton mining memories, heard through these lenses of the present. It is almost as if we are listening to the process of memories develop: a motif arrives, disappears, mutates, reappears, is contrasted with a new phrase or timbre or sound. The effect is feeling. A music that itself feels and forces one to feel. Under the name Carousell, Skelton finds (perhaps) his most immediate and raw mode, and one that is more overtly melodic than many of his works. While earlier works often emphasized a dense layering of instruments and sounds, Black Swallow and Other Songs is stripped. But not barren. Improvisation takes a much more prominent role, one that to these ears emphasizes the sensation of memory and mind at work. It is raw, but round and full and beautiful.

At the 2:05 mark in “Black Swallow,” for instance, the bowed violin recedes, leaving the plucked instrument (is it guitar?, it is disguised in this timbre) to face a stronger silence. At this same time is what sounds like a female sigh—a haunting and very moving application. It takes on a Japanese-infused motion and melody, rhythmically complex and tactile. Then at 3:14, the bowed strings return and eventually force the staccato notes away—an elegiac moment where the memory of one thing in particular overtakes the stutter-stopping of thought and sweeps things away in a cascade.

When the following track opens, “And the Orchard,” the tone of the piano is startling, a marked contrast to all of the strings (and opening church bells of the album), and subtle scrapings that are a hallmark of Skelton’s sound. The hammers of the piano adumbrate the staccato plucked passage in the previous piece, acting as a kind of passage of thought through ideas that then again open more broadly. This happens with the transition to the next piece, “Which is the Blood,” with a laughing woman (or is it a girl?) flowing into Skelton’s characteristic wavering bowed and scraped strings. Then again an arpeggiated piano seems to add clarity to the moment, providing a focus to the thought that has been evoked.

I could continue in this vein, “reading” each piece, at the very least reading “into” them. Skelton though gets so many variations of tone and sounds out of his palette of instruments and recording techniques that this is of course reductive and unnecessary. Black Swallow and Other Songs primarily renders its power as an accretion of reflections, thoughts and feelings. Skelton often emphasizes the importance of landscape in his art, and how place influences his compositions. I would suggest that memory is inexplicably linked to place for him—and that to listen to him is to listen to him remembering worlds of so many yesterdays.

“A change in the weather,” wrote memory’s literary caretaker Marcel Proust, “is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” He also wrote that “It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.” Black Swallow and Other Songs sounds like eight glorious passing states of mind, each forging a moment of such great purity in the present, a kind of purity that seems to rarely exist. But one need only play the record again to sustain it. Skelton strikes me as someone who cares deeply about this intersection of place and time, wishes to both preserve that which was and always, always make new, and renew. There is something of the American Transcendentalist in him, perhaps akin to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transparent eyeball, a current of universal energy, a vital process rather than a reified object. But as I have written here before, he also seems the consummate Modernist.

In the end, Skelton is singular, and irreducible. His music needs no justification or explanation. And its beauty has no boundary in place, nor in time.

You may order a copy of Black Swallow and Other Songs directly through Richard Skelton’s Sustain-Release Press. You may also read about Skelton’s recently commercially re-released A Box of Birch (on Tompkins Square) previously on Hallock Hill.

Tompkins Square

Sustain-Release, Richard Skelton’s private press

Sustain-Release on MySpace

Landings on MySpace