Richard Skelton, “Green Withins Brook,” Landings (Sustain-Release 2009)
Those of you who check in here with any frequency will have noticed that about one year ago I became interested in the work of Richard Skelton. You might also have noted that since that time my posts here gradually became less frequent, even non existent. It is safe to assume the two are related, as they surely are.
Occasionally one encounters something that changes a part of one’s core. And so it has been with me for Skelton. I’ve been playing music for thirty years and all the time waiting patiently to hear in the world those textures and movements of mind that, for me, define thinking, memory, sensation, the aural equivalent of feeling with the tips of your fingers the flesh of someone you love. When a resourceful press agent from Tompkins Square e-mailed me in the hopes I would like Skelton’s A Box of Birch (under his A Broken Consort moniker), little did he realize what he was igniting.
So much of what we do and say and feel is rote and pattern. We allow ourselves to carry on in a boilerplate world. What Skelton does is challenge you to hear what is beyond the expected, to distort the expected tone or timbre or melody and to move patiently into a fresh perspective. While many have remarked on a determinedly sad tenor throughout his work, I’ve instead found nothing but celebration. The fête of liberating sound from the walls of a collective box and placing it within landscape, whether the geography of place or mind.
Intriguingly, Skelton produces marvellous, bespoke boxes for some. I do not have one, but I imagine the thrill of its reception, opening it, participating in that liberation of sound in metaphoric ritual. And listening. And returning the captured sounds to their container, their memory all that then exists beyond the box’s walls.
I am studying Joseph Cornell’s boxes intently these days as well. He too made mysterious the things we know as commonplace. The box opening to reveal something more about itself, its contents and its viewer.
Why is my decreased writing related to Richard Skelton? Frankly, because I’ve been listening so deeply to his work and to comment on it cursorily felt dishonest. And because he’s changed how I live, how I treat people, treat myself. But there is a way to come back to this writing, reenergized. It is Spring after all! Time to lighten up maybe, and just enjoy and share my appreciation for this great body of work.
Many other musics and musicians thrill me and excite me. None of us is one dimensional, or even three dimensional. But no art has altered my thought so deeply. Any who go to Skelton’s work will find a world of multiple secrets and pleasures unknown.
P.S. An accompanying book was released with Landings as seen above. It is, in a word, superb. I will have more to say about it, and the work of Richard Skelton, in the future.
Corbel Stone Press website
Richard Skelton’s website
Sustain-Release website
