Richard Skelton – Border Ballads (Corbel Stone Press)

Richard Skelton has unearthed ambient transmissions from deep time and pressed them into the present with this album of hinterland inspired compositions

“I am mud and flame!” proclaims the formerly priggish Stephen in Penda’s Fen, at last embracing his outsider status. The David Rudkin written and Alan Clarke directed hauntology-inspiring masterpiece locates Stephen’s personal and societal transformations within the English countryside, in this case Edward Elgar country. Richard Skelton’s Border Ballads brings Penda’s Fen to mind as it digs into a hinterland topography. He employs processed electronic compositions that hew close to nature, yet also hint at turbulent changes and shifting allegiances within the human sphere. Skelton has made the rural northern edge of the border between Scotland and England his home for the past couple of years. He has mined the water that courses through, across and under the land to craft beautifully compact but vast-with-potential pieces that speak of mud and burn with the flames of human life.

A perceived stillness belies the turbulence and power underneath each composition – the implication of the natural world’s ability to transform anything and everything. The drawn-out strings and fragile piano at times recall early Godspeed You! Black Emperor, with subtlety rather than bluster as the driving force. Skelton’s Border Ballads is a quietly visionary work of the hinterlands. Its strange markers might be buried, but they seep through on further listens. The listening necessarily becomes more intent, the resulting feelings more intense.

Skelton also plays with scale throughout. Sometimes it is as if the limitless world is laid out before our feet. At others, the water is put under the microscope, miniature universes spooling out beyond what the eye can know. Vast swathes of nature have been compressed into the space of minutes, yet nothing feels contained. There’s an openness throughout Border Ballads that invites one back again and again; a dialogue between the land and the people that make it their home. It’s as if Richard Skelton has unearthed ambient transmissions from deep time and pressed them into the present.

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