Richard Skelton - A Guidonian Hand

A Closer Listen

A Guidonian hand is a Medieval mnemonic device that utilizes the hexachord to teach people how to sing, assigning different notes to different parts of the hand.  While Richard Skelton certainly needs no Guidonian hand, his assignment of notes has always followed a mysterious process that may well trace back to the Middle Ages. Furthering this thought, the track titles of Skelton’s new album are all quotes from Thomas Browne (1605-1682), whose diverse body of work addresses everything from nature and science to religion and human behavior.  As Skelton knits and scrapes his way through various chordal structures, incorporating violin, woodwinds, bowed cymbal and piano, one can’t help but wonder if the 21st century polymath has extended his own hand to history.

Parts of the album arrive in waves, especially “in the altar burnt offerings” and “a longilaterall figure,” vestigial limbs from Skelton’s electronic foray.  The majority embrace the mulched drone for which he has become famous, albeit in restrained fashion.  These works nudge against song structures without toppling into song.  “in ancient fabrics” seems one thing until it is another, a distorted surge accompanying a rise in volume.  The eight-minute length allows it time to unfurl.  “and instruments of incision” adds hints of organ, a way out of the morass; the clear violin line serves as the labyrinth thread.  Deep in the album, “nature is become a point of art” exercises a laudable stillness, reverberant cymbal the primary sound at beginning and end.  If the center is more exploratory, the edges still hold: a sonic reflection of Browne’s quest for knowledge.

“the late affecting fire” is perhaps the most morose of Skelton’s compositions, less in sound than in inspiration; Browne’s quote concerns the death of children whose bodies were not burned because they were “too tender a morsel for fire.”  Should we call Skelton’s rising drone a “surge,” we might compare it to the results of inaction: unnecessary suffering and death, a pandemic that might have been contained had we the humility to look to our ancestors for wisdom.  Centuries of knowledge are still available to us; will we honor the past to stave off a disastrous future?  (Richard Allen)

The Quietus

Richard Skelton’s A Guidonian Hand is a metal album. Not in a sign-of-the-horns and headbanging sense, but in the way the songs sound metallic, like they might be actually forged from iron.

These ten compositions of fused acoustic and electronic textures conjure the elegance of furnaces, geological processes, and the pranging, creaky beauty of their products. Smothering drones and occasional jagged edges make listening akin to donning a rusted Victorian diving suit and being swallowed into the depths.

On ‘the motion of the indivisible’, flurries of melody sound like they’re being elegantly pried and bent into shape. ‘in patient fabricks’ has a rhythm track which might have beeen sampled from a blacksmith’s workshop. In an interview last year for this website, Skelton described his work as existing in a space “where the archaeologist hands the baton over to the poet and the poet goes off into the realm of pure speculation and imagination.” A Guidonian Hand sounds like it’s adding metallurgist to the list. An alchemical approach to surfaces, textures, and materials in the way these pieces smelt and fracture.

This isn’t to make the album sound totally abstract – it’s not Skelton’s Metal Machine Music by any stretch. Constants in his oeuvre, aching bowed and droned strings, the inward facing levity, are all still present among the ferric electronics. They capture a similar turbulent headspace to his Landings series, especially so in more propulsive moments, such as ‘nature is becoming a point of art’. But instead of ruminating on desolate panoramas, A Guidonian Hand feels more suited to footage of molten metals in a steelworks.

Previously, Skelton’s music and writing has felt deeply attuned to the resonances of place. But rather than an attempt to document landscapes themselves, he traces how they seep into our minds and bodies. The marks a setting leaves after it’s leaked through the membranes of eyes, skins, and ears and inscribed itself into soul and mood. It’s a music of interaction, of negotiations between human and environment, nature and art, emotion and intuition. Sticking in the messy overlaps to breach understanding.

That sense of interaction comes across in how electronics and acoustics meld together here. The separation between strings and wires, human and electrically powered instruments is tenuous at best, and by ‘and instruments of incision’ and the ‘the late affecting fire’ it’s practically non-existent. The arrangements taking on the quality of volatile alloys which haven’t quite settled.

A Guidonian Hand feels fixated on matter itself rather than locations. The wobbly line separating naturally occurring and manmade. The convoluted, tangled histories and brilliant processes embedded in everything around us. An alluring mix of magical thinking and material investigation which bridges the compulsions of metal detectorists and chemists.

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