The Inward Circles - And Right Lines Limit and Close All Bodies

A Closer Listen

Richard Skelton is a man of many guises.  This April he returns as The Inward Circles, continuing to invoke history, nature and the mysteries of the human mind. This is his fourth release and third album under this name, and arrives with a bonus: an additional album that was made available for early adopters.

For those who know Skelton only under a single guise, the album may come as a surprise.  Skelton has always flourished in the drone genre, although the majority of his releases are more placid than this.  And Right Lines Limit and Close All Bodies is thick and foreboding, as it recalls an unearthed body preserved in peat moss: the “Cumbrian bog man,” found in the skin of a deer.  The music of The Inward Circles imitates the wrapping with its own corrugation and decay: stringed notes and found objects are subjected to intense processing akin to that of time upon matter.  Field recordings are here, but buried, and even if excavated may have been mulched beyond recognition.

Skelton writes of “a desire to obliterate, to destroy, and to discover anew.”  His fascination with land is extended here to what is beneath the land, the fauna that has become feed.  To know this is to shudder, but also to challenge one’s perceptions of comfort and discomfort.  It’s one thing to be able to recognize the presence of stringed instruments and to follow their sonic trajectories; it’s another to embrace their dissection and reassembly.  But this has always been Skelton’s way.  In his previous incarnations, he’s dredged up ancient words and reconfigured them as poetry, opening new doors of perception through new angles of approach.  Now land and body are indistinguishable one from the other.

Layering has always been important in Skelton’s music, and this affinity is apparent here.  Each track includes baseline drones as well as mutable foregrounds.  Whenever the volume rises, one wonders how high it will go.  This practice is in contrast to the loud mixing for volume’s sake in much of today’s popular music.  The intent here is not to produce excitement, but tension; not a visceral reaction, but a cerebral one.  Whenever the levels rise into the red, one thinks of recovered words, bodies and sites, bursting the boundaries of the ordinary and expected, no longer ignored.

Not until the fifth track (“Nitre of the Earth”) does a certain sadness begin to creep in as well: an aura of inevitability, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  Everything will crumble.  Looped ambient phrases attempt to comfort while the outside world threatens to abrade.  Midway through “Necks was a proper figure” (the title from Thomas Browne), a repeated bass note is added to the swirling volume to produce a dramatic peak.  From this point on, The Inward Circles relents, just slightly, finally arriving at a peaceful conclusion on “Scaleby, xi” ~ which when coupled with the earlier “x” prompts us to ask, “Where are the other nine?”  They can be found in the digital bonus album, a shorter set that offers a gentler take on the subject matter.  At times, Scaleby‘s music is even contemplative, as if the fear and foreboding have themselves been abraded, subjected to the whims of decay, edges softened like ancient stone.

“vii” and “viii” return to an attitude of assertiveness, showcasing a small array of tempos, pulses and beats.  But the final word belongs to “Scaleby ix” ~ eleven flowing minutes that wash over bodies and mysteries like time before sinking into the morass.  What endures?  The question has haunted Skelton throughout his life.  These albums are the aural reflection of an inner search.  (Richard Allen)

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The Quietus

Despite the often melancholic nature of his compositions, Richard Skelton’s solo work under his own name or as A Broken Consort, or as part of the duo *AR with Autumn Richardson, has always had an open, outward-looking quality. It translated the windswept landscapes of northern England or the Irish coast into musical forms, Skelton’s bowed string drones becoming echoes of the land and the sea, as if he were reaching out to describe them to the listener. His most recent project, however, is centred on more introverted matters. As its name suggests, The Inward Circles sees Skelton burrowing into the ground and his own psyche, revealing more sombre realities as he does so.

Like its predecessor, 2015’s extraordinary Belated Movements for an Unsanctioned Exhumation August 1st 1984, And Right Lines Limit and Close All Bodies takes as its thematic starting point a long-buried cadaver, this time found in Cumbria, but it’s not an archeological reconstruction in sound à la Chris Watson on In St Cuthbert’s Time. Instead, Skelton uses the Cumbrian man as an embarkation point to delve into the frightening effect that the passage of time has on the material world. If one thinks of a decomposing cadaver, such degradation happens generally away from the prying eyes of humankind, in tombs, bogs or pits, so there is intrinsically an aspect to And Right Lines that evolves at an evocative, imaginary level, the sombre strokes of Skelton’s synthesizers and transmogrified sound effects existing in a realm of grim introspection and lightless imagination.

As such, on the surface Richard Skelton’s musical language has an earthy quality to reflect the language that surrounds the album. ‘Lye not in Fear’, as a track title, evokes the last rites, the caustic chemical used by many a sinister ender of lives to dispose of unwanted evidence reimagined as an agent of passage from life into the earth that sustains us all. It’s a dark and dank metaphor, and the drifting synth lines, distorted vocal sweeps and murky string drones that have been manipulated beyond all recognition serve to drag the listener downwards into the funereal pit. Anxious sequencer patterns maintain a certain rhythmic pulse as gristly noises flutter back and forth, heralding And Right Lines as Richard Skelton’s most unsettled – and most unsettling – album to date. Where even as The Inward Circles, but especially under his own name, Skelton would previously allow notes to linger like the cries of birds echoing across a valley, now he engages in a sort of folk-drone sensory overload, the massed tones aggregating to form sepulchral excavations as deep and unfriendly as a charnel pit. Elsewhere, ‘In an Hydropicall Body’ surges fitfully over ten minutes of mutated drone (could be an organ, could be a mutant string tone) surrounded by ever-building shimmering synth textures and an undercurrent of Throbbing Gristle-like mulch. Once again the imagery of land and nature seems forefront in the piece’s pyschogeography, but this time it’s dense, foreboding and altogether unwholesome.

By subjecting his panoply of string instruments (cello, bouzouki, viola) to so many degenerative effects, Skelton is using them as a metaphor for the degradation of the human body through the adverse influence of time and the natural world. Crucial here is that the instruments be acoustic: even if the methods of altering and disintegrating them are digital, the result is an organic transformation of familiar sounds. But within such faltering depths, the human essence still finds room to transcend its earthly -and earthy- demise. ‘The Soul Subsisting’ features an elegiac drone throughout that builds heavenwards, as if said soul was not so much subsisting as persisting. The ambiguous combination of the track’s grim title and the music’s blissful textures creates a mysterious atmosphere. Although he is a singular, even unique, artist in the avant-folk and drone circles in the UK, Richard Skelton cannot be completely divorced from the tradition of dark and light that has dominated these islands for aeons, especially in the wake of recent (dark) folk revivals. For all the darkness and decay, there is a human tradition that, no matter how deeply buried, endures.

On ‘Nitre of the Earth’, brittle surges of distorted string noise are counterpointed by tender swells that try to claw back warmth from the depths of cold, wintery disintegration. ‘Necks was a Proper Figure’ is even more hesitant and wistful, its textural overload imbued with the kind of intense melancholy than so beautifully defined Skelton albums like Landings. Even as he unflinchingly and resolutely disassembles the means he uses to make his music, and buries them six feet under, Richard Skelton’s own heart breaks through the mud to imbue music that could have been coldly morose (like so many dark ambient releases) with an emotional beauty that lingers well after the disc has stopped spinning. This is perhaps most potently evoked by the digital-only album that accompanies And Right Lines, Scaleby. Its tracks are in general shorter, but take in a range of moods more than textures or themes. As the string samples vacillate between dark tonalities and ghostly shimmers, a new idiom emerges, one that uses the languages of death and decay to better celebrate the living.

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