Alde Time Music
© Autumn Richardson
A couple of weeks back, we successfully landed the space craft at Aldeburgh Music for another mind expansion session programmed by the boundary pushing sonic assassins at Faster than Sound. Their events are like a 5th dimension version of Wire magazine, proper ‘did that just happen?’ avant head tilters.
I’ve been hugely impressed by the quality of the musical, visual and mental experience at past events so jumped at the chance for tickets to this performance, the first live outing for Richard Skelton with The Elysian Quartet. I’ve been a ‘fan’ for some time, collecting Richards beautifully considered electro acoustic pieces, sometimes music, sometimes art, sometimes poetry, sometimes all three.
His deceptively understated pieces are like elemental meditations, minimal sound sketches of the landscape and the folklore that inhabits it, a narrative of found flotsam and bowed drones. He has an uncanny way of harvesting sounds and representing them in such a way that reconstructs my own exaggerated memories and perception of the rural world around me, like sleep walking in familiar earthy territory. This is the soundtrack to reading Roger Deakin and Robert MacFarlane, or the aural counterpart to the images of Justin Partyka.
© Richard Skelton
Faster than Sound appears to encourage artists to react to the environment through residency and direct experience and to present work that is relevant to people and place. Skeltons three pieces this evening were formed from his time around the Alde Estuary, breathing in the mantra of the reed beds, the ebb and flow of the marshland tide, Anglo Saxon kings, Oystercatcher, Curlew and Redshank, abstract estuarine expression.
The transporting of Skeltons pieces into the live enviroment was incredible, maybe less melancholic than his recorded works, breathier and full of salt air. The evening was accompanied by some beautifully understated typographic projections and the flowing improvised nature of the pieces felt like you were witnessing a moment in time, a personal piece of bespoke performance, unlikely to be repeated, like a private pressing.
I hope the evening was recorded, the acoustics were intimate and warm and The Elysian Quartet were on terrific (and terrifying) form. Quite how the Cellist makes her instrument sound like waders, water and a fog horn (in my brain anyway) at the same time I do not know. A special evening.
Richard Skeltons work can be found at Corbel Stone Press.
Richard Skelton, EA – from rehearsals.
Posted by: Forte