Richard Skelton — Landings

Landings is the record Richard Skelton made on Anglezarke Moor in Lancashire in the years after the death of his wife, Louise. It is outdoor music in an unusually literal sense: the landscape is not a backdrop but a participant, and in places a co-author.

Skelton buried strings beneath stones, soil and river shallows. He left a zither, a singing bowl and chime bars out on the moor for weeks before reclaiming them and playing them, weathered, in the studio. He gathered stones, bark, pine cones, feathers and bone and used them as plectra. He played recordings made in one place back into another through portable speakers and re-recorded the result. "Repetition," he has said, "makes ritual."

Some pieces were recorded in the open outright — the concertina on "Green Withins Brook" was played and captured beside the stream of that name on a winter morning. The music that results is layered violin, piano and bowed guitar, corroded and slow, closer to erosion than to composition. The album was accompanied by a book of the same name, a personal account of the moor's history and place-names.