‘It’s not a landscape that’s there for people to go and look at,” says Richard Skelton. The countryside around the Anglo-Scottish border doesn’t share its secrets willingly, but a few hours spent in the passenger seat of Skelton’s MG hatchback reveals some of its strange charms. Wide, arrow-straight roads are a mesmerising constant that switches one’s focus to the granular details – the textures of the road surface, the ditches flanking each side, and the occasional cartoonish tree. The effect is hypnotic. “It’s kind of maze-like, and you don’t know where you are half of the time,” Skelton says. “I feel like I could drive around here for decades and not really get the measure of it.”
Skelton is one of the UK’s most prolific and consistently impressive experimental musicians, the creator of slow-moving yet unexpectedly gruelling drone-based music, and his work often communes with landscapes like these. He’s seen plenty of them at the mercy of the rural renting market. The Lancashire-born musician and his wife, the poet and publisher Autumn Richardson, have lived in Cumbria, Fife, Ireland, and now Liddesdale, just over the border into Scotland. After six years there, they’re preparing for another move, but not before Skelton ends this chapter with Selenodesy, a drone album of yearning swells and searing intensity, motivated in part by the region’s dark skies.
