More terrible beauty

At some point during your reading of this book the realisation might dawn, if you didn’t already know about his creative double life, that Richard Skelton demonstrates an unusual sensitivity to sound. Barbed wire unfolds over a dry-stone wall, an image which he reimagines as a mutant stringed instrument. ‘What harmonies would result if all were sounded in unison?’, Skelton asks — a question which he is uniquely placed to answer. Beyond the Fell Wall is a graceful meditation upon the relationship between landscape, language and sound, written by the most strikingly original composer of electronic music currently working in the UK — a man who spends his days exploring and gathering in the sounds of the fell land that borders his Cumbrian home.

The tools of his trade include digital recording devices and stringed musical instruments; Skelton improvises inchoate melodies by zoning inside the changeable moods of the environment, recordings captured in the field which become source material for his visionary, shape-shifting electronic soundscapes. Ordinarily, he releases his music via his own Corbel Stone Press in editions invariably accompanied by chapbooks of poetry and fragments of text. Beyond the Fell Wall is his first taste of distribution by a commercial publisher, and appears as interest in the work of nature writers like Richard Jefferies, Robert Mabey and Robert Macfarlane is in the ascendant.

Language and landscape — and the conservation of both — provided the subject of Macfarlane’s 2015 Landmarks, a volume not immune to wistfully phrased bucolic nostalgia. Skelton’s fell wall is situated near the River Duddon in Cumbria, once William Wordsworth’s muse. But he is no Romantic. Inner-city Hackney has nothing on this riot of wanton death, destruction and decay. Nature is an aggressor that imposes its arbitrary life-cycle on anyone (and any thing) that gets in its way.