Belated Movements (The Inward Circles)

Belated Movements for an Unsanctioned Exhumation August 1st 1984 is Richard Skelton’s second album as The Inward Circles, following 2014’s Nimrod is Lost in Orion and Osyris in the Doggestarre. If his previous offering hovered ‘between the empyreal and the subterranean’, Belated Movements is resolutely earthbound, beginning at ground level and slowly moving ever downward. The title is a reference to ‘Lindow Man’, one of many bog bodies discovered in northern Europe in the twentieth century, and continues an archaeological theme which first surfaced in his 2013 *AR collaboration with Autumn Richardson, entitled Succession. In particular, it is the last composition from that album, Relics, which can now be seen as starting point for much of Skelton's future work as The Inward Circles. But whereas Relics dealt with the pollen remnants submerged beneath tarns in the remote Cumbrian uplands, Belated Movements evokes a distinctly funerary landscape.

1. Petition for Reinterment
2. To Your Fox-Skin Chorus
3. Canis, Lynx, Ursus: Awake, Arise, Reclaim

Total Running Time : 60mins
Title two from Edmund Gosse

 

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‘I traced
the convolutions of
turf, laid out by men,
& made new windings with the mole
through undisturbed
barrows.’

(Ronald Johnson, The Book of the Green Man)