MORAINE & LASTGLACIALMAXIMUM (Richard Skelton)

MORAINE is a square-format 28pp booklet of poetry by Richard Skelton, beautifully printed on Tintoretto papers. The eponymous poem is an evocation of landscape features known as ‘moraines’ - lithic material deposited by the movement of glaciers. Accordingly, its own textual material is scattered across each recto page in imitation of glacial action.

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LASTGLACIALMAXIMUM is an album of recordings for the landscape of the British and Irish peninsula as it lay most recently under ice. The general consensus among glaciologists is that the British and Irish Ice Sheet attained its greatest extent — the so-called Last Glacial Maximum — between 27 and 21 thousand years ago.

The shifts in timbre and texture between succeeding recordings on this album is imitative of what are known as ‘Dansgaard–Oeschger events’ — rapid cycles between cold and warmer climatic conditions during the last ice age.

 

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The edition comes with an artwork download card for a digital version of the LGM album, and one for the accompanying digital-only album, Stadial.

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Total Running Time : 39 minutes

‘a hauntingly powerful 39-minute paean to earth's elemental condition…’ (Q Magazine)

‘a record of incredible weight and power, its music shifting like an almighty ice sheet in the throes of shedding its cold skin’ (Fluid Radio)

‘extraordinarily sparse and austere, paper-thin layers of isolationist drone’ (The Quietus)

‘… like a vague outline of something that once was …’ (Further)