Rays - Cassette (The Desert Natures)

- C20 gold cassette with white silkscreen lettering,
- Clear case and J-Card.
- Music download card.​
- Limited edition of 50.

 

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Tracklisting:

 

1. light gone quiet (6:38)
2. horoscopy (3:18)
3. partly seen, unseen (3:58)
4. san bernardino alle ossa mantra (5:50)

Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton return under a new pseudonym, charting fresh territory with their first collaborative music in over a decade. Partly informed by the vast elemental landscapes of Autumn’s Canadian upbringing, Rays presents a collection of recordings seeded during a pre-Covid road trip down that myth-laden artery of American song, Mississippi’s Highway 61.

 

On the opener, “light gone quiet”, Autumn’s barely discernible lyrics dissolve into viscous smears and slow, unearthly quivers, underpinned by Richard’s staccato, bare-bones guitarwork. The result is skeletal yet hypnotic — a kind of negative-space Americana — and unlike anything else in their combined catalogues. This hushed, contemplative mood presides over the rest of the EP.

 

The second track, “horoscopy”, blurs Autumn’s vocals further still, until they resemble reeds or distant woodwinds weaving in and out of the underlying piano refrain. Richard’s guitar feels more desolate here — the rattle of his strings and the whine of his DIY circuitry proving more expressive than any articulated note.

Side two’s “partly seen, unseen” slowly coalesces into a thrumming dirge, its layered organ tones pooling into a narcotic mire through which Autumn’s slowed vocals make their chthonic passage. The effect is uncannily choral — voices rising from the tarmac’s heat-haze, half-remembered and half-imagined.

Rays concludes with a fragment of Autumn singing beneath the sepulchral dome of the San Bernardino alle Ossa — Milan’s ‘chapel of the bones’. Her voice remains untouched here, carried on the chapel’s natural reverberation, while Richard’s post-hoc guitar shimmers and swells in widening arcs, eventually engulfing her vocal in soft plumes of distortion that feel devotional rather than destructive.

Known for their longform, drone-inflected collaborations, Autumn and Richard present something markedly distilled as The Desert Natures. In many ways, Rays sits closer to Autumn’s solo work as Autumn Grieve, or her earlier band Resin, albeit refracted through Richard’s transformative production techniques. These recordings are pared back to their elemental forms — heat, light, wire and breath — tracing new devotional geometries from the faded lines of the American road. It’s a decisive shift from the tidal pull of their previous works toward something more songlike and skeletal — a dust-blown strain of chamber-pop where structure flickers but never fully settles.