Shadow Reflex (The Inward Circles)

Glass-mastered silkscreened CD.
4-panel digipak enclosure.
Music download card.
Edition of 100.

 

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Soundcloud excerpts.

 

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Tracklisting:

 

1.  a living alloy (10:06)
2. with light from objects (10:09)
3. an early station (10:01)
4. flowers for the pyre (10:07)

Richard Skelton’s ninth album since 2014 under the Inward Circles guise pushes his acoustic- transformation ethos into its most hostile, percussive shape yet. Where previous releases dissolved his trademark strings into smeared, spectral matter, Shadow Reflex brings the physical domain to the fore, overwhelming the listener with a dense, punitive soundworld that seems actively antagonistic to the room it occupies.

It’s his most alien and forbidding work since 2015’s I have heard a music and it is delirious, but the mood here is less atmospheric and more blunt-force. Acoustic sources are still present — scraped, struck, bowed — yet they’re subjected to processes that shear away any sense of origin, leaving only convulsive rhythm and scorched resonance. After the fragile, aetheric beauty of 2023’s Before We Lie Down In Darknesse, Shadow Reflex feels like a violent course correction — a work of bruising corporeality, where sound is no longer something to drift within, but something that holds the listener under.