The Second Chamber (Richard Skelton)

Glass-mastered silkscreened CD.
6-panel digifile enclosure.
Music download card.

 

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Soundcloud excerpts.

 

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Tracklisting:

 

1. emerge (5.10)
2. mosaic (5.28)
3. confluence (4.20)
4. cascade (5.22)
5. unmoored (5.22)

6. quills (2.47)
7. hovering (4.39)
8. embers (5.32)
9. archaism (6.28)
10. weightless (4.36)

2025 marks the 20th anniversary of Sustain-Release, the private press label through which Richard Skelton published a string of hermetic, landscape-oriented albums under a series of pseudonyms.
 
Rather than release a retrospective, a collection of remixes, or a cache of unreleased material, Richard has instead made a new album that honours the spirit of his earlier work. Recorded between 2021 and 2025, these new compositions feature his original ‘broken consort’ of small, handmade or modified stringed instruments, augmented by cello, viola and piano.
 
Over the past decade, Skelton has subjected this acoustic palette of sounds to increasingly destructive processes, but on The Second Chamber he allows each instrument to simply ring out in reverberant space. The result is an album that looks to the horizon while remaining anchored in the soil, an album that treats as revelation the chance resonances of even the simplest of musical gestures, that celebrates the life-affirming qualities of music itself.