The Second Chamber, by Richard Skelton

The Second Chamber

by Richard Skelton

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ahnoel Such a lovely revisiting of an older sound with more recent forms & techniques. Tough to pick a favourite, but I love the movement of mosaic and quills Favorite track: mosaic.

maarten schermer Beautiful album, my favourite track would be 'Weightless'. Favorite track: weightless.

drigby0 Favourite tracks: Confluence, embers, archaic

John Coldwell Very difficult to select a favourite from this beautiful collection. In the end I chose Mosaic. Richard’s acoustic palette references Vaughan Williams and Olivier Messiaen. Lovely. Favorite track: mosaic.

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	1.	emerge 05:10
	2.	mosaic 05:28
	3.	confluence 04:19
	4.	cascade 05:21
	5.	unmoored 05:22
	6.	quills 02:46
	7.	hovering 04:39
	8.	embers 05:31
	9.	archaism 06:28
	10.	weightless 04:35

about

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, Skelton has 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 whilst remaining anchored in the soil, an album that treats as revelation the chance resonances of even the simplest of musical gestures, an album that celebrates the life-affirming qualities of music itself.

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released May 30, 2025

‘The Second Chamber unfolds like a cyanotype, an art form shaped by long exposures and gradual transformation. Its sonic rinses and slow tonal bleeds evoke a striking hue tempered by telluric shadows. Its final form is a shade of blue long associated with melancholy and rare natural beauty.’
(The Quietus)

‘His music, seemingly comparable to drone chamber music, contains much more: the evocative power of a sound and its yearning, the ecstasy of sublimation… The Second Chamber brings us back to the present, where nothing is as it seems and nothing is as it was before. Twenty years later, so much life.’
(Blow Up Magazine)

‘Skelton’s harmonies are luminously beautiful, but he paints with restraint, and his view of the countryside never denies its dark side: life grows in the earth to which one day we will all return.’
(Prospect Magazine)

‘To mark two decades since the label’s formation, Skelton has put together an album made in the spirit of those original productions, taking us back to the same isolated but expansive spirit that first drew us to his work. It’s the kind of work that has been endlessly rinsed in the years since, by too many artists to mention, but Skelton’s take here is disarmingly pure - a gorgeous, sentimental reflection on an era that now seems impossibly distant.’
(Boomkat)

‘It’s often a narcotic, almost unearthly experience that he manages to offer you here. A force field of profound emotions, resulting in a moving beauty.’
(De Subjectivisten)

‘A uniquely personal sound. Skelton‘s arrangements are nothing like what is usually called contemporary ‘modern classical’ music. His compositions can be rather abstract, and even when they have a distinct melody, there’s still something otherworldly about them.’
(Ambientblog.net)

‘While the composer's sound has evolved over the years, it has retained an elegiac, heartfelt quality. This sound was rare then and remains uncommon now.’
(A Closer Listen)

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Aeolian Scotland, UK

Digital music editions from Corbel Stone Press & Sustain-Release.

All releases are the work of Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton.

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