[Listen] Richard Skelton – Verse of Birds

Verse of Birds is a collection of recordings from the west coast of Ireland. It comprises over 100 minutes of new music conceived during the spring, summer, autumn and winter of 2010/11.

The album can be thought of as an auditory companion to the texts of The Flowering Rock, which are collected within Field Notes (Volume One), also published by Corbel Stone Press.

PR: Suum Cuique is the alias used by Demdike Stare’s Miles Whittaker to vent his purest analogue noise experiments. Giving a stoic nod to the hardware emissions of Mika Vainio or Maurizio Bianchi, and conducted with a meditative practice comparable with Eleh, his 2nd album ‘Ascetic Ideals’ is the sound of Miles’ machines coaxed into revealing their bleakest secrets, often recorded straight from the mixing desk with no overdubs or edits. Aesthetically, it’s closest to his Demdike Stare material, as opposed to his Pendle Coven or MLZ releases, and was – perhaps unsurprisingly – crafted in between sessions for the ‘Elemental’ album. But these tracks are far more stark, murky and extreme than anything in the Demdike cache. The sound veers between outright shock attacks like opener ‘Strohtopf’ to plangent techno malfunctions on ‘Kuiper Analysis’ and the shellshocked, Alberich-like sound sphere of ‘Core Values’, leading us blindfolded thru the infernal torture chambers of ‘Proton Aesthetic’ and the Carpenter-esque closing sequence ‘Dionysus Decay’.

Not a Del Ray fan, but I like Biggie Smalls, so…get it here if you fancy.

The album is banging.