Drone Records

CLOUWBECK - Wolfrahm

Format: CD

Label & Cat.Number: Shining Day SHINE 11

Release Year: 2009

Note: behind CLOUWBECK we find RICHARD SKELTON (also active as A BROKEN CONSORT), who spreads here beautifully poly-layered violin-drones, always shifting & waving and building organic landscapes of metallic shining acoustics.. . absolutely stunning & highly recommended if you like multi-layered drone-harmonics as TROUM, VOICE OF EYE, CISFINITUM, ULTRA MILKMAIDS, etc..

Price (incl. 19% VAT): €13.00

More Info

" 'Wolfrahm' is the latest work by UK artist Richard Skelton, who records under many different guises, including A Broken Consort and Carousell. It's the follow-up to 2007's "A Moraine", and continues his preoccupation with landscapes, land formation, erosion, decay and renewal. The album's title is a reference to the mineral ore that produces Tungsten - a metal, which amongst other things, is used to make violin strings. The music itself brims with a rich, textural ebb and flow - a sonorous drift of shifting layers, with dark seams of beautiful, bowed melodies and eddying, turbulent undertow." [label info]

www.shiningday.pl

"Clouwbeck is yet another pseudonym for the British ambient folk experimentalist Richard Skelton, following A Broken Consort, Carousell, and a couple others which haven't yet found their way through these doors. Each of his monikers has its own slight yet particular bent on his signature sound of rough hewn melancholia, with Clouwbeck being the most somber and abstract that we've heard from him so far. He strips down the instrumentation to just the violin, although he does allow for a considerable amount of processing and thick applications of layered drone from that instrument, building up a ponderous atmosphere of wintry sadness. The album's opening track "Gossan" scratches out the melody as if the bow were dragged across a piece of barbed wire instead of violin, yet the buzzing, luminous beds of sound that Skelton broadcasts around these scraped recursive melodies prevents the whole thing from tumbling into dissonance. "Leached" softens the rustic buzz with a majestic billowing of overlapping violin melodies, distended and blurred into a rich mass of sound. The rest of the album continues to dive deeper with each track becoming incrementally more submerged in the dense loopings and hazy drones. Throughout, Skelton's album sounds like those beautiful orchestrations from Johann Johannsson as played by Alastair Galbraith and produced by the Caretaker. Really, fantastic stuff." [Aquarius Records]