Richard Skelton and Lawrence English have spent decades making some of the quietest, most patient music around, one from the edge of the Atlantic and the other from Brisbane. Their first album together, NOON, comes out November 20 on the UK label Phantom Limb, and its opening track, "Sprites," is out now. It runs seven and a half minutes and sets the tone for a record built slowly, the way weather builds.
Two artists, two hemispheres
Richard Skelton is a British composer, artist and writer who now lives on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. His music has always been tied to land: Phantom Limb points to Landings, his 2009 record shaped by the Pennine moors, and to the years he spent burying instruments in the soil and digging them up months later to record with them. He has released music under his own name and as A Broken Consort, The Inward Circles, Imperial Valley and Burnt Harbors. Since 2009 he has also run Corbel Stone Press with the Canadian poet and musician Autumn Richardson, a small press devoted to landscape, nature and myth that puts out books, records and art editions. The two also record together as The Desert Natures.
Lawrence English is an Australian artist, composer and curator whose work circles around listening, perception, place and memory. He runs the experimental label Room40, which his own Bandcamp page sums up with the title "Room40 Honcho," and his catalog is full of duets: records with David Toop, with Loscil, with Werner Dafeldecker and with Akira Kosemura, plus solo works such as Field Recordings From The Zone and this year's The Rest Is My Ghost.
Where NOON came from
According to the label, the two started talking in 2021, when the pandemic had pushed the noise of everyday life down to almost nothing. Those conversations soon turned to the weather. Australia was dealing with floods and wild swings, and storms were battering Ireland's coast. That sense of huge forces moving slowly runs through the whole record, which the label hears as music that shudders and swells like a storm cloud seen in slow motion.
The title is the hinge. Noon is the same fixed point in the day for both of them, even though they sit on opposite sides of the planet and in opposite hemispheres, so the album works as a kind of mirror between two places. The duo call it a palindrome of listening, which suits a cover where Skelton's name is printed upside down beneath English's.
The four pieces
The Apple Music listing gives the shape of the album: "Sprites" at 7:36, "Holding Light" at 9:44, "Wish Bone" at 10:03 and "The Child" at 11:22, close to 39 minutes in all, with each piece longer than the last. "Sprites" arrived as a single on September 23, and Phantom Limb has posted an official video for it on its YouTube channel.
If you came to ambient music through the big names, this is a good next step, the kind of record made for headphones and a dark room. Our ambient music starter guide is a good map of the wider field, and fans of Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri's long-distance album will feel right at home.
How to get it
NOON is up for pre-order on Phantom Limb's Bandcamp. It comes as a digital album, a standard vinyl edition with printed inner sleeves, and a special edition on white vinyl, limited to 100 copies, in a debossed and foil-stamped sleeve with a reversible A3 print designed by the two artists. Check current pricing on the Bandcamp page. The hand-stamped test pressings have already sold out. The label ships from the UK, the EU or the US, depending on where you are.
While you wait for November, the back catalogs are deep. Skelton's last Phantom Limb album, selenodesy, turned his attention from the land to the night sky. On English's side, A Colour For Autumn is the 15th anniversary edition of his 2009 album, and The Shell That Speaks The Sea is his duet with David Toop.
Stream "Sprites" now on Apple Music or Bandcamp, and save NOON on Apple Music for release day.
NOON on Bandcamp · Phantom Limb · Lawrence English · Lawrence English on Bandcamp · Corbel Stone Press · Phantom Limb on YouTube
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