Landings Diary

Originally published in an extremely limited hardback edition, “Landings Diary” is a loose-fitting collection of writings that obliquely articulate ideas about memory, mark making, proximity and loss, a sense of place and the landscape (its voices, history and folklore). Along with diary entries, the book gathers together word lists, poetry and prose fragments from 2004 to 2009, and in many ways provides a kind of private narrative and companion guide to much of the music published through Sustain-Release during that period.

A paperback edition of Landings Diary will shortly be available, accompanied by a series of photographs and an album of music that represents the culmination of four years recording in the landscape of the West Pennine Moors, Lancashire, UK. But rather than a document of a particular period of time-and-place, these words, pictures and sounds are an attempt to imaginatively engage with a landscape, to connect with a place and its history in a way thay is filled with gesture and ritual. Here’s how Nick Cain described it in The Wire:

“Skelton’s music is inextricably linked to the rural landscapes of Lancashire and the Pennines, where he often records. Album and track titles allude to these environments, as do the artwork and packaging. … The connection is most explicit in his Landings project, which documents countryside recording sessions, pressed as one-off CDs, packaged and deposited at the location where they took place. MP3’s of several can be found at his blog, whose ruminations, musing on nature’s sublimity and untangling discovered histories and displaced narratives, essay a form of pastoral psychogeography. Like Skelton’s music, they map, draw on and inhabit landscapes – both physical and emotional – etched with memory and loss.”

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