Richard Skelton is an English musician. Over the past seventeen years and over 50 albums & EPs,
he has developed a signature sound, often comprised of strings, piano and other acoustic instrumentation. Since 2013 he has
increasingly buried these organic sources in layers of detritus and static. The process, as he articulates it, is to use signal-degradation
as a means of reflecting the processes of decay and transformation in the natural world. His music has been placed alongside
giants of experimental music, such as Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Stars Of The Lid, William Basinski. A DIY advocate, most of
his music has been self-released, either via Sustain-Release (2005-2011) or Corbel Stone Press (2009+).
Renown for his
expressive and innovative use of acoustic instruments, his much-imitated treatment of strings — at once visceral and haunting
— began in 2007 on the album ‘Box of Birch’, and was later developed on his trio of ground-breaking recordings, ‘Marking Time’
(2008), ‘Landings’ (2009) and ‘Verse of Birds’ (2011). His work has been lauded by Gramophone, Mojo, Q, Record Collector and
The Quietus, among others, and in 2011 he was featured on the cover of The Wire magazine. In 2013 he was shortlisted for a
Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, and in 2014 he was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Award for Experimental Music.
Jung An Tagen invites us to reflect on the diffuse but persistent term ‘experimental’ not as deviation from aesthetic orthodoxy,
but as the design and implementation of compositional systems that offer unpredictable results; ‘electronic’ as an annulment
of the previous instrumental tradition, and as a simultaneous reversion towards aesthetic openness; as the fragmentation of
a theoretical or mythical musical syntax by obsessive repetition, sequential motivic mutations, aleatoric arrays, pareidolic
illusions and moiré effects; ‘electronic’ as the ultimate split, dehumanisation, mechanic strangeness.
Backed up by 2
decades of discographic activity under diverse pseudonyms and multiple collaborations on labels such as Editions Mego and
Diagonal, Stefan Juster performs tirelessly at Festivals like Unsound or Sonic Acts, researching the boundaries of techno
and dissociative computer music. Testing strategies of physical disorientation and forceful sonic phenomena, encouraging minds
and bodies to calculate and intuit their own place in spacetime. It’s addictive music. Music in constant explosion.
The sound performance series Sonic Specters is the first part of the program centering on AIL’s new topic: Haunted – Persistence
of the Past. In cooperation with Struma+Iodine.
ail.angewandte.at
