The Old Thrawing Crux

Credits from Bandcamp

New sonic fictions. Written within sight of the Old Thrawing Crux, County Galway, and recorded to a Phasic 2½ inch reel-to-reel in September and October of 2023, this series of twelve songs was originally conceived for the ‘Carna’ clavophone, a uniquely chaotic electroacoustic device on loan from the Ryan Marine Science Institute. The reels, however, were later unaccountably damaged and the work was subsequently abandoned. After a 2024 crowdfunding campaign, portions of the tapes were reconstituted using the Punctus E.R.R. immersion system currently in development at Lightford Laboratories. The remainder was interpolated from the original scores. The resulting recordings were mixed at six feet above sea-level by J. Gall Inglis, and final mastering was performed by William Boyd Carpenter at the Wrackrooms.

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The special edition comprises A CD of 'The Old Thrawing Crux' and a CD of the album 'The Preliminaries'. It also includes an original artwork in the form of a page excised and adapted from 'The Marine Radio Manual' by G.L. Danielson and F.C. Mayoh - a book salvaged from the ‘withdrawn’ stock of the Marine Science Institute’s central library. The cover features one of four paste-on photographic prints, and the edition is completed by a 16-page booklet of photography assembled from a strip of Belmont CRX 17 x 13mm negatives found cached in the spine of 'The Marine Radio Manual'.

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"Skelton's most unsettling material to date, saturating eerie, elongated drones into ruptured, ferric rumbles. The music cracks and creases as Skelton's woozy symphonies develop, hissing, warping and waning for an added sense of tension." (Boomkat)

"The album sits among the most consistently captivating works the composer has committed to tape, reel or otherwise. The sonic equivalent of abstract expressionism, where blurs of harmony and timbre swirl around each other and occasionally coalesce into fixed patterns." (The Quietus)

"Skelton once again captures the haunting beauty of the environment that inspires him." (Headphone Commute)