Grief, hallucinations and exhumed violins: the astonishing music of Richard Skelton

‘It’s not a landscape that’s there for people to go and look at,” says Richard Skelton. The countryside around the Anglo-Scottish border doesn’t share its secrets willingly, but a few hours spent in the passenger seat of Skelton’s MG hatchback reveals some of its strange charms. Wide, arrow-straight roads are a mesmerising constant that switches one’s focus to the granular details – the textures of the road surface, the ditches flanking each side, and the occasional cartoonish tree. The effect is hypnotic. “It’s kind of maze-like, and you don’t know where you are half of the time,” Skelton says. “I feel like I could drive around here for decades and not really get the measure of it.”

Skelton is one of the UK’s most prolific and consistently impressive experimental musicians, the creator of slow-moving yet unexpectedly gruelling drone-based music, and his work