This latest full-length from the darkest and most intense of Richard Skelton’s many guises is quite accurately billed as the project’s most hostile and percussive release to date. That is quite an impressive achievement indeed given that there are some earlier Inward Circles pieces that sound like the fucking earth is being ripped open or like a goddamn star is collapsing, but it is true that their crushing immensity often felt like the natural cycle of life and death on a massive geological scale than a world-eating extra-dimensional horror turned loose on humanity. I’d say that the latter certainly matches the spirit of our current era though, so no one can accuse Richard Skelton of failing to meet the moment. Also, there are beats now too: crawling, scraping, lumbering, and relentlessly unstoppable ones. In short, Shadow Reflex is a blackened, slithering, and seismic nightmare of an album and quite possibly one of Skelton’s most powerful statements yet.
The opening “A Living Alloy” sets the album’s cold, stark, and menacing tone nicely, as a slow pulse of bowed bass drones is gradually joined by a shimmering and melancholy two-note melody, an off-kilter kick drum pulse, and some rhythmic scraping metal textures. Eventually, however, the bowed bass motif detaches from the glacial throb of the groove to resemble a deep, elemental howl of anguish. Obviously, elemental howls of anguish are prime Inward Circles territory, but those howls definitely seem unusually malign this time around, as it feels like a camera is slowly panning across a desolate pre- or post-human frozen landscape as some kind of cosmic Lovecraftian horror seismically shudders back to life in its subterranean lair. While that same unrelentingly bleak and haunted vibe impressively extends for the entire duration of the album, the remaining three pieces are even more effective at conjuring up gnarled, unspeakable horrors stalking across a ruined landscape, as they largely dispense with the most recognizably human touch of the opener (the coldly glimmering guitar motif).
To my ears, the best of the lot is “with light from objects,” as Skelton’s curdled, smeared, and hollow drones are combined with primal howls and a visceral, scraping percussion loop that unpredictably comes and goes. In fact, it feels a lot like a wounded and crawling nightmare has just climbed out of hell to transform the world into a smoldering, slime-covered ruin, which proves to be a bit of a recurring theme throughout the album. Each individual nightmare DOES have its own distinctive qualities though. For example, “an early station” feels like a massive hallucinatory nightmare worm slithering through a landscape of smeared howls, cursed fog, and slow-motion and industrial-gnawed broken disco beats. The closing “flowers for the pyre” is also a bit surprising in the beat department, as it combines a convulsive throb with shakers and dubby spatial effects. It also proudly reveals a new strain of Skeltonian nightmare, as it feels like sentient industrial machinery creaking back to life in a haunted, overgrown, and long-abandoned factory.
In short, Shadow Reflex captures Skelton in his most blackened and malevolent form yet and it is one hell of a focused and sustained statement. In fact, it sounds like the sort of album someone could only dream up if they were the last human on earth and had only a soundless copy of John Carpenter’s The Thing for company and spent their entire lonely life trying to imagine what that world would sound like. Looking back, I am legitimately astonished at how radically Skelton’s art has transformed since I first encountered him via Type’s reissues of Landings and Marking Time, as I fell in love with rustic and intimate violin pieces and sharp harmonics. These days I am far more likely to hear something that resembles cracking glaciers, shifting tectonic plates, or an all-enveloping cosmic horror devouring the universe.
Unsurprisingly, moving away from the deeply personal and human into geological time scales and massive planet-sized canvases has not been without some growing pains and dark ambient-flavored missteps over the years, but Skelton is truly on a plane all his own when he is in an inspired mood and hits the mark just right. Shadow Reflex is definitely one of those times, as it rivals Nimrod Is Lost In Orion as my favorite Inward Circles release. It may be a more stark and menacing plunge into the void than I am accustomed to, but the seething and howling catharsis at its heart is still the kind that I can feel in the very depths of my soul.
