Bearer (Richard Skelton)

​- Overprinted silver CDR
- Artist-made six-panel roll-fold jacket with CD enclosure.
- Eight-page sewn-in poetry pamphlet. 
- Four photographic prints on heavyweight matte card.
- Music download card.
- Signed by the artist.​
- Limited edition of 25.

Drawing on the same phonographic source as 2023’s Before We Lie Down in Darknesse, but accumulating tributary currents of cello, viola and mandola over the course of 2024, Bearer is a single extended recording for the dark, viscid channels of water that seep through the peat and granite of Connemara’s lowland coastal bogs before draining into the sea. The Irish word for river mouth, ‘inbhear’, finds its ultimate source in the Proto-Indo-European word ‘*bher-’, meaning ‘to carry, to bear children’, but Bearer eddies outwards from these etymological origins, seeking further protogenetic material to be absorbed into its watery matrix, tracing the influx of each subterranean channel to the foothills of nearby mountains, and following their efflux into sea basins of undocumented bathymetric depths. 

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In some glossaries, ‘inbhear’ has a secondary metaphoric sense, meaning ‘an ostiary’ or ‘watcher over the House of God’. In the Catholic ministry, an ostiary is one of the four ‘minor orders’, the others being the order of the lector, the exorcist, and the acolyte. In something of a heretical departure from this idea, Bearer instead invokes those unseen and undocumented watchful presences of the land itself — what the accompanying poetic text hermetically terms ‘the occupants’, ‘the hazed figures’ and ‘the familiars’. Recalling the secondary sense of ‘*bher-’, meaning ‘to bear children’, the combination of text and music in Bearer therefore serves to conjure a landscape that is pregnant with hidden agency, perpetually on the point of issuing forth, but always at the periphery of our apprehension.