The Preservation label presents the reissue edition of Marking Time from UK artist Richard Skelton. Richard has recorded in various guises -- as Clouwbeck, Heidika, Carousell and A Broken Consort. Marking Time was his first work released under his own name, and also the first on a label other than his own, Sustain-Release. Through the prolific output on Sustain-Release, Richard stamped a singular vision with his music: a sound that is at once complex and elemental in its questing nature, corporal feel and ultimately life-affirming quality. Marking Time represented a new beginning for Richard, finding him at his most direct and intimate, slowly turning on relatively bare textures of bowed strings, piano and guitar. A meditation on loss and the passing of time, its measure of transcendence accumulates in instrumental passages that work like gestures drifting towards a sense of space both rich and real. In reviewing Marking Time, The Wire wrote: "Not a single note is wasted ... utterly beautiful." After being one of The Wire's notable albums for 2008, it's something he continued to explore on his follow-up for the Type label, Landings (TYPE 055CD), in 2010 -- another similarly acclaimed album. And as with Marking Time, it is with his music that Richard impacts on and affects that environment, by documenting his ever-changing shape in it by means not only uniquely personal, but universal in a devastatingly beautiful way.