On either side of the globe, two seminal experimental artists collaborate for the first time: UK composer Richard Skelton and Australian artist Lawrence English meet for Noon, a devastating study of greyscale landscapes, deep sonics, and long-distance unity. 

“When we first started speaking together, back in 2021, it was a moment of contemplation,” writes Brisbane-based Lawrence English. “The world had quietened, the throws of a pandemic had hushed the ambient noise floor and in doing so had somehow unlocked a deeper connection to the world around us. Everything was the same, but completely different and the details of the day to day revealed a new perspective on even the most mundane of activities.”

Creatively, hushing the ambient noise floor is a phenomenon known well to Lawrence English and Richard Skelton. Both musicians, over decades of activity in their respective worlds of mournful, glacial, experimental ambient music, have released some of the field’s touchstone recordings. Their work has expressed isolation and evocation with yearning and redolent gravitas, reducing their noise floor to near silence. Their first ever collaboration, Noon is a finely balanced cohabitation of the themes and practices that have come to characterise these two luminaries of the genre.

“Many of our conversations that year were about the bizarre weather events we faced,” the duo write. “Australia suffered incredibly dynamic weather, flooding and more. Ireland’s coastline was whipped by vicious storms, a sea completely visceral and untamed.” Over four longform pieces, the music of Noon shudders, groans, and engulfs like a rolling stormcloud, as if portraying these climactic events in devastating but entrancing slo-mo.

“Noon is a meeting point and it's this promise of a repeating solar centre to our days, acting as the orbit from which so much of this record is made,” explain English and Skelton. “In many ways the idea of Noon is a temporal marker for two musicians operating not just on different sides of the planet, but also different hemispheres. It’s here, amidst shared ideas and methodologies of making, that a vision of an oppositional mirror of the hemispheres was imagined. An echo from one side to the other, an echo whose carriage exists beyond the sonic, but is absolutely rooted on sound. Noon operates as a palindrome of listening practices and experimentation, and more over as a shared temporal marker that reminds us of the vastly finite turnings of our world.”