"a sky cold as clay is a record of traces, where sounds exist as palimpsests rather than clearly delineated entities. The album’s root is a collage of recordings Rory Salter collected over the last few years. Piano captured on an iPhone, friends throwing sticks at trees in Finland, a hurdy-gurdy laying around a studio – threaded together with tender melodiousness from trickling acoustic guitar, wobbly drones and electrical tones. Each track sounds like a superimposition, as though traces from their original contexts and the processes of their creation and documentation are leaking through.

Salter’s day job is as a sound engineer. And across a sky cold as clay we’re offered a glimpse into that work. The way sound acts before it’s captured in a perfect recording or performance, and the possibilities it has before being varnished to a pristine external standard.

Opener “during a slack half hour” arrives with the noise floor of a mic-preamp cranked high, dousing us in a blanket of static through which chirring electricity, struck metal and languid acoustic guitar emerge. “In corners, after clocks, on tiled floors” sees unsettling thuds, coughs and voices creep through hissy ether, as though the mic is turned so high it’s picking up the neighbours. On “Where the gains are set” Salter reads a poem which teeters back and forth between the sense of gain as both an audio term and one imbricated in the fabric of a zero-sum, competitive way of seeing the world.

Sound is both Salter’s canvas and his livelihood, and this record traces the possible multitudes that can unfurl in capital’s downtime, in the curious intervals teetering between on and off the clock. When playful explorations and mental flights of fancy aren’t time fillers but points on a map surveying what exists outside a goal-oriented hegemony. It’s a possibility written into the very process of how these tracks were made. Salter brought the archive of fixed sounds to life by rebroadcasting them through different amplifiers and speakers - holding them under his arms, playing sounds back in different rooms and re-recording them, accruing the traces of different spaces and playback devices as he went. Sticking in the playful zone of the sound engineer’s craft, staying at the site of possibility, evading straight lines and efficient technical shortcuts.

It gives the record a rich, unconventional depth. A sense we’re hearing what happens when one slips off the treadmill of efficient productivity and the work of capturing sound is opened to playful diversions and detours. “(bow r)” documents a blistering performance on a hurdy-gurdy, miked up in such a way that we become bewilderingly intimate with its creaks, wheezes and rasps, presenting the material action of wooden wheels alongside the sublime sound they create. On “run off ashes” a lulling acoustic guitar segues seamlessly into lonely piano atop an uninterrupted creaking, rustling backdrop. A splicing where Salter seems to offer us two different musical accompaniments to the same off kilter soundscape.

Salter notes that a key formative influence on the album was playing in improvisation contexts, both with other musicians and solo. Specifically, he deployed samplers, filled with many of the sounds which now appear here. It perhaps explains why, despite these tracks being made from fixed recordings, they’re never inert, tranquil or benign. Playing among improvisors, Salter became aware that timing is often a more distinguishing characteristic of a musician than the tools they use. That awareness imbues the record with a sense of drama, new sounds emerging with sudden immediacy and creating startling juxtapositions. Most poignantly, a scream on “In corners, after clocks, on tiled floors” recurs at the same time indent on “The field is full of stone”. A trace of one track emerging in another, a trace of improvisatory zeal recurring throughout the album and giving it a vibrancy beyond a collage of fixed audio.

Each track feels like a palimpsest woven from the traces of work, technology and accidents that go into producing and conveying sound as much as sounds themselves. On a sky cold as clay, imperfections become starting points rather than dead ends to cut, what’s ugly becomes something to reconsider when offered a different light. Like taking time to notice the richness of a bleak sky."

Infant Tree, 2025