The collaboration has its roots in conversations that began in 2021, during a period when the world had fallen unusually quiet. As the ambient noise of everyday life receded, Skelton and English found themselves considering the altered relationship to landscape, weather and perception that emerged from that silence. “Everything was the same, but completely different,” recalls English, describing the period in which their correspondence began.

Those conversations soon turned towards the increasingly volatile environments around them. Australia was experiencing flooding and extreme weather, while on the opposite side of the world, Ireland’s Atlantic coastline was being battered by vicious storms. From these distant but strangely connected landscapes, NOON began to take shape.

Across four longform compositions, the album moves through these shared preoccupations with landscape, isolation, weather and the elemental forces that exist beyond human scale. The music shudders, groans and expands with the slow violence of a storm system… devastating yet entrancing, as though climactic events have been rendered in extreme slow motion.

Both Skelton and English have spent decades developing highly distinctive approaches to mournful, glacial and experimental forms of ambient music, creating works in which silence, texture, memory and place become as important as sound itself. NOON finds a natural point of convergence between these practices, while retaining the sense of distance that makes the collaboration so powerful.

The album’s title reflects this tension between distance and connection. NOON is a shared temporal marker, a fixed point in the day that occurs simultaneously for two musicians operating across different sides of the planet and in different hemispheres. For Skelton and English, it becomes an imagined centre from which their respective listening practices can mirror one another: an echo travelling from one side of the world to the other.

“NOON operates as a palindrome of listening practices and experimentation,” explain the pair, “and moreover as a shared temporal marker that reminds us of the vastly finite turnings of our world.”

Based on Australia’s east coast, Lawrence English is an artist, composer and curator whose work explores perception, memory, place and embodied listening. He has collaborated with artists including William Basinski, David Toop, Lea Bertucci and Loscil, and has presented work through performance, installation and recordings internationally. Since 2000, English has run the renowned experimental label Room40, releasing music by Ben Frost, Grouper, Tim Hecker, and many more.

Richard Skelton is a prolific British composer, artist and writer based on Ireland’s wild Atlantic coast. His extensive body of work spans numerous aliases including A Broken Consort, The Inward Circles, Imperial Valley and Burnt Harbors, alongside his work as co-director of Corbel Stone Press with Autumn Richardson. NOON marks his third release with Phantom Limb, following his acclaimed solo albums; These Charms May Be Sung Over a Wound (2020) and selenodesy (2023).