A broken consort is “an ensemble featuring more than one family of instruments”.  A Broken Consort are a broken consort in a sense – they have the requisite disparity of instruments - but they have only one member, Richard Skelton, and he can’t consort with himself.  He’d go blind.

Box of Birch is a magical construct, and by pulling a similar trick to the most confusing sorcery performed by airplanes it manages to be both floaty and dense.   It has none of that noisy rushing about that tends to come as part of the airplane package though; this is quiet and slow all the way.  Despite being made of many semi-diaphanous layers of lazily-threatening guitars, wandering piano, elegiac violin scrapes, and assorted who-knows-what, somehow it manages to retain an airy ethereal quality.  I can hear hints of A Silver Mount Zion and Boxhead Ensemble most obviously (I won’t say “ but on Miasmah”, as I’m saying that too often these days; instead just imagine that I had said it); and a touch of Ry Cooder’s bleak Paris, Texas bluescapes.  It feels very emotive and substantial while it envelops you, with an all-pervading sense of loss, yet somehow when you step back from the record at the end it fades like a dream, slipping from your mind like fog through a sieve; you’ll feel the loss and will want to slip back under the covers and its spell before you become too roused from your slumber.

Listen to “The Elder Lie“, and also to a selection of other tracks on the label (including A Broken Consort’s “Effacer“) over at The Wire.  This seriously wonderful record is available (theoretically) from Sustain-Release Recordings as “Two 8cm CDR’s - one silver, one white - wrapped in linen and encased in a black, jeweller’s box with individualised cover band. Inserts include six artwork prints by Louise Skelton, vellum parchment enclosure and a bag of birch twigs”.  Limited to, erm, 28 copies.   However, there is a second edition of 100, which comes in still-lovely personalised packaging, with a freshly pressed leaf.  Grab a copy of previous album The Shape Leaves while you are there, you won’t regret it…this is one of my favourite discoveries of the year.