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.

Infant Tree - 2025