Rory Salter - a sky cold as clay

Rory Salter
a sky cold as clay
Infant Tree
UK, 2025
LP

Rory Salter, who often records under the name Malvern Brume and runs the restive Infant Tree label, has a day job as a sound engineer. Rather than leading him in the expected directions—conventional perfectionism, pristine audiophilia—it seems to have the opposite effect. Like much of his work, a sky cold as clay finds him tending to misfit sounds—smudged, strange, unprofessional, uncanny—like auditory rescue dogs. Yet his careful layering and juxtaposing of these sounds is no less exacting for his choice of material. It’s not always pretty (though it often is), but there’s something quite moving about his devotion to this arcane junk, like folk art, or folk heroism.