![]() | This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification, as its only attribution is to self-published sources ; articles should not be based solely on such sources.(January 2021) |
The Caretaker | |
---|---|
Birth name | James Leyland Kirby |
Also known as | V/Vm |
Born | 9 May 1974 |
Origin | Stockport, England |
Genres | |
Instrument(s) | Computer, sampler, turntable |
Years active | 1999–2019 (as The Caretaker) 1996–present (solo career) |
Labels | V/Vm Test Records, History Always Favours The Winners |
Website | thecaretaker.com |
The Caretaker was a long-running project by English ambient musician, James Leyland Kirby (born 9 May 1974). His work as the Caretaker is characterized as exploring memory and its gradual deterioration, nostalgia, and melancholia. [1] The project was initially inspired by the haunted ballroom scene in the 1980 film The Shining , the 1978 TV show Pennies from Heaven , and the 1962 film Carnival of Souls . [2] His first several releases comprised treated and manipulated samples of 1930s ballroom pop recordings. [1] Most of his album covers were painted by one of his friends, Ivan Seal.
The Caretaker's works have received critical acclaim in publications such as The Wire, The New York Times , [3] and BBC Music. [4]
Simon Reynolds refers to the Caretaker's first three releases as "the haunted ballroom trilogy", [5] spanning 1999–2003: Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom , A Stairway to the Stars , We'll All Go Riding on a Rainbow .
Jon Fletcher described the sound as
" instantly recognizable musical identity of British tea-room pop (dance-band and swing music from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s) plugged into a multitude of effects to create a Proustian Replicant inverse. It's a stranger's past relocated within your own memories, a re-imagined history from an alien past. The mannered romantic swing of a bygone era is rendered beguilingly uncanny. These first releases flitted from bursts of noise (September 1939) to gaseous ambiance (We Cannot Escape The Past) to subtly-soaked moments of outright beauty (Stardust). Despite the uncanny effect and the eeriness, there is something warmly seductive about this debut triptych. Kubrick’s film, like the best horror, still injects a thrill and is a remnant of comfort in being haunted, a strange warmth. These early forays have the allure you find in childhood ghost stories. By the time of the third release though, it was hard to imagine what more could be done with the project. Never less than beautiful, it was just hard to conceive of actually needing any more of it." [6]
Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia was released in 2005 as a series of 72 free MP3 downloads. The release found much critical acclaim. Reynolds identifies it as a shift in the sound, "disorienting in its scale and abstraction", with his period 2005-2008 "exploring similar zones of queasy amorphousness". [5] Doran also sees the album as "a change in direction for the project conceptually, as it started to explore different aspects of memory loss as the music itself became more texturally and structurally complex." [7]
Jon Fletcher describes the release as "the labyrinthian set is a k-hole for the mind. Vague clouds of noise, barely flickering signals of life, only the starkest traces of past romanticism (no matter how poignant)- nothing to cling onto." [6] Mark Fisher contrasts this album with the Caretaker's previous output: "If his earlier records suggested spaces that were mildewed but still magnificent - grand hotels have gone to seed, long-abandoned ballrooms - Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia invokes sites that have deteriorated into total dereliction, where every unidentified noise is pregnant with menace." [8]
Persistent Repetition of Phrases combines an overt interest in amnesia and memory distortion, with a more melodic piano-centered atmosphere, with fewer recognizable samples than the Haunted Ballroom period: "After a few minutes you realize that something is stuck...Each song is tightly looped, a single event, chasing its resignation. No development, no narrative, no story. Not every locked groove is entirely hopeless. Rosy retrospection fixates on an event with a sense of less-bereft nostalgia - the memory trap seemingly resting on a happy moment.". [6] Kirby described it as "a lot warmer and more gentle...Not all memories are necessarily bad or disturbing memories". [9] At the time, this album was seen as his masterpiece, with Kirby describing himself as "surprised" by the level of reception, as it was created in a "bleak" and difficult period of his life. [10]
After 2008, the Caretaker's website announced that "work has begun on a new release for early 2010 which will shift focus completely towards the brain and brain function, recall and error". [11] During this time, Kirby released Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was under his own name, which was described by Pitchfork as "music of stasis that doesn't announce itself as much as it seeps." [12]
Kirby's focus at this time was on another album, and did not plan out making another Caretaker record of this kind - the album was made because of "pure chance in action at all times.". [11] The critical impact of An Empty Bliss Beyond This World is explored in detail on its page.
He also completed the soundtrack for Grant Gee's film Patience (After Sebald) (2012) during this period. Kirby's score for the film uses a 1927 record of Franz Schubert's piano-and-voice-only composition Winterreise (1828) as its main audio source. It also differs from other works of the project where hissing sounds are used instead of crackles, the loops are shorter in length, and the non-musical aspects of each track (the hiss sounds) serve as the foreground of the mix.
After another break, the Caretaker returned with his final project, intended as an end to the Caretaker persona. He conceived of six interlinked releases, which would explore the progression of dementia stage by stage to its end. Later stages reprise loops and motifs from both earlier albums in the series, and from throughout the Caretaker's back catalogue. [7] To immerse listeners, Kirby released each album 6 months apart.
Kirby has always been driven by innovation and frustration with his past, saying "I can’t carry on for another ten years looping old 1920s music" [7] and seeking to make a final break, and expressing a quixotic desire to frustrate fans of his earlier work, describing them as "a certain type of listener who will be buying this for a particular type of sound". [7] Everywhere at the End of Time is also influenced by technological changes since 1999, most notably advances in recording and mixing technology, and the new opportunities of sourcing music cuts online rather than scavenging in a physical record store. [7]
Everywhere at the End of Time was released to wide critical acclaim.
In 2017, Kirby released Take Care. It's a Desert Out There... , following the suicide of his collaborator Mark Fisher, who was suffering from depression. [13] It features a single track in its 48-minute runtime, with previously unreleased music by the Caretaker. [14] Kirby's initial intention would be to give Take Care for people attending at his performance at the Barbican Hall in London. [15] However, its high demand caused him to share it on the internet. [16] Released in a CD, it included a message stating its proceeds would be donated to the mental health charity Mind. [17]
Kirby's last work as the Caretaker, released alongside 2019's Stage 6, is Everywhere, an Empty Bliss , a collection of unreleased archival works.
The Caretaker describes himself as "fascinated by memory and its recall", as well as suggesting the project is "a kind of audio black comedy". [18] As well as The Shining , The Caretaker names Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven as an influence, which also appropriates music of the era in a new way with a "sadness in the lyrics to keep telling the story", as well as Carnival of Souls (1962) [18] and the music itself:
"Most of that music is about ghosts and loss as it was recorded between both the world wars. it's of a totally different era and has more or less been forgotten. Titles inspired new ideas as did the audio itself" [18]
He cites Al Bowlly specifically, whose music is featured prominently in The Shining, as a key touchstone:
"He was the golden voice of his generation, but he was killed by a parachute mine outside his London home. Bowlly always sang as if haunted; his voice was otherworldly. It's very strange music from this time between the two world wars: optimistic, but also very much about loss and longing, ghosts and torment. It seems haunted by the spirits of those who went to the trenches and never returned" [5]
For his work on amnesia and dementia, he also drew from books and research on the topic. [7]
The Caretaker's original website suggested it to "fans of the darker isolationist ambient work of modern composers such as William Basinski, Nurse with Wound, Aphex Twin, Fennesz and Brian Eno". [19] Fisher notes that the project is "rooted in Britishness", [20] with the Caretaker generally choosing to focus on only British source material. Fletcher suggests "Roxy Music's early weirdness" [6]
The Caretaker sees his work as a collaborative process, stressing the importance of LUPO's mastering, the visuals of weirdcore.tv, and longtime album-artist Ivan Seal as a key part of his process. [21] Theorist Mark Fisher had a symbiotic relationship with the Caretaker, contributing the liner notes to Theoretically Pure Antiretrograde Amnesia as well as putting his work in critical context, often taking the Caretaker as a jumping off point for his political ideas. Following Fisher's death, the Caretaker released Take Care, It's a Desert Out There as a memorial album, after one of the writer's quotes, with proceeds going to the mental health charity Mind. [22]
Mark Fisher played a major role [23] in theorizing the Caretaker's sound. He names the Caretaker as a key hauntology artist, alongside "William Basinski, the Ghost Box label...Burial, Mordant Music, Philip Jeck, amongst others" who had "converged on a certain terrain without directly influencing one another...suffused with an overwhelming melancholy; and they were preoccupied with how technology materialized memory" - in the Caretaker's case, that of vinyl records. [24] He identifies the "crackle" of vinyl as "the principle sonic signature of hauntology" which "makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint", [24] signaling "the return of a certain sense of loss" which "invokes the past and marks our distance from it". [25] Fisher connects the Caretaker's sound to his wider project of describing capitalist realism - the political idea that "not only has the future not arrived, it no longer seems possible", and hauntology's melancholia to capitalist realism's "closed horizons". Fisher contributed liner notes to Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, describing it as "uneasy listening"; in contrast to the Caretaker's earlier works, "the threat is no longer the deadly sweet seduction of nostalgia. The problem is not, anymore, the longing to get *to* the past but the inability to get *out* of it". [26]
Jon Fletcher similarly describes his work as "a hideously clear analysis of the post-modern condition - the sheer ephemerality of contemporary culture degenerating into a hopelessness - a sickness so debilitating that we forget the moment while it is still taking place…" [6]
Kirby's press releases also welcome political understandings of his work. With British-born Kirby having lived and worked for many years in Berlin and Kraków, the press release for Everywhere at the End of Time compares the project to Brexit: "Both started in 2016 and are due to wrap up in spring 2019. It should be no stretch of the imagination to read into their parallel progression from nostalgia and historic/collective amnesia, to progressive dementia and complete obliteration of (the) sense(s)" [27]
Adam Scovell focuses on the "spatial qualities" of Take Care, It's a Desert Out There - contrasting it with the Caretaker's earlier evocation of old tea rooms and hotels with "transporting the listener into a void of sorts". He describes it as "almost weather-like which is appropriate as depression is in some sense meteorological...Everything is dampened, nothing is spared. There is only the "now" when the weather is bad. Bones are damp, thoughts are damp and the dry land that others inhabit is seemingly inconceivable." [13]
Jon Fletcher described the Caretaker as "one of this decade's most innovative, heartbreaking and downright eerie musical projects has been playing to shadows under dimmed lights for the past 12 years". [6] Pitchfork described An Empty Bliss Beyond This World as "the musical equivalent of a permanent smile." [21]
The Caretaker's final project, Everywhere at the End of Time, is amongst his best-known. The Quietus, who very frequently features Kirby's projects, named it at the top of its 100 Reissues list in 2019. [28] In 2020, the completed Everywhere at the End of Time went viral on TikTok, with users telling one another to listen to the entire six-and-a-half-hour album series in one sitting. [29]
Albert Allick Bowlly was a South African-British vocalist and dance band guitarist who was popular during the 1930s in Britain. He recorded upwards of 1,000 songs that were listened to by millions.
In neurology, anterograde amnesia is the inability to create new memories after an event that caused amnesia, leading to a partial or complete inability to recall the recent past, while long-term memories from before the event remain intact. This is in contrast to retrograde amnesia, where memories created prior to the event are lost while new memories can still be created. Both can occur together in the same patient. To a large degree, anterograde amnesia remains a mysterious ailment because the precise mechanism of storing memories is not yet well understood, although it is known that the regions of the brain involved are certain sites in the temporal cortex, especially in the hippocampus and nearby subcortical regions.
The St Luke Passion, BWV 246, is a Passion setting formerly attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach. It is included in the BWV catalog under the number 246. Now it appears in the catalogues under the heading apocryphal or anonymous.
Sick-Love is the debut remix album by V/Vm, an alias of English musician Leyland Kirby. Released in 2000, it samples several 1960s-1990s pop songs about love, distorting them to create a sinister atmosphere. The album is mostly unavailable physically because of copyright laws; V/Vm later released the similar album The Green Door. Met with a positive reception from music critics, the album and its single received airplay on various radio stations, achieving the NME title of single of the week.
Ivan Seal is an English painter and sound artist who specializes in surreal and abstract works centered around concepts of memory and the creation of imagined objects. He is best known for his collaborations with electronic musician James Leyland Kirby, also known as The Caretaker, creating artwork for the critically acclaimed albums: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World and the six part album series Everywhere at the End of Time, both of which examine themes of memory loss through the long-term mental decay brought about by dementia.
An Empty Bliss Beyond This World is the ninth studio album by the Caretaker, an ambient music project of English musician Leyland Kirby, released on 1 June 2011 through History Always Favours the Winners.
Mark Fisher, also known under his blogging alias k-punk, was an English writer, music critic, political and cultural theorist, philosopher, and teacher based in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He initially achieved acclaim for his blogging as k-punk in the early 2000s, and was known for his writing on radical politics, music, and popular culture.
The soundtrack for Patience (2012), a film by Grant Gee, was composed and produced by English musician Leyland James Kirby under his ambient music project the Caretaker. The official soundtrack album was issued on 23 January 2012. Unlike other albums of the Caretaker that used old recordings of playful and bright ballroom music, Kirby's score for the film uses a 1927 recording of Franz Schubert's song cycle for voice and piano Winterreise (1828) as its main audio source. It also differs from other works of the project where hissing sounds are used instead of crackles, the loops are shorter in lengths, and the non-musical aspects of each track serve as the foreground of the mix. The soundtrack was favorably received by professional music journalists.
Hauntology is a music genre or a loosely defined stylistic feature that evokes cultural memory and aesthetics of the past. It developed in the 2000s primarily among British electronic musicians, and typically draws on British cultural sources from the 1940s to the 1970s, including library music, film and TV soundtracks, psychedelia, and public information films, often through the use of sampling.
Everywhere at the End of Time is the eleventh recording by the Caretaker, an alias of English electronic musician Leyland Kirby. Released between 2016 and 2019, its six studio albums use degrading loops of sampled ballroom music to portray the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Inspired by the success of An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (2011), Kirby produced Everywhere as his final major work under the alias. The albums were produced in Kraków and released over six-month periods to "give a sense of time passing", with abstract album covers by his friend Ivan Seal. The series drew comparisons to the works of composer William Basinski and electronic musician Burial, while the later stages were influenced by avant-gardist composer John Cage.
Everywhere, an Empty Bliss is the twelfth release by the Caretaker, an alias of English musician Leyland Kirby. Released on February 26, 2019, the record is compiled from archived tracks that were meant to be used on the Caretaker's albums. Before finishing his album series Everywhere at the End of Time, Kirby released the album as "a surprise golden farewell".
We, So Tired of All the Darkness in Our Lives is the seventh studio album by English musician Leyland Kirby, released on 28 September 2017. An electronic album, it features melancholic and gothic elements. It was produced the same time as Stage 4, and released the same day as Stage 3, of Kirby's album series under the Caretaker moniker, Everywhere at the End of Time. We, So Tired of All the Darkness in Our Lives contrasts from the Caretaker's work in that it is more positive; aspects such as drums mimicking a sound of marching are present. The album's title is a reference to the Joe Jackson song Steppin' Out.
Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was is the debut studio album by English musician Leyland Kirby, released on 1 September 2009. With his ongoing aliases at the time, Kirby produced a melancholic album that explored thoughts of the future. He produced Sadly at an agitated time, when he would not work but rather drink with various girls. The record was first issued as three full-length CDs and would later be repressed as six vinyls with artwork by Ivan Seal. The release received moderately positive reception from music critics. Some criticized its length, while others praised its emotional sound.
Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom is the debut studio album by the Caretaker, an alias of musician Leyland Kirby. Released in 1999, it consists of an influence from the horror film The Shining, manipulating songs from the 1920s to resemble the film's music. It differed from Kirby's earlier works in that it did not manipulate pop songs to create noise albums, as he did under the V/Vm alias. It rather slowed down big band records to create a hauntological atmosphere. However, the packaging was the same as other V/Vm releases. The album was met with positivity from music critics, who praised its hauntological themes.
We'll All Go Riding on a Rainbow is the third studio album by the Caretaker, an alias of musician Leyland Kirby. Released in 2003, it was the last of Kirby's "haunted ballroom trilogy", which spans his albums influenced by the film The Shining. It features looped melodies and vinyl crackle to create the ambience of The Shining's ballroom, with its artwork emphasizing this style. We'll All Go Riding on a Rainbow was met with positive reception from music critics, who praised its haunted ballroom ambiance. However, other critics felt that the album's length was an issue. Kirby's next album as the Caretaker, Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia (2005) would abandon the haunted ballroom concept and install themes of memory loss.
A Stairway to the Stars is the second studio album by the Caretaker, an alias of musician Leyland Kirby. Released in 2001, it was created after one of Kirby's pop manipulations as V/Vm gained attention. Following Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom, A Stairway to the Stars features new genres such as darkwave and elements such as reversed vocals. The record was met with positivity from music critics, who praised its ambiance. It is regarded as Kirby's best album in his haunted ballroom trilogy, which spans his first three releases.
Persistent Repetition of Phrases is the seventh studio album by the Caretaker, an alias of musician Leyland Kirby. Released on 1 April 2008, it was his first record to cover themes of Alzheimer's disease. The album was also the first Caretaker release to present looping of short segments within tracks. It marked Kirby's change of record labels from V/Vm Test to History Always Favours the Winners, which he felt might have helped with the record's success.
Take Care. It's a Desert Out There... is the eleventh studio album by the Caretaker, an alias of musician Leyland Kirby. Released on 8 December 2017, Kirby composed it after the death of his collaborator, Mark Fisher, who died by suicide on January 13, 2017 at age 48. Consisting of a single title track throughout its 48-minute runtime, its proceeds would be donated to the mental health charity Mind. Kirby's initial intention would be to give the record to attendants of his performance at the Barbican Hall in London. However, due to a high demand, he decided to release it on his YouTube channel.
Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia is the fourth studio album by the Caretaker, an alias of musician Leyland Kirby. Released in 2005, it abandoned the haunted ballroom aesthetic of the previous albums and explored memory loss. Divided into six CDs, it consists of seventy-two drone tracks combined to create an almost four hour long release. It was compared by several critics to other musicians, including Merzbow, Boards of Canada, and Krzysztof Penderecki.
Eager to Tear Apart the Stars is the second studio album by English electronic musician Leyland Kirby, released on 3 October 2011. Following his own name debut album Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was, Kirby continued exploring a more personal side of his music, though one that differs from his work as the Caretaker. Kirby produced the songs without using any samples, mostly creating piano tracks from synthesisers. This style of sound drew comparisons to the work of composers Harold Budd and Roedelius, though the record's press release claimed Kirby has his own oeuvre.