James Leyland Kirby has been making music since 1996, first starting out under the project name of V/Vm. Since his early years he has put out an array of records under his own name, as well under the moniker of The Caretaker (inspired by a scene from the Stanley Kubrick film 'The Shining').
Kirby first released the first album as The Caretaker in 1999, entitled 'Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom', a nod to the project's inspiration. The album featured dark ambient passages, and fuzzy recordings of orchestral ballroom and waltz music, and also included Kirby's 'take' on The Shining's Al Bowlly song 'Midnight and the Stars and You'.
The Caretaker moniker gained recent attention from the musical community with the release of 2011's 'An empty bliss beyond this world'. The songs are crafted from snippets of a 'mysterious collection of 78s', and the album features the clearest sounding music from the The Caretaker project, apart from a few crackles from the record player.
As someone who had never previously listened to any of Kirby's Caretaker records, the album's faded sounds of piano and orchestral instrumentation, clear enough to distinguish yet still feeling distant, and the atmosphere that these loops of 1920's/30's music conjured up was an immense, moving experience (even more so because I listened to it at night).
I especially loved the feeling of depth and distance in some of the songs, as if someone was playing it in the next room or down the hallway. As Kirby's defines the album's music as a reflection of 'the ability of Alzheimer's patients to recall songs of their past', you do feel as though you're trying to remember a song from distant years, but only remembering a certain part of the melody.
The whole album is available to listen to on Youtube (see link above), or can be listened to and downloaded with all of The Caretaker's other albums on The Caretaker official bandcamp page.
No comments:
Post a Comment