An Empty Bliss Beyond This World sounds like a collection of edits of prewar parlor-room music because that's what it is. "This Caretaker album is built from layers of sampled 78s and albums," James Kirby told me in an email recently. "Things have been rearranged in places and other things brought in and out of focus. Surface noise"-- which is abundant-- "is from the original vinyls."
Kirby is an artist whose concepts are sometimes more fun to engage with than his music. As V/Vm-- a project he started in the early 1990s-- he made grotesque edits of soft-pop songs and released an entire 7" of the sounds of pigs feeding. His albums as the Caretaker have been comparatively more subdued, tending toward ambient music made from preexisting recordings.
Bliss was inspired by a 2010 study suggesting that Alzheimer's patients have an easier time remembering information when it's placed in the context of music. What makes it unique isn't that Kirby resuscitates old but vaguely familiar source material; it's how he edits it. Several of the tracks here take pretty, anodyne phrases and loop them mindlessly; several stop in what feels like mid-thought; several reach back and then jump forward. They never feel filled-in from start to finish, and they tend to linger on moments that feel especially comforting or conclusive: the last flourishes of a song, maybe, the pat on the shoulder, the part when we're assured everything is drawing to a close. Kirby isn't just making nostalgic music, he's making music that mimics the fragmented and inconclusive ways our memories work.
Unlike Kirby's last few albums, whether as the Caretaker or Leyland Kirby, Bliss isn't dissonant or heavy-handed. Nobody has to remind me that losing my memory is upsetting, or that I'm losing it as I type, or that the loss will probably accelerate as I get older, or that I'll probably spend my final hours sitting by a window repeating myself. What I like about Bliss is that, as the title suggests, there's something at least metaphorically beautiful-- even slightly funny-- about living inside a locked groove, dancing with nobody.
The last five years or so have been filled with music that feels haunted by an unresolved moment or looks at the past from a crooked perspective. The Ghost Box label has been consistently good at making jigsaw puzzles from cultural memories; Ariel Pink's grotesque soft-rock finally has an audience-- even music by a producer like Burial relies on the intrusion of a voice that sounds more part of history than the present, something reaching forward from a time we thought was gone. Kirby isn't unaware of what he's doing here-- everything he's put out in the past few years plays around with these ideas directly, down to his choice of titles (2009's Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was being the most impressively gymnastic). Even calling himself "The Caretaker"-- a reference to the endlessly recurring ballroom parties of The Shining-- feels like an effort to suss out the inherently psychedelic properties of memory.
Bliss reminds me of Ekkehard Ehlers' "Plays John Cassavetes 2" and Gavin Bryars' "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet", two pieces that transcend high-concept nostalgia. "Cassavetes" is a layered loop of the opening string figure from the Beatles' "Good Night", and the Bryars piece-- which was explored in a column here last year-- is a loop of a homeless man singing a hymn as an orchestra gradually builds behind him. In both cases, the actual amount of musical material is relatively small, and the "work" done on the part of the composer is minimal-- even Bryars' 30-minute build consists mostly of consonant drones.
Bryars' and Ehlers' conceptual leap was to wear their moments out as completely as possible. Repetitive music has a way of dissolving a listener's ability to pay attention to it: by the end, Ehlers' and Bryars' pieces sound different from the beginning, but there's no part I can point to in them and say, "here, here's where things change for good." They're constantly changing. They're also constantly returning. With Kirby, the effect is even more subtle and confusing. "Libet's Delay", sounds like it confuses its end for its beginning (or vice versa), and "Mental Caverns Without Sunshine" appears twice, with a two-minute song in-between: It's as though Kirby is trying to trick you into experiencing déjà vu. In all three cases, the source material is music designed not only to comfort, but to sound like it existed before you: hymns, love songs, lullabies. Bliss is eerie because it takes the seduction of those forms and turns it slightly askew; there's something unsettling about the musical equivalent of a permanent smile.
