Leyland Kirby has been making music as the Caretaker since 1999, but 2011 proved to be the project's breakthrough year. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World was the right record at the right time, a meditation on decay and loss that was beautiful on the surface but also had layers to peel. It reached listeners with only a passing interest in music from the experimental sphere, much in the manner of William Basinski's early-millennium series Disintegration Loops, because it brought together ideas about archives, appropriation, memory, and the accretion and disappearance of cultural objects. The name of Kirby's project comes from Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining, and Bliss was the album as a large, empty, and haunted building, imparting a feeling of loneliness at the edge of the world. Sampling and manipulating crackling 78s with sweet dance tunes from the 1920s and 1930s, Kirby's tracks dangled in front of you and turned slowly, rods on a mobile that was gradually falling apart.
Following a solo album, Eager to Tear Apart the Stars, that was nearly as fine, Kirby returns with a new Caretaker record, this one the soundtrack to a film by director Grant Gee about the German writer W.G. Sebald. According to Kirby, this material was actually recorded before Bliss, and Patience (After Sebald) is clearly the product of a similar process, though the record's overall mood is quite different. Instead of haunted jazz-age ballroom numbers, Patience draws from the music of Austrian composer Franz Schubert, sampling and manipulating (in some cases, very heavily) 78 recordings of his piece Winterreise. From its title on down, the Schubert piece brings to mind a frozen world, and Kirby responds in kind, crafting an album that hints at the season's chill with characteristic complexity and ambiguity.
Given the nature of its source, Patience is mostly built from manipulated samples of piano and voice. "When the Dog Days Were Drawing to an End" loops a single keyboard fragment from a waltz-time section and punctuates the end of each cycle with a barely perceptible voice, and lets the melody, saturated with noise, spin in place for nearly five minutes. "The Homesickness That Was Corroding Her Soul" uses a warbly piano interlude for its repeated refrain, with the instability of the pitch imparting a sense of unease and tension. On the opener "Everything Is on the Point of Decline", hiss and rumble is pushed way out in front, so you can just barely make out the music beneath a blinding sheet of distortion. These are simple motifs, but they show an uncanny sense of balance and feel anything but accidental.
But the album grows more interesting in its second half, as the processing gradually overtakes the source material and transformation becomes the prevailing theme. "In the Deep and Dark Hours of the Night" coats the piano line in a thick syrup of slap-back echo and layers it under a piercing layer of hiss, making the music feel simultaneously distant and close, like it's either coming from inside your head or is so far away you can barely make it out. "No One Knows What Shadowy Memories Haunt Them to This Day" and the closing "Now the Night is Over and the Dawn Is About to Break" takes the guttural male vocals from Schubert's piece and stretches them out, turning single syllables into tense, uneasy drones. The effect, oddly, will remind some of the Justin Bieber slowdown from a while back, which sounded like Sigur Rós being pulled through a black hole's event horizon. Kirby's voices, heard late in the record after the unsettling beauty of the piano loops, reinforce the feeling of collapsing into something, the howls, that could stand in for pain or ecstasy, suggest that something will never be the same.
The brilliant thing about the Caretaker project is how it mashes together emotional states into something complex that can sound different each time you hear it. While the surface hiss and 78-groove crackle, which are sometimes so loud they overwhelm the music the grooves carry inside them, bring to mind decay and death. The immersive, womb-like nature of Kirby's approach also conjures childhood and a life stretched in front of you, filled with possibility. So this music, so basic on one level, is both warm and cold, blackened by mortality and twinkling with life, somehow evoking the wonder and absurdity of existence itself.
