There's a track on the new album by the Stranger, the latest project in a long list of many from James Leyland Kirby, titled "About to Enter a Strange New Period". As a literal reflection of Kirby's musical shifts, it couldn't be more appropriate. This is, after all, a guy who has recorded under the names Notorious P.I.G. and Billy Ray Cyrix. He's best known for two projects—the bizarre cut-ups he conducted as V/Vm, and his work as the Caretaker, whose An Empty Bliss Beyond This World repurposed old 78 rpm recordings to beautiful effect. The latter was a triumph of content over concept, suggesting there's more to Kirby than the arch prankster, laughing into his sleeve while smearing blood and vomit over memories of Chris de Burgh.
The Stranger picks at a thread Kirby started on the Caretaker records, once again returning to an area that loosely grapples with memory, loss, and fear. His work has peers—even the idiosyncratic approach to V/Vm wasn’t too far removed from artists such as Stock, Hausen & Walkman and Kid606—but Watching Dead Empires in Decay is his first record that feels like it's slotting into a scene instead of operating on its fringes. It's cast into a similar shadow to the one artists like the Haxan Cloak and Raime are working under, and Demdike Stare before them. The Stranger's music carries a similar air of reimagined nightmares, depicted as places full of precipitous surfaces and figures endlessly plodding through violent terrain.
By working in this area Kirby is continuing his fascination with memory, arguably taking it even further out into the abstract than he has before. Where Bliss was all faded glamor and ruminations on a time long passed, Dead Empires dwells harder on the darker subconscious, giving it a tactile edge that replaces the suggestive ambience of the Caretaker material. There's also a greater reliance on drama and narrative. The way the skeletal beats of "Spiral of Decline" build is suggestive of a particularly unpleasant turn in a movie, and the standout "Where Are Our Monsters Now, Where Are Our Friends?" is driven by powerful slabs of electronic noise that highlight Kirby's ear for suspense.
Where Kirby succeeds over some of the lesser artists currently plowing this field is in the detail he lends to his work. There's a grain to his samples, perhaps inspired by his work with surface-noise textures on Bliss. "We Scarcely See Sunlight" is driven by sparse layers that resemble someone bashing pipes in a dank basement, but it's the swirl of hiss around the sound that gives it an air of menace, with Kirby repurposing lo-fi for his own evil needs. On "Ill Fares the Land"—a title that taps into the current horror fad for mining old English folklore for chills—he heads in the opposite direction and floods the track with sound, piling up chaotic layers of pistons to the point of combustion.
There's some beauty here, although it’s decidedly muted in tone. Kirby just leaves faint traces of it trailing through tracks—a spindle-thin keyboard riff, or a sample of strings rising and falling. Dead Empires isn't an album that deals in hope much, instead approaching the chaos and confusion of memory and scattering it into the open. There's something more human here than the work of, say, Raime, whose world is far colder than that of the Stranger. Kirby's fondness for disorder is a perfect fit for this type of material. Dream states rarely make sense until you plunge deep into them, and Dead Empires throws up thousands of different routes to get tangled up in on the way down there.
