The Caretaker aka Leyland Kirby aka V/vm aka The Stranger

the music's evolution across the album releases is like a simulated dementia
which was really misinterpreted

Has he said anywhere where the idea has come from? That is, whether it is completely "imagined" or whether it has been "observed"? (Eg. in his family or through, say, work).

UPDATE: Kirby has apparently just given his moniker The Caretaker “dementia.”

that's kinda cool actually

i mean from a creative standpoint.. kind of an "oblique strategy"

Why did that article say he had early onset dementia?

I can see why they'd be confused, the media promo stuff says he has it."'Everywhere at the end of time' is a new and finite series of works exploring dementia, its advance and its totality. It is the sound of the journey The Caretaker will make after being diagnosed as having early onset dementia."

> Has he said anywhere where the idea has come from?

William Basinski's Disintegration Loops?

He's done a fair amount of research on the subject, from what i've read in previous articles. I think when Empty Bliss was released he mentioned it.

that new vinyl sold out pretty fast!

I'll do my best to bump this thread if I see reissue (which may also be cd?) available before october 6th

> Has he said anywhere where the idea has come from?

William Basinski's Disintegration Loops?

― koogs, Friday, 23 September 2016 07:50 (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha, ha. Yeah. I was kind of wondering whether it was a "I like music that sounds like it is disintegrating. I know, I'll make a concept album about dementia" or whether it was more, I dunno, profound than that.

the whole caretaker business has been about memory and fuzzy nostalgia, makes sense that he'd end it with the destruction of memory

thanks for the head's up on this. preordered the repress via boomkat, which is supposed to come out in early November.

great piece, Doran, btw! i hadn't read an interview with him before but he seems very likable in addition to making wonderful music

he stuck around a festival I was at after he'd performed earlier in the week. we had a brief conversation about how the bar at one of the venues had a horrible whiskey selection.

btw he drinks a lot of jameson but likes highland park scotch iirc

ha, i was just reading an old pitchfork review of his, which ends by noting that he gave away the album for free on his bandcamp but requested that he be paid in birthday shots of whiskey

a man after my own heart

Cheers! xxxxp

I love the Disintegration Loops to death but The Caretaker stuff is a lot more specifically 'about' various forms of memory degradation not 'cultural memory' - as the MP3 collection Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia in 2005 and tracks such as Von Restorff Effect, Unmasking Alzheimer's and Libet's Delay suggest.

despite the new one being posted up on his bandcamp, i'm going to hold off until i get the LP in the mail. really looking forward to seeing how this works in the latter stages of the series, esp after reading his thinking about it in Doran's piece. he mentions that he enjoys the challenge of how to present total confusion in a listenable way, and i look forward to seeing how he goes about it! also love the idea of the albums reincorporating earlier releases in various ways, even though i'm only familiar with approximately 0.1% of his 32084250234 pieces of music

also i'm personally interested in art that tackles memory loss, along with a sense of not having a home to return to. i'm an idiot for not listening to his stuff before, despite multiple recommendations from others

Absolutely John. That's why I was a bit miffed about the "Caretaker has dementia!" articles. His musical research alone in this field is unparalleled.

(Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia is not just an MP3 collection btw, I cherish the physical six cd version of it!)

Xxp

I'm holding off till the vinyl arrives, too. Any day now, hopefully!

XP: you lucky bugger. I slept on that CD box and some of the more recent vinyl. I have the first few original CDs in the ziplock bags though.

Ha, was being a bit facetious about disintegration loops comparison. And Haunted Ballroom predates it anyway.

disintegration loops are overrated, I say!

XP: Fair dos but the conceptual memory loss side of The Caretaker only kicks in with TPAA in 2005.

The Empty Bliss reissue is up over at Boomkat. Looks like the purple wax is sold out already, but the black is still available.

Purple already on discogs for silly money :(

just ordered black :D

Fuck! How does this happen?

Despite its melancholy theme, the new one is beautiful drifting off to sleep music

I really like the new one. Maybe if I played it as many times as I played Empty Bliss, I'd love it just as much.

the closing sentences of the pitchfork review:

As Kirby goes all in on this coup de grâce, one can’t help but notice that he’s using other people’s music to channel the subjectivity of other people’s medical condition, and wonder where that gets us.

Empty Bliss rested on studies of Alzheimer’s patients and music, which seemed to keep a respectful distance from real, specific suffering. But there is something a little unseemly about Kirby “giving the project dementia” and reveling in it across hours of pleasurable music, especially after he announced it in such a confusing way that he had to clarify that he himself had not been diagnosed with dementia. If not exploitative, it’s at least an unduly romantic view of an illness. We like to dabble in madness through music, in the abstract. But an actual disease? Why should we want to experience dementia by proxy, aesthetically, or think we even can? I watched my grandmother succumb to it for a decade before she died, and it was very little like a “beautiful daydream.” In fact, there was nothing aesthetic about it.

i have had these reservations before, not just about caretaker but about my own interests in memory loss. like the reviewer and a lot of other people, i too watched my grandpa go through alzheimers's. he's right, there's nothing romantic about it. my instinct is to think that he's taking what is an awful process to observe from the outside and morphing it into something beautiful and relatable, and that's what a lot of art aims to achieve. artists use traumatic subject material all the time, of course. the problem, if it exists, would be if Kirby was presenting his music as some sort of documentation of what the process really feels like to the person suffering from it. i haven't read the liner notes to any of his albums, but the little excerpts in the review seem to suggest that he does, at least to a degree - “Here we experience the first signs of memory loss,” Kirby writes in liner notes. “This stage is most like a beautiful daydream. The glory of old age and recollection. The last of the great days.”

here are 5 more albums to come, and by Kirby's own description, they will be quite different, more uncomfortable, and that would seem to address the reviewer's issue with this being "an unduly romantic view of an illness." i don't know. what do you all think? does this bother you? t

Very interesting post, Zach. Like you, memory and all it entails, especially its shortcomings (loss, false memories, how they are stored and wired neurologically, memory conditions) is probably my biggest "hobby", field of interest outside of what I do for a living. Out of mere fascination. It was like that already well before I got to know The Caretaker. He is undoubtedly one of my all time favorite artists, for a lot of reasons, but the shared fascination of memory obviously a big one too. Your questions and reservations deserve to be looked at more closely. I'll give it a first try.

Caretaker's focus on memory's flaws and rare conditions started out way earlier than his HAFTW records. I feel this needs to be pointed out. The massive 80 track collection 'Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia' seems to have been his starting point of making music with the idea of memory malfunction and amnesia disorders behind it, conceptually. I was, and still am, deeply struck by the sheer power of that monumental release. And sonically I'd say it approaches Alzheimer's more truthfully than anything else he's done after that. For Alzheimer's isn't a romantic thing slowly and merrily sailingthe person suffering from it into a place where reality and dreams merge into something in between those states indefinitely. It's harsh, it's full of sadness and tears, frustration and utter helplessness (loneliness) for someone who half realizes he is going down that road but is unable to take a turn. I've seen the demise in my grandfather, and it was heart shattering. TPAA sonically is in many ways unforgiving, relentless, blurry, confusing and chaotic. Which is why it struck me as 'truthful' in a way (despite from being beautiful music).

The disintegrating fading memory ballroom music, to call it that simply, are really different, but up to this last record didn't make me ask the questions you and the reviewer do, as Caretaker himself didn't conceptualize it other than perhaps the song titles he used. Now, though, he explicitly declared these last six records will basically portray the mind of someone suffering from dementia, as a way of putting this project to rest.

At the risk of criticism being way too soon here - we've not heard the other five, and I don't know if he has any personal experience with people with Alzheimer's - it is laying it on a bit thick, to announce it in the way that he did. Thin ice, conceptually imho, too. There's little if none to romanticize about Alzheimer's. Though on the other hand, seeing where he 'comes from' with his music and ideas behind it, I find it difficult to imagine he'll merrily stick to romanticizing this to be done with it.

In short: an artist should be able to examine this subject freely, I think. And his track record shows he doesn't tread lightly regarding this very subject. So I'm inclined to believe the critique is a bit too early, though I really do understand the questions raised, and will make me more focused on them as this six lp swansong progresses.

Hope that makes sense.

From that review: "Ambient music has a habit of all running together, but on 2011’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, James Leyland Kirby devised a series of ways to stand out"

Started in 2008 already with Persistent Repetition of Phrases tbrh

all of that makes sense! and i agree. i think he's approaching the subject earnestly and has a demonstrated longstanding interest in the theme. i do think he fucked up the "rollout" of it a bit by describing it in a somewhat callous way, but i don't doubt his intentions.

i guess the end of the pitchfork review just caught my eye because as i learned more about caretaker/kirby, i wondered if others had objections to how he was approaching it, and the reviewer definitely did.

With the usual caveat about posting stuff that originates on my own site, V/Vm's Tim Hecker, Mrs Mills, Nils Frahm CD is now out...

As for the P4k review...

Here are some things that the reviewer could have gleaned had s/he read it:

He's already been working on this project for one and a half years.

It has another three years to run.

That's six albums in four and a half years in total along one theme.

Here's how he describes the first record: "an old person daydreaming"

The second record will be when they first realise something is "wrong". Therefore the first record doesn't really have anything to do with dementia other than it is the control record, if you will - this is for the listener to judge what 'normal' sounds like.

He has done a lot of research, bought books, magazines, read online articles. Not just for this album but several of the previous ones (starting with TPAA not Empty Bliss, as rightly pointed out above).

He describes the disease as "not nice", which is why the latter stages of the project will not be nice either.

He has made 200 tracks for the project so far and will have made 1000 by the end of the three years.

And none of this suggests that we're dealing with some insensitive lazy dilettante who is just trying to cause offence.

On the other hand he's only done one interview on this project in the last three years and the P4k reviewer couldn't be bothered reading it before crimping out their review and, getting nearly the whole thing arse about tit.

Sorry... had she read the interview that I did with him on this very subject I should have said. </half asleep>

s/he even. FFS.

I should say for the record: the sentence in the original press release that said, 'The Caretaker has dementia' WAS ill-judged (or sloppy perhaps). But given that a clarification was issued within an hour or two, this kind of heavy handed smack down issued by a site still fuming and red in the face simply because it couldn't be bothered fact checking a patently not-true "fact" before hitting publish, is insipidly weak sauce.

I still don't think that sentence was ill-judged, nor sloppy. I haven't seen a single fan of his music mistake it for L. Kirby actually having dementia himself. That was all media jumping to conclusions. If you've followed him for some time, there was no way to take it the wrong way imho. Didn't even cross my mind he might have been talking about something outside of his art.

Yeah, I only meant ill-judged in as far as it could have been misinterpreted by someone who knew nothing about the two decade long history of this project and was lazy and was in a massive rush.

Just a shame a person fitting that very description happens to be a P4k staffer - and shameful that they would then attack him over it rather than apologising for their own ineptitude.

NEWS FLASH: David Bowie has revealed he is a Space Invader!

CORRECTION: It appears he is not a space invader but is in fact an alligator!

More on this amazing story as we have it...

so have you guys listened to this Mrs. Mills release? :)

I like it, but am also a huge tim hecker fan

same

tim hecker's thing is amazing but also very clownable and this description on the release page just about killed me
TIM HECKER: Is a serious musician and long time V/VM fan from Montreal whose subtle use of distortions, emotions and pain makes him a perfect fit for the 4AD label, smoke machines and the colour magenta.

i think i've seen tim maybe... four times now? but james kirby only once, sadly

yeah i don't recommend listening to The Caretaker if you don't want to feel uncomfortable feelings

that was shitty, sorry.

i missed something, notably how that was shitty

unless it's "heyooo this music makes you feel bad because it's bad"

in which case lol