![]() ![]() When you can do that and hold that feeling, there’s joy in it. Make it more because you enjoy making it, rather than with an audience in mind. Now that it’s done, I’m in the mode of “man, I hope people listen and like this.” I want to push it, I want it to be heard, but while you’re making it, you have to kind of get that out of your head. PMB: I would say that was the main reason, but also I think when you’re making these smaller records that a limited amount of people may hear, it does reframe your thinking. It’s difficult to pour everything into your own music when you’re trying to spin so many plates. So I did work with a lot of artists and produced some stuff and managed some records, and I started a record label, so I just didn’t really have the time. Bands that I manage, you know, also right before the second album Mount Qaf, I moved from Philly to LA and just the cost of living difference, I had to work and start a business and really concentrate more on that. But I was working on some other people’s music. Peter Matthew Bauer : Hahaha, yeah, maybe in some part that’s why. 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.Josh Leidy: This is your first album in almost 5 years correct? A lot has changed since your last record was there a lull creatively that led to the layoff? We like to dabble in madness through music, in the abstract. If not exploitative, it’s at least an unduly romantic view of an illness. He’ll talk a lot about process and concept, but you have to turn to Who Sampled to tell you that, say, the title track of Empty Bliss is derived from Layton and Johnstone’s 1929 recording of “The Wedding of the Painted Doll.” 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.Įmpty 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. He mulches and reconstitutes an era, but he is not very interested in historical footnotes. It’s a testament to Kirby’s cunning composition that it sounds like he’s playing long stretches of the source material intact, when in fact, he is drastically altering tiny snippets and composing them into smeared but credible pieces. A winning gentleness pervades later tracks like “An Autumnal Equinox” and “The Loves of My Entire Life,” but by the end, even gentleness has taken on a desperate tinge, as though if the dancing stops, everyone dies. “Things That Are Beautiful and Transient” is inside-out, the melody an inner voice, its harmonic field the foreground. On “Slightly Bewildered,” the instrumentation becomes an almost toneless mooing, the loop wrapping around with a stagger. The last of the great days.” But we begin to hear more severe signs of breakdown around halfway through it. “This stage is most like a beautiful daydream. “Here we experience the first signs of memory loss,” Kirby writes in liner notes. Roaring Twenties horns turn from saucy to sloe-eyed, poky and dopey, as if a heavily opiated combo kept losing its place in a Gershwin tune. ![]() But mainly, the loops just play, stuck somewhere between dreamlike and deathly, until suddenly, ominously, they stop. As on that album, pitches laze, overtones huff and puff, lines elongate, surface noise crackles, and scratches slash out a rhythmic rain. ![]() In short, it’s an extreme continuation of what Kirby did on Empty Bliss, his most popular release to date: lingering on the precipice where pleasant reverie slips into the abyss. The music will chart the patient’s decline, ending in the alter ego’s “death.” Memory, incarnated as resurfacing bits of music from throughout the Caretaker’s oeuvre, will progressively smear and recombine. The first three will come out as downloads and LPs between now and next year, when they will also be compiled in a CD set the last three follow the same pattern from March 2018 to 2019. The premise is that the Caretaker, one of Kirby’s long-running aliases, has been diagnosed with early onset dementia. Everywhere at the End of Time has been planned as a six-stage release. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |