Again like Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom, or Emptyset's recent Medium EP (which found the Bristol duo literally forcing low-frequencies through a building in order to trigger resonance), these tracks feel like echolocation imprints of imaginary warehouses, knackered old buildings and basements. Percussive sounds scattered through.

i’m all too aware of the profound irony in what i’m about to write. The final stage in Leyland Kirby’s epic six-part cycle exploring dementia, Everywhere at the end of time, has literally – this very minute – just been released. Whether it will bring to a close not just that individual cycle but also Kirby’s 20-year project under the moniker The Caretaker remains to be seen, but either way, significant endings inevitably invite the desire for some sort of retrospective. Like the biblical tale of Lot’s wife’s fatal backward glance at the city she’d been instructed to leave (Genesis 19), Dante the Pilgrim’s looking back at earth through the celestial spheres before his final ascent into paradise (The Divine Comedy: Paradiso, Canto XXII), or Truman Burbank’s last survey of his fictional world before departing it forever (The Truman Show), there’s an impulse in, i suspect, all of us to take stock and appraise the full scale of something as it reaches its culmination. Except of course, in the case of Everywhere at the end of time, it’s ironic to do this since the essence of its entire trajectory runs counter to the very possibility of being able to look back, as memory and awareness become ever more dulled, deadened and destroyed. So for the last few weeks, as i’ve been contemplating Stage 6 and how we got here through the preceding five stages, and indeed Kirby’s entire oeuvre as The Caretaker, i could hardly be more conscious of how privileged, fortunate and grateful i am to be able to do just that.

The downward spiral of deterioration running through Everywhere at the end of time has been shaped by a number of factors, each of which has gradually encroached more and more oppressively on the exquisite fragments of ballroom music that are the source of all its material (Kirby’s decision to use this music is perfect, both for its ability to evoke a distant past as well as for its combination of elegance, sophistication and, above all, happiness). The first is its dependence, in the first three stages, on repeating loops of music, affording mere windows into something much bigger and grander (what i’ve previously described as “like trying to preserve a story in a single sentence”). Even at the outset of Stage 1, all was very far from well. Thereafter, those fragile loops are subjected to further factors, whereby the music is in different ways slowed down and filtered (greatly robbing it of its higher frequencies), and heard from within increasing quantities of reverb and surface noise, exacerbated further as drop-outs start to occur, the fractures and rifts they cause sounding enormous when emphasised by the reverb.

Where the first half of the cycle, Stages 1 to 3, is preoccupied by these factors, the second half (of which Stages 4 and 5 were my combined best album of 2018) is abruptly transfigured. Traces of the material are hard to make out within an increasingly homogenised soup that Kirby no longer presents in neat three- or four-minute morsels (a tribute to the music’s origins as songs) but as arbitrarily-proportioned 20-minute slabs. The cycle thereby proceeds from mere forgetfulness to a more terrifying blank oblivion, surrounding us with a maelstrom of impenetrable sonic matter, a jostling clatter of allusive elements in which, somehow, infinitesimal moments of dim clarity implausibly emerge. Which brings us to the end.

Where Stages 4 and 5 were impenetrable, Stage 6 is unfathomable. In purely superficial terms, though, it’s no longer a place of overt horror, instead resembling an apocalyptic landscape of abject erosion. What remains: rumble, crackle, hiss, like some amalgam of the movement of wind, sand and sea; what it began life as is impossible to tell. The surface noise has by now gone beyond mere crackle to become irrevocably cracked, deeply-etched ravines of damage scouring the landscape. What also remains is resonance, vestiges of ideas strenuously dredging their way from boundless depths to emerge as muffled yet reverberant echoes of something once tangible. Against all probability, they retain enough to preserve their essential identity, enough for us to recognise or at least infer with infinite sadness a glimmer of their ancient glory. It’s hard not to hear these remnants as courageous acts of defiance in extremis. But their world has become wiped, and one of the most disturbing parts of Stage 6 – heard in the third track, ‘Long decline is over’ – is the way that everything reduces to a kind of ‘open’ passive background hiss, gently struck by the most dull impacts, solitary motes of memory glancing against an endless surface of vacant noise.

Everything eventually ends, and this trajectory only ever had one possible outcome. The way Leyland Kirby brings his Everywhere at the end of time cycle to an end is genuinely one of the most stunningly beautiful and deeply moving musical experiences i’ve ever known. How one hears the final track, ‘Place in the World fades away’ – particularly its unexpected closing few minutes, in which we hear a kind of music we’ve never heard before in any of the work’s six stages – depends on your outlook and sensibilities, but for me it’s a defeat, a consummation and sheer transcendence. The minute’s silence at the very end isn’t nearly enough to begin to take in the enormity of the six and a half hours that preceded it.

Returning to Dante, to whom i referred at the start, the apex of his journey into paradise concludes with words breaking down in the face of the overwhelming power and magnitude that confront him. i think i know something of how he must have felt: Everywhere at the end of time ultimately goes far, far beyond what words – or, at least, my words – can adequately convey. It is simply incredible.

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The entire Everywhere at the end of time cycle is available as a digital download for just £5 from the Caretaker Bandcamp site; CD and vinyl editions of the various stages can be obtained from Boomkat.

In the beginnings of civilization, we made buildings out of stone.Our ancestors craved permanence, immortality. Of course, those empiresfell, leaving behind monuments of their own former magnificence and itspassage, scarred by memory so subject to fabrication and forgetting,into myth or history, almost all but those etched into hermetic tombsburied in the sands of time. Still, from time to time, we uncoverobjects of utility from their resting places in the earth: broken jars,curse tablets, currency. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”said Ozymandias, former king of kings, resting his cracked statue headon the arid, level sands.Already the most imperishable pieces of Western civilization’sindustrial history accumulate the same scars, and already some rust andcrumble, to be recovered perhaps by some future historian. Modernempires rarely offer the luxury of exodus as they lie at the endpointsof their history; there is nowhere else to go. But our records afford usan ability to inscribe a more permanent witnessing of what we were andhow each piece succumbed to an environment we had once thought was thevictim.

What, in its obsolescence, will remain as evidence? JamesLeyland Kirby’s The Stranger project, from a cold future consciousness,tracks the audible signals of the decay of the old, industrial empires,recording and imitating the rhythmic coldness of their machinery,locating the listener in the midst of the decline.Ruined industrial wastes make for beautiful photographs; the viewer,utterly alienated from the utility of the machine, can witness it as apure object, exposed to corrosive weather and mechanical failure.

Thesounds of the factory offer the same monumental abstraction, and theytoo evoke the beautiful gloom of the exhaustion of human endeavor. It’sthese inhuman sounds (though quite often Kirby makes them with his ownhands, here) that fill Watching Dead Empires In Decay: percussionat slow but regular intervals, groaning hulks, friction of metal onmetal. By our very estrangement from our civilization’s own creations,indeed, even its own processes of manufacturing, we already stand in afuture where the objects that build our world may become mere artifacts,memories adorning our museums, colossi laying at the periphery of ourcities, rotting.Whereas his work as focused on memory inside the person and its loss (especially on, for instance, Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia), The Stranger focuses on the external indications of loss. Last year’s evoked malformed memories of old tunes, gauzy reflections of past experiences. Watching Dead Empires In Decayis much more immediate: the machines still seem to be running,regardless of our attention. It surrounds the listener in its bleaksoundscape, in many ways more appropriately “ambient” than TheCaretaker’s recordings, though no doubt more insistent and rhythmic.

AsKirby stated in ourwith him in 2011, The Stranger is a kind of bridge between V/Vm and TheCaretaker, taking up the center of the spectrum between unbridled noiseand controlled, calm piano loops.Although Watching Dead Empires In Decay lacks content otherthan song titles, it evokes spaces that need no explanation — theyalready feel like future casualties of decline, though they still throbwith a kind of life. These spaces are cold to our presence, only givingus the opportunity to understand them in our alienation from them.Fabricated evidence of a decline though they may be, these tracks do notreveal much within us except in how we react to them. Their gloominess,despite moments of beauty, is deeply oppressive. But perhaps this isthe stage of history we are entering, in which the forces we once usedto shape our destiny now succumb uncontrollably to entropy. And we,powerless, stand and fearfully witness the permanent waste, theconsequences, left behind.Just as youthink you’ve fathomed James Kirby, along he comes to surprise you once again.

Iwas ready to consider project Kirby’s greatestachievement. But listening to this astonishing new album from his avatar TheStranger—and relistening to its predecessor 2008’s —might make me re-assess thatjudgment.

Kirby isperhaps better understood as an artist than a musician—and, viewed as such, hiswork should shame the banality, the affectlessness and the conceptual povertyof so much contemporary art. If only contemporary art could come up with aconcept as rich as The Caretaker’s Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia—inessence, an installation simulating a memory disorder in the form of a six-CDbox set. Part of the power of The Caretaker conceit—a collection of music thatmight have been made for The Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining—derivedfrom its simplicity.

But Kirby complexified and deepened the project with eachrelease, until it has become an ongoing exploration of memory (and itsdisorders), and the relationship between place, sound, and the psyche. The Strangerproject is very different, although related. Here, place comes to the fore. Butthese aren’t the interior spaces haunted by The Caretaker—the ornate decay ofgrand old hotels fallen into decline, their genteel collapse doubling the innerspace of the brain itself, as it succumbs to various forms of neurologicalcollapse.

Instead, it is outer spaces that The Stranger surveys: terrainsbeyond human habitation, terrains which humans can only visit, where they go tolose themselves or where they end up getting lost, or where, most horrifyingly,they are buried, never to be found again, like poor Keith Bennett, one of thevictims of Britain’s most notorious killers, Ian Brady and Myra Lindley. TheStranger walks us over these lonely moorlands, subterranean cave systems,crags.

On the twoStranger records, Kirby offers a new sonic-cartographic study of what mycollaborator and comrade has called the Eerie North West ofEngland. The Eerie North West covers a geographical and psycho-cultural terrainthat includes a number of intense hubs.

There’s Manchester, thehobgoblin-stalked industrial hinterland evoked by the early Fall. What I wasmost reminded of when I initially heard Watching Dead Empires in Decaywas. There is the same(double) sense of seeing a space evacuated of humans, with non-human eyes. Thesame eerie intuition that we are tracking some illegible catastrophe, walkingthrough the ruins of a trauma that happened long ago (whose is the empire that hasdied? Is it even that of a human group?) The same merging of dance-musicdynamics with ambient atmospherics. But of course—Kirby is ahead of the game asusual— Bleaklow preceded Raime, and now he reclaims the territory heestablished on the 2008 record, so that The Stranger forms a kind of eeriepredecessor and twin of Raime’s work. If youposition it as an ambient record, Watching Dead Empires In Decay can beheard as engaging with the ambient concept that Eno laid down with On Land.Eno’s title could be read as an essayistic proposition—this was a record aboutland, and here we are confronted with the doubleness of the ambient concept, asEno originally thought of it: ambient was about ambience, about the power ofspace, and the translation of that power into sound; and it was also meant tobe heard as an ambience, as background rather than foreground music.

Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia

WatchingDead Empires In Decay is far too visceral, too rhythmically insistent, tobe ambient in that second sense. As with some of Raime’s tracks, WatchingDead Empires suggests some improbable reconciliation of post-Basic Channelmachine-dub and early Swans. “Where Are Our Monsters Now, Where Are OurFriends” actually sounds like an eighties time capsule that is in the processof being unearthed, its contents having merged and mutated while underground,producing a strange hybrid of Cop-era Swans and Sylvian & Sakamoto. Withits scrapings, ominous chimes and sounds of earth crumbling underfoot, theopener “We Are Enemies But Not Here”, meanwhile, feels like it takes placeeither in some vast troglodytic cavern—the space where some awesome ritualhappened, or is now happening, perhaps—or high atop some wind-blasted hillside.The 23 Skidoo-like loping Neolithic funk of “So Pale It Shone In The Night”, meanwhile,makes one think of the underground railway system in The Weirdstone ofBrisingamen. The personaKirby constructed in the days of —ducker and diver, themocker and prankster— can sometimes distract (perhaps it is intended to) fromthe intense lyricism, the keening beauty, of his audio-productions. The beautyin Watching Dead Empires In Decay is not the sweetness of melodies onthe brink of being forgotten (or remembered), as with The Caretaker—it is thebeauty of rhythm and atmosphere, the dread-ful beauty of eerie spaces. Butdread here does not necessarily mean we are in the presence of somethinghorrific—it means confronting something outside the standard frames of humanreference.

Certainly, the heaths and moors of the Eerie North West have beenthe sites for atrocities. But they are also spaces where we feel the pull ofthe alien and the unknown—spaces which, like all of the best products of theEerie North West, Watching Dead Empires In Decay renders as both ominousand seductive. Mark FisherThe Stranger is James Leyland Kirby, also known as The Caretaker. CDHoused in Deluxe 6-Panel Digifile. Polymath James Leyland Kirby mustsurely have one of the most confounding CV’s in the business: he spentyears taking the piss out of the music industry with anthems rallyingagainst the (VV)MCPS, he notoriously fell out with various well knownrecord labels for reasons you’ll just have to google, goaded Aphex Twinwith a series of ‘tributes’ and channelled his love of everything fromFalco (Rock Me Amadeus), Chris De Burgh, Frankie Goes to Hollywood andStockport karaoke nights into a stream of increasingly bizzare 7”s backin the early noughties. But at the same time he was responsible forreleasing some of the very earliest material from Boards of Canada (HellInterface: 1997), made a ruck of frankly groundbreaking industrialelectronic records, brought New Beat to the world’s attention and, in1999, made his first album as The Caretaker, a project that would go onto release some of the most loved Ambient/ Lynchian albums of recenttimes. Since then he’s also produced an incredible suite of releasesunder his own name, scored various film projects and released three EP’sunder the ‘Intrigue & Stuff’ banner which are, for our money, soahead of their time they might just start sinking in properly by the endof the decade.

Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom Rar Album

All of which brings us to ‘Watching Dead Empires inDecay’, a new album recorded under another of Kirby’s pseudonyms ‘TheStranger’ and released on Modern Love, a label that has been close toKirby through these last eventful 15 years. It’s a dream album for thelabel: perhaps the most ambitious of Kirby’s career so far. It’scomplex, singular, enigmatic, percussive, dark, and you just can’t workout how it was constructed. Gone are the sampled 78’s of The Caretaker,but it also doesnt exactly sound electronic - you just can’t quitefathom how any of it was put together: Field Recordings?

Found Sounds?Sheets of metal scraped and hammered? Drum machines re-wired? It’s starkand unsettling, haunted, even troubling - but often just beautiful. Itstarts with the sharp clang of opener ‘We Are Enemies But Not Here’before the woozy percussive crawl ‘So Pale It Shone In The Night’ sucksyou into a bare landscape: somewhere between Eraserhead and FumioHayasaka’s music for Akira Kurosawa. And then there are moments thatbreak through the tension with clarity and familiarity, nostalgia even:‘Where Are Our Monsters Now, Where Are Our Friends?’ could have beenmade by Boards of Canada if they had taken a turn into more noxiousterrain back in 1998, while ‘Spiral Of Decline’ offsets the drumprogramming you’d most likely associate with a Powell record with anoblique sense of timing and space.

It all ends with ‘About To Enter AStrange New Period’, an unusual, vaporous coda that offers no resolution- it just shuts proceedings down with nothing settled. boomkatBleaklow (2008). Aside from all the shenanigans and sonic mayhem V/VM have so brilliantlyprovided over the last 10 years, James Kirby has also intermittentlyreleased quite exceptionally dense music under his Caretaker and TheStranger monikers. This new album, however, qualifies as his mostabsorbing and fully realised yet - an 11 track arrangement ofunbelievably layered drones, sound washes and percussive structures thatwill leave you wondering just what else might be lurking in V/VM'sno-doubt substantial archives. The album opens with the suitably bleak'Something To Do With Death' - a haunting assembly of distorted dronesand sonic detritus that sounds like a cross between Ben Frost, Fenneszand Hecker - and makes for an astonishing opening. 'Exposure' is nextand delivers what must surely count as one of the most brilliantlyapproachable pieces in the V/VM cannon, displaying a spacious alignmentof padded percussion and brushed tonal slivers that you could almostimagine Martin Gore having produced on one of his more satisfyinglycreative periods writing daring b-sides for Depeche Mode. 'SolemnDedication' also features a prominent percussive element, though thistime the carefully crafted bombast recalls vintage John Carpenter, withthose slightly plasticated drum sounds beautifully aligned and distortedto create an almost nihilistic mental image - and in this case onethat's surrounded by tempered noise that lends proceedings a brilliantlyfreakish glow.

The title track, meanwhile, will leave you gasping forbreath with its eerie, out of tune strings and lush undulating drones,creating a kind of narcotic cacophony that doesn't really sound likeanyone that comes to mind, except perhaps for some kind of fantasycollaboration between Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 era Aphex Twinreworked by Tim Hecker. 'Bleaklow' is a deep and incredibly satisfyingalbum - perhaps more so than any other releases on this frankly mentallabel - and once your surprise starts to subside you're left with theunerring impression that James Kirby is one of the most interesting anddiverse producers working on the scene today. Highly Recommended. boomkatV/VM The Caretaker interview by Shaun Prescott.