THE CARETAKER - Patience (After Sebald)

Leyland James Kirby is one of the most prolific minds in the musical landscape tied to dark-ambient and modern classical. "The Caretaker", a project active since 1999, is just one of the four faces of this shy prism hanging, deliberately dust-covered, from the sumptuous chandelier of an old ballroom, disused since the early 1930s.

Our "caretaker", however, unlike the fearsome Jack Torrance who inspired the moniker, certainly doesn't spend his days filling reams of paper with "All work and no play makes Leyland a dull boy" or trying to do away with his wife and his "little angel head" in fits of repeated homicidal mania.

The far more composed Kirby instead enjoyed himself creating a soundtrack for the feature film dedicated to the German writer W.G. Sebald (and to his fundamental work "The Rings of Saturn", 1995), made by independent director Grant Gee (the same director behind the acclaimed Radiohead documentary "Meeting People Is Easy", 1998, ed.).

"Patience (After Sebald)" comes out on Leyland's new label, "History Always Favours The Winners", born after tucking "V/Vm Test" into bed for good.

The source "Patience" draws from is "Winterreise" (1827) by the Austrian Franz Schubert, the famous "winter journey" told through a cycle of 24 compositions for piano and voice.

The long titles given to the twelve tracks of this reimagined suite fill the void left by the absence of lyrics and, as with Kirby's previous releases - both as Caretaker and under his own name - strongly contribute to evoking a kaleidoscope of landscapes and sensations without ever lapsing into the literal.

The samples and manipulations of the piano parts, which the "caretaker" works on with tailor-like skill and precision, sketch out a frozen world of memories abandoned in a grand ballroom, its tables and armchairs wrapped in a suffocating layer of cellophane.

Getting lost in times past is easy, indeed mandatory: starting with "Everything Is On The Point Of Decline", the insistent - yet reassuring - crackle of an old 78 rpm record accompanies the first touches of the melancholy piano. It's winter knocking on your shoulder with its snowflakes.

The mood described is the through-line of the following tracks: the sense of pleasant self-disorientation alternates with an unusual stillness in pieces like "When The Dog Days Were Drawing To An End", where very brief piano adagios chase each other in an endless loop, like a worn-out music box; in the distance, only the momentary incursion of dark, modulated vocalizations that leave no chance for the eyes to close.

In other pieces such as "The Homesickness That Was Corroding Her Soul", as the title itself suggests, an almost cinematic nostalgia reigns, while in "I Have Become Almost Invisible, To Some Extent Like A Dead Man" a subdued unease dominates, emphasized by mysterious and nearly imperceptible chimes. The simple hiss of the opening tracks has by now become a glacial drone impossible to do without; with "No One Knows What Shadowy Memories Haunt Them To This Day" one is "increasingly absorbed" (to quote another title) into this decadent early-20th-century memory, until the solemn closing choral chant of "Now The Night Is Over And The Dawn Is About To Break".

All around, everything is ethereal, steeped in an ambiguity that surrenders to a thin haze of anguish - though one that doesn't hurt: it's like unexpectedly finding yourself in the labyrinthine garden told first by King and then by Kubrick, and not knowing (or not wanting) to get out.

This time, The Caretaker found himself already halfway through the work, considering that a great deal of the atmospheres recreated here emanate from Schubert's genius; that said, one still strongly feels the magic touch of the now-masterful "editor" from Stockport.

P.S. The release of "Patience (After Sebald)" is accompanied by that of "Extra Patience", a sibling album of reworkings and outtakes, available as a free download on Bandcamp.

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23/02/2012