Leyland Kirby:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zArVYIIIF00

compare…

The Caretaker (from ‘Persistent Repetition Of Phrases’):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQlDlxA9unI

and contrast…

William Basinski (from ‘Melancholia’):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUhimrxosdw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP_LAnhQAiY

Works very well in a kind of expressionist way. I can hear undertones of Aphex and Tim Hecker without it sounding like either – in fact, there’s more of the ethos of The Caretaker at work here; that kind of warped elegiac melody seeking to assert itself over the unpitched material careening around it and not be sucked down into a vortex of noise. What lifts it above The Caretaker is a certain almost transcendent/transformative/overcoming quality – though this feeling is possibly driven by the video imagery.

I’d rather that he spent more time exploring the Caretaker-ish/hauntological idea of ‘The Sound of Music Vanishing’ (both its style & concept; NB: chosen as a highlight without taking in Marc’s choice…). But I’ve come to feel pretty benign towards – though not often very moved by – the piano pieces as drops of colour in ‘Sadly’s otherwise austere vastness.

That scale does seem to signal something equally large in Kirby’s ambition here. But I’m not sure it’s achieved – or, at least, in a way I’m able to recognise.

It’s impossible not to be impressed by the ambition & seriousness of purpose at work; it’s somewhat possible, unfortunately, to feel that your investment yields less return than you might have expected.

That feeling may well have something to do with the strategy that Joshua & Marc highlight so well – “not only re-imagine but to stoke a memory of a kind of music that is unabashedly and outwardly emotional” & “to mythologize his own experience in familiar tropes”.

If not exactly ironic, this strategy does seem to put some kind of distance between Kirby & the sometimes uncomfortably tinkly parts of ‘Sadly’.

Something of this sort is going on with the titles too. Face value is definitely not how we’re meant to take ‘The Beauty Of The Impending Tragedy Of My Existence’! It’s the opposite of mock-heroic – mock-tragic, I guess – but somehow reserving the option to mean it too…

You can feel the same thing

Take “When We Parted, My Heart Wanted to Die.” It sounds very much like Angelo Badalamenti, each melodic fragments giving way to a considered pause (but Balamenti isn’t necessarily inherently ironic, which is why I prefer him contextualized by David Lynch), and then there are these synthesized, pneumatic blasts, like soft white noise generators, which take the edge off the melodrama (or, perhaps more to the point, add an edge to it). But ultimately the tension in the melody is what comes close (and only close) to making it palatable to me, the way, after the halfway mark, it seems to continue to end, like Liberace playing the 1812 Overture on a waterlogged piano.

By name alone, “The Sound of Music Vanishing” is more up my somnolent alley — the strings of some old Hollywood movie are in there, shredding along, but it’s all being murk-ified by a dense machine along the lines of Gavin Bryars’s Titanic, or Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon (this track is one of the ones closest in mind to the anecdote of mine above).

“As a document it’s emotional and personal, heartbreaking and gentle, it’s a six month fairy tale from the big city complete with heroes and villains, with winners and losers.”

Fairy tales, after all, use stock characters and familiar landscapes: witches always have pointy hats, bridges always have trolls beneath them, stepmothers are always wicked, and we know the rest. Perhaps then I am trying to suggest that Kirby is using these stock elements – the lonely piano, the swirling noise, the slathered-on strings – to mythologize his own experience in familiar tropes, to allow us to understand its emotional trajectory while still leaving us with something both beautiful and mysterious as an artifact of that journey.

Of course, size is likely not the sole concern of Leyland Kirby, but it’s certainly one of the key factors distinguishing ‘Sadly, the Future.’ I found myself, while listening, wishing that the melodic fragments were more muted — they approach a ‘Chariots of Fire’ drama at times — and wondering how Kirby can so easily go from an almost melodramatic impulse to tiny surface textures.

Throughout my listening, the whole thing sounded familiar, but I was incapable of figuring out what it reminded me of.

And then I sorted it out. Most mornings, on my daily commute, I walk through the plaza in front of City Hall here in San Francisco, and every morning there is in the plaza a small group of tai chi exercisers — Falun Gong, I believe — doing their modestly paced ritual to that kind of melodic music that is at once emotionally raw and synthetic, saccharine — sometimes of a quasi-classical mode (Western classical, as if a computer program had been made to mimic Mozart) and sometimes Eastern. But the music is played on a boombox, a shaby old thing that dates from the days of Doug E. Fresh. And, as they say on the late-night infomercials, that’s not all. The tai chi score plays out across a busy street from the public library, and that street is crowded with cars all morning long, along with the sound of water being used to hose down the sidewalks where homeless had been encamped all night. The tai chi music, fragile enough to begin with, playing as it is on dying D-size batteries through splintered speakers made of decayed plastic, is almost entirely lost in the soundtrack of street noise.

And that which is not lost amid the street noise is what at its best Leyland Kirby’s album sounds like. It’s a noble goal.

Whereas The Caretaker seemed emotionally distant, like a collector of others’ memories – perhaps akin to the Lethian archivists in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film After Life – Kirby here seems to be working with more raw, emotional, and personal material here, and Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was dismisses the haunted abyssal big band in favor of a lonely palette of piano, strings, and noise.  From the opening, When We Parted, My Heart Wanted To Die, through its closing, And At Dawn Armed With Glowing Patience, We Will Enter The Cities Of Glory (Stripped), this is a narrative of loss, of pain, of acceptance, and although Kirby calls it a “six month fairy tale” it strikes me more as single night’s Vargtimmen (Bergman’s wolf hour of deaths, births, dreams) and a single person’s harrowing of that night.  Having recently seen Lars Von Trier’s film Antichrist I found myself thinking of that triptych and of his three beggars of Grief, Pain, and Despair while listening to Sadly, yet while both works are in their own way cathartic Kirby seems to have found his way less destructively back to the light, for at a certain point – and for me it is the towering noisescape of A Longing To Be Absorbed For A While Into A Different And Beautiful World – he turns and leaves the pain behind him.  If this really is about a girl, as the titles suggest, he has made one of the best break-up albums of our decade, but even if he is simply pining for Manchester from Berlin, this expanse of loneliness is one of the most beautiful and rewarding I have encountered.  It is difficult after a first listen to such an epic for me to sum it in any useful way, but for the moment I will share my map of its various points of interest.

1.1. Roedelian melodies at the close of the film, the projector flickers, and the viewer has left through the side door, listening from beside the freeway.

1.2. A beautiful psychedelic string orchestra heard from beneath someone else’s skin.

1.3. The orchestra has switched to a requium and begun a descent into the depths of the earth through a haunted factory floor.

1.4. Shinya Tsukamoto’s Haze:  beauty just beyond the membrane of pain.  Klaus Schulze’s Irrlicht:  strings heard through a radio telescope.  Distortion at Maeror Tri levels, but an aetherial atmosphere near Tangerine Dream or Michael Stearns.

1.5. Enoesque endtitles with the steam-chugging of gentle machinery.

1.6. The piano bar at the end of the world.  Bohren und Der Club Of Lynch. Abandon all hope ye who lounge here.

2.1. The Pearl, crumbled to dust, and slowly blown away, false memories of HOH and Kitaro.

2.2. Shutov semblance, twinkling synths, intestinal drones.  The same room in two worlds, awake in both.

2.3. The pretty music in a deleted scene from a horror film, recollections of a non-survivor, old oscillators oozing through old fuzz.

2.4. Everything through the grinder now.  The light is bright, but so far away.  Music of the spheres Troumed.

2.5. The tents were pulled up, the carney is gone, the music melted into the dirt and stayed.  Tears were shed here, but no wings.

2.6. From the documentary in which not everything has perished.  The orchestra is pulled from the sea, and breathes again.  Froese and Kitaro lurk here.

2.7. Piano, only slightly dissolved, I emerge.

3.1. Simple piano and synth, Music For Films, twinkling, the abyss gaping below.  Am I asleep, or are you?

3.2. The needle in and occasionally out of the groove.  The cables of the inward descent have frayed and snapped.

3.3. Climbing at last, a mountain of noise, in like Aloof Proof, out like Sealand or Stanlow.

3.4. I am out, into the air, into the light, something has changed since I was last here, all thump and wheeze, a fanfare for the common no-one.

3.5. A meditation for a place, in which I am no longer within myself.  The mist is thick, the dawn is still dark, but Brian Eno is on the next bench.

3.6. The glittering dazzle, reflected in dark deep water.  The rumble is still here, will always be here.

3.7. I found joy and can show you the scars.