Browse by Label: HISTORY ALWAYS FAVOURS THE WINNERS (UK)

Artist:	KIRBY, LEYLAND
Title:	Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was
Label:	HISTORY ALWAYS FAVOURS THE WINNERS (UK)
Format:	3CD
Price:	$23.50
Catalog #:	HAFTW 001CD

These pieces are the first released by The Caretaker's James Kirby under his own name and are the result of an intense period of production aimed at encapsulating a deep feeling of loss and alienation. What started as a concept for a simple single album soon turned into a double-album, then into a double double-album before finally ending up as a triple-double- vinyl album and triple CD soundtrack. As James Leyland Kirby himself describes it: "Here we stand, 20 years on from the first CD, and our optimism has gradually been eroded away collectively. "Tomorrow's World" never came. We are lost and isolated, many of us living our lives through social networks as we try to make sense of it all, becoming voyeurs, not active participants. Documenting everything. No mystery. Everything laid bare for all to see." Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was is the soundtrack to a world in decline, the heroism of modern life, a document of loss, an essay in gloom, delivered with a brutally honest appreciation of the pitiful truth. Time-worn, ambient drone-hauntology.

Artist:	CARETAKER, THE
Title:	Persistent Repetition Of Phrases
Label:	HISTORY ALWAYS FAVOURS THE WINNERS (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.50
Catalog #:	HAFTW 003CD

Having already been chosen as one of The Wire magazine's top 10 albums of 2008, as well as featuring on numerous "end-of year" charts, The Caretaker's highly-acclaimed Persistent Repetition Of Phrases is finally made available on CD again -- this time on The Caretaker's own History Always Favours The Winners label. James Kirby's work as The Caretaker has always dealt with the suggestion of haunted memory and the obscuring of temporal motion, and this album makes that more explicit than ever, with titles that reference amnesia, Alzheimer's, past life regression and other such memory misfires and short circuits. Musically, this album might be compared to Philip Jeck's manipulated vinyl tracts, featuring similarly oceanic swells of crackle and dust, with faded pianos or big band sounds wafting wraith-like across the mix. After conjuring the sinister atmospherics of The Shining with his debut album Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom, The Caretaker has been chasing this idea of sound leaving its indelible mark on a space and time, so consequently these creepy, semi-dissolved musical passages sound no more tangible than shadows, and the album for the most part comes across as some sort of séance held via wax cylinder.

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