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viewing 1 To 12 of 12 items
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LP
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HAFTW 003LP
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First re-press in a decade for The Caretaker's 2009 masterpiece, one of the earliest and most iconic releases on his label History Always Favours the Winners, and a true classic of the early 21st century. Spine shivers, all the way. Persistent Repetition Of Phrases was the follow-up to Leyland Kirby's 7CD boxset Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia (2006), and a landmark on the path that ultimately led to the influential An empty bliss beyond this world and Everywhere at the End of Time albums. Beloved of departed cultural theorist Mark Fisher, The Caretaker's alchemic transformations of 78RPM shellacs have, over time, come to hold a unique place in underground and popular imaginations simultaneously. It's the sort of music that elicits strong feelings from gen Z as much as Janus-faced xennials, jaded gen X-ers and perhaps even your gran, in a way practically incomparable to any other records of this strange century so far. It's an album that transcends notions of ambient or even concrète, sharing a palpable uncanniness, on the cusp of soothing, melancholy and something deeply ineffable. An essential listening experience for anyone who prizes the capacity of music to transport across time and space, or more acutely impact your sense of self. Pour one out and drink in deeply.
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CD
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HAFTW 008CD
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2019 repress; Originally issued in 2011. An Empty Bliss Beyond The World returns our doddering protagonist to the deserted ballroom, wandering its waxed floor and dilapidated grandeur in an attempt to capture an era which has long since disappeared but still haunts the atmosphere. James Leyland Kirby conjures a quieter, more introspective spirit, lost in his own mind amidst a low-lit labyrinth of ever-decaying and antediluvian shellac phrases. Sourced from his mysterious collection of 78s, these vague snippets of archaic sonics reflect the ability of Alzheimers patients to recall the songs of their past, and with them recollections of places, people, moods and sensations. The effect is subtly amplified by the chronic mastering at D&M, allowing each memory to segue seamlessly and unpredictably into the next for an otherworldly and disorienting experience. Coupled with another deeply enigmatic artwork commission from Ivan Seal, An Empty Bliss Beyond The World, is a highly potent transmission from one of the most singular characters in electronic music. Mastered by Lupo.
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4CD
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HAFTW 406CD
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Compiling the last three albums in the Everywhere At The End Of Time series -- four CDs and almost five hours of material cataloging the ultimate descent into dementia and oblivion, using a patented prism of sound to connote a final, irreversible transition into the haunted ballroom of the mind that he first stepped into with 1999's Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom. Invoking Jack Nicolson's caretaker character in Stanley Kubrick/Stephen King's The Shining as metaphor for issues revolving around mental health and a growing dissociation/dissatisfaction with the world, the project really took on new dimensions in 2005 with the 72-track, six-CD boxset Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, which was accompanied by an insightful unpacking of its ideas by cultural critic Mark Fisher, aka K-Punk; a stalwart of the project who identified it (alongside music from Burial and Broadcast) among the most vital, emergent works of hauntological art -- a form of music often preoccupied with ideas about memory and nostalgia (but one distinct from pastiche), and the way that they possibly overwhelm, occlude, or even define our sense of being; ideas that resonate with Fisher's own assertion that capitalism essentially undermines collective thought, distorts the individual, and has tragically lead to a worldwide increase or even ubiquity of mental health-related issues. By using fusty samples from an obsolete analog format, and by doing so in the second decade of the second millennium, The Caretaker perfectly and perversely bent ideas of anticipation/expectation with his arrangements, playing with notions of convention and repetition with effect that would lead some listeners to wonder if the same record was being released over and again. When combined with Ivan Seal's bespoke painting for each release from 2011's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World onwards, the project crystallized as a real gesamtkunstwerk for these times, and one arguably defined by a stubborn and intractably chronic drive against the grain of modern popular culture, or even a refusal of it.
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2LP
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HAFTW 029LP
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2019 black vinyl repress. The penultimate release in the series, Stage 5 of The Caretaker's Everywhere At The End of Time charts severe levels of musical/mental deterioration and sensory detachment through four extended, smudged and hallucinatory side-long pieces. Nearing the end, Stage 5 sees our protagonist enter a near-permanent state of confusion and horror. Mirroring the endemic deterioration of dementia's latter phases, one is pulled through the most extreme entanglements in the series so far; repetition and ruptures, barely maintaining a connection to waking life and a sense of self. In the most classic sense, one becomes witness to an abandonment and dissolution of ego, as the mulch of bygone 78s totally loses itself in a way that connotes misfiring synapses failing to properly relay information at advanced levels of the disease. It feels as though one's skull is being scraped out, uncovering hellish layers of accreted sensation and mulched imagery, occasionally recognizing calmer patterns, only for them to fray into the ether before it's possible to parse and dwell on them. At this point it's also perhaps worth pointing out the uncannily profound synchronicity between the timelines of Everywhere At The End of Time and Brexit, which both started in 2016 and are due to wrap up in spring 2019. It should be no stretch of the imagination to read into their parallel progression from nostalgia and historic/collective amnesia, to progressive dementia and complete obliteration of (the) sense(s). Mastered and cut by Lupo, artwork by Ivan Seal.
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2LP
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HAFTW 028LP
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2019 black vinyl repress. The Caretaker slips beyond recognition in the first "post awareness" stage of Everywhere At The End Of Time. The ability to recall singular memories gives way to confusions and horror. It's the beginning of an eventual process where all memories begin to become more fluid through entanglements, repetition, and rupture. Though the metaphoric device of worn-down ballroom 78s and Jack Nicholson's descent into madness in The Shining (1980), The Caretaker connotes the transitory cognitive breakdown of moderate into severe late stage dementia. Memories of the good times are recollected in glitching pyknoleptic flashes as the music struggles to follow consistent lines of thought, instead fluctuating between a fractured mosaic of ideas and elusive emotive gestures, but still occasionally able to gather coherent thoughts. In aesthetic, the sieve-like mind state of Stage 4 vacillates a serene sort of psychedelia with utterly paranoid and petrifying mental subsidence. Smudged traces of sublimated musical hall memories give way to shocking tracts of atonality and discord with runaway rhythmic logic, perpetually tumbling farther into states of mind perhaps best compared with K-Hole-like dimensions or the babble of after-hours psychonautic journeys. The concision of previous stages is here replaced with wandering, side-long tracts. Three of those are titled "Post Awareness Confusions" and correspondingly explore and reflect agitated, irritable mindsets as they navigate an ephemeral, confusing complexity of structures. The other piece is called "Temporary Bliss State" and starkly contrasts the other parts in a coherently lush traverse of ambient crackle and glittering melody... Artwork by Ivan Seal. Mastered and cut by Lupo. Double-LP comes in gatefold sleeve.
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LP
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HAFTW 027LP
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2019 black vinyl repress. The third of a six album cycle cataloguing The Caretaker's fictional first person account of life with early onset dementia, presenting some of the last coherent memories before confusion fully rolls in and the grey mists fade away. In this crepuscular, autumnal phase, recollections phosphoresce, and wilt in advancing stages of entropic decay, steadily approaching a winter of no return. Continuing to mirror the progression of dementia, using nostalgia for ballroom as an allegory of the disease, The Caretaker's musical flow in places becomes more disturbed, isolated, broken, and distant. Singular memories, and all their connotations, begin to atrophy and calcify, crumbling away with each rotation of the record -- sometimes in curt scene cuts, others in quietly breathtaking reverbed fizzles; like tea lights extinguished, never to flicker again. These are the last stages of awareness before you enter the post awareness stages, where those memories become completely detached from comprehension. On Stage 3, the haunted ballroom's repertoire becomes increasingly muddled, peeling off in recursive contrails from the gestures of "Back There Benjamin", to snag on the stylus in starkly reverberant knots on "Hidden Seas Buried Deep", or worn down to calloused nubs such as "To The Minimal Great Hidden", and "Sublime Beyond Loss", all leading up to some of the project's most uncanny detachments in "Libet Delay" and the coruscating brass shimmer of "Mournful Cameraderie", which beautifully suggest the mercurial nature of memory and its recollection. Artwork by Ivan Seal. Mastered and cut by Lupo.
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3CD
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HAFTW 103CD
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The first three stages in a series of six albums by The Caretaker, compiled here on a deluxe three CD collector's edition. Each album reveals new points of progression, loss and disintegration, progressively falling further and further towards the abyss of complete memory loss and nothingness... Embarking on the Caretaker's final journey with the familiar vernacular of abraded shellac 78s and their ghostly waltzes to emulate the entropic effect of a mind becoming detached from everyone else's sense of reality and coming to terms with their own, altered, and ever more elusive sense of ontology. The series aims to enlighten our understanding of dementia by breaking it down into a series of stages that provide a haunting guide to its progression, deterioration, and disintegration, and the way that people experience it according to a range of impending factors. In other words, Everywhere At The End Of Time probes some of the most important questions about modern music's place in a world that's increasingly haunted or even choked by the tightening noose of feedback loops of influence; perceptibly questioning the value of old memories as opposed to the creation of new ones, and, likewise the fidelity of those musical memories which remain, and whether we can properly recollect them from the mire of our faulty memory banks without the luxury of choice. It's highly encouraged that you join The Caretaker on this, his final journey through the endless haunted ballrooms and mazy corridors of his wasting mind... Features new and exclusive artwork by Ivan Seal on each panel -- made especially for this series. Housed in a deluxe eight-panel, triple digifile. Mastered and cut by Lupo.
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LP
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HAFTW 026LP
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2019 black vinyl repress. The second of six albums issued under the title Everywhere At The End Of Time, The Caretaker's fictional first person account of life with early onset dementia, takes a more wistful tack as our protagonist gradually realizes that all is not well and begins to rummage deeper into the recesses of his memory, masking emotions of grief, loss, fear, and uncertainty by deeper dwelling in the recesses of a decaying mind. As The Caretaker's short term memory functions begin to more rapidly erode, the loop-based punctuation of previous installments begin to subtly unravel, leading his mind to drift off and ponder fuller segments of tea dance strings and horns which appear uncannily more inviting, seductive, and now even more tangible than the abbreviated reels of earlier editions. Loop points wilt away in autumnal greys and russet rustles as new information becomes more difficult to process, back pedaling down memory lane toward an opaque smudge of half-forgotten/remembered spaces, places and un/familiar faces which provide more comfort and clarity than the world around him. It feels strange to recommend undergoing this experience, albeit in such an impressionistic and detached manner, but it somehow feels like a conversely enlightening one for these strange, disingenuous and unpredictable end times that we inhabit right now. Artwork by Ivan Seal. Mastered and cut by Lupo.
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LP
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HAFTW 025LP
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2019 black vinyl repress. Everywhere At The End of Time is the first in a series of six albums by The Caretaker, aka James Leyland Kirby, slowly cataloguing the stages of early onset dementia. Each album will reveal new points of progression, loss and disintegration, progressively falling further and further towards the abyss of complete memory loss and nothingness. Viewing dementia as a series of stages can be a useful way to understand the illness, but it is important to realize that this only provides a rough guide to the progress of the condition. Drawing on a recorded history of 20 years of recollected memories, this is one final journey and study into recreating the progression of dementia through sound. As the first in the series - and despite its typically frayed loop construction, this volume is the most lucid - subsequent instalments will continue to move into faded obscurity and material erosion. Mastered and cut by Andreas Lupo Lubich. Artwork by Ivan Seal.
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LP
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HAFTW 008LP
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Limited repress. The second album from James Leyland Kirby's alias The Caretaker, originally released in 2011 following 2008's Persistent Repetition Of Phrases (HAFTW 003CD). By now regarded an absolute classic of haunted ambient music, An Empty Bliss Beyond The World returns the doddering protagonist to the deserted ballroom, wandering its waxed floor and dilapidated grandeur in an attempt to capture an era which has long since disappeared but still haunts the atmosphere. James Leyland Kirby conjures a quieter, more introspective spirit, lost in his own mind amidst a low-lit labyrinth of ever-decaying and antediluvian shellac phrases. Sourced from his mysterious collection of 78s, these vague snippets of archaic sonics reflect the ability of Alzheimers patients to recall the songs of their past, and with them recollections of places, people, moods and sensations. The effect is subtly amplified by the chronic mastering at D&M, allowing each memory to segue seamlessly and unpredictably into the next for an otherworldly and disorienting experience. An Empty Bliss Beyond The World is a highly potent transmission from one of the most singular characters operating in music today. James Leyland Kirby, is also known as Leyland Kirby, The Stranger and V/VM. Mastered and cut by Lupo. Artwork features another specially commissioned painting by Ivan Seal.
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CD
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HAFTW 013CD
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2018 repress. James Leyland Kirby returns in 2012 with his long-in-the-making soundtrack to Grant Gee's film about W.G. Sebald. Patience (After Sebald) is a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss by the acclaimed documentary film-maker Grant Gee. It is an exploration of the work and influence of German writer W.G. Sebald (1944-2001), told via a long walk through coastal East Anglia tracking his most famous book The Rings Of Saturn (1995). The book mixes history, travelogue, memoir, meditation, fiction and images to explore the personal, public and often overlooked histories of Suffolk. In 2009, Grant approached The Caretaker to work on a soundtrack for this work and he sourced out-of-copyright Franz Schubert works from 1927 including the famous work "Winterreise." The soundtrack has been pieced together using snippets and fragments of this source material. The CD album artwork features another specially-commissioned painting by Ivan Seal, and comes in a gatefold digifile sleeve. Mastered and cut at Berlin's Dubplates & Mastering.
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CD
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HAFTW 003CD
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2018 repress. 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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viewing 1 To 12 of 12 items
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