Bleep

As James Leyland Kirby begins to wind down his time as The Caretaker, we should all take a moment to appreciate the strides he has made via the project. 2012’s Patience (After Sebald) was the first Caretaker project to see the light of day after Kirby’s acclaimed LP An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. Conceived as a soundtrack to Grant Gee’s documentary on German writer W. G. Sebald, he eschews the sampling spectrum of An Empty Bliss... (20s and 30s ballroom jazz) to focus on the manipulation of one piece - Franz Schubert’s 1827 song cycle Winterreise. Sometimes Kirby smudges the record with reverb; sometimes he swamps it in distortion; sometimes he lets the crackle of vinyl slowly creep in until it dominates the source material. Whatever his treatment, the results are never less than brilliant.