THE CARETAKER – An Empty Bliss Beyond This World [fvll albvm] (2011)

The Caretaker was a long-running project by English ambient musician Leyland James Kirby (born 9 May 1974). His work as The Caretaker is characterized as exploring memory and its gradual deterioration, nostalgia, and melancholia. The project was inspired by the haunted ballroom scene in the 1980 film The Shining. His first several releases comprised treated and manipulated samples of 1930s ballroom pop recordings.

After 2008, the Caretaker’s website announced that “work has begun on a new release for early 2010 which will shift focus completely towards the brain and brain function, recall and error”. During this time, Kirby released Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was under his own name, which was described by Pitchfork as “music of stasis that doesn’t announce itself as much as it seeps.”

Kirby’s focus at this time was on another album, and did not plan out making another Caretaker record of this kind – the album was made because of “pure chance in action at all times.”. The critical impact of An Empty Bliss Beyond This World is explored in detail on its page.

He also completed the OST for Grant Gee’s film Patience (After Sebald) (2012) in this period. Kirby’s score for the film uses a 1927 record of Franz Schubert’s piano-and-voice-only composition Winterreise (1828) as its main audio source. It also differs from other works of the project where hissing sounds are used instead of crackles, the loops are shorter in lengths, and the non-musical aspects of each track (the hiss sounds) serve as the foreground of the mix.

0:00 – All You Are Going To Want To Do Is Get Back There 3:45 – Moments Of Sufficient Lucidity 7:33 – The Great Hidden Sea Of The Unconscious 10:35 – Libet’s Delay 14:00 – I Feel As If Might Be Vanishing 15:57 – An Empty Bliss Beyond This World 20:16 – Bedded Deep In Long Term Memory 22:05 – A Relationship With The Sublime 25:40 – Mental Caverns Without Sunshine 28:54 – Pared Back To The Minimal 30:40 – Mental Caverns Without Sunshine 32:15 – An Empty Bliss Beyond This World 36:03 – Tiny Gradiations Of Loss 38:55 – Camaraderie At Arms Length 43:41 – The Sublime Is Disappointingly Elusive 45:25 – Fleeting Dreams 48:28 – The Story Is Lost