The Caretaker

Leyland Kirby's most recent effort, much like, but unique from, those released previously, exists as a faded daguerreotype of passing time and time passed. Commissioned as the score for Grant Gee's most recent film, Patience (After Sebald), it's an amorphous miasma of echoing antiquity, evoking a time prior to the advent of colour film as a crackling grey scale roll. This record collects the works of Austrian composer Franz Schubert and morphs them into a gloomy meditation on the sure, comforting absurdity of existence. Some of the record's bleakest and more sprawling tracks, like "Approaching the Outer Limits of Our Solar System," answer to dark, ambient landmarks like William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, while other free-floating parlour tunes aimlessly waltz through a foggy ballroom haze. Throughout Patience, the hiss of damaged 78s lie supine atop a wash of sunken piano and Dantean voices, guiding the listener through memories that, while familiar, are not their own.