When I wrote about Leyland Kirby’s Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was almost a year ago, I mentioned his work as The Caretaker inspired by the haunted ballroom scene in The Shining. This is that record. It has to be said it takes its brief fairly literally. Snatches of old records, I guess largely swing and big band and the like (though I’m far from an expert), already probably muffled and cracked with age, are looped, and fuzzied up further, to create something a little bit nostalgic and a lot eerie. It’s hard not to picture Jack Nicholson wandering brokenly around the corridors, looking at the faded photographs of folks having a good time — and seeing himself peering awkwardly out of one. When it first came out in 2008, this would have been a pretty important release. It’s still very enjoyable, although it does lack the subtlety of the best of the work that came after it (not least Kirby’s own later material).
I bought this from Boomkat. They call it Dark Ambient / Drone / Metal, somewhat confusingly.
dogrando writes about some records 