Not exactly the kind of project one expects to inspire the latest viral stunt on TikTok, the video-sharing app and present obsession of Zoomers worldwide. James Leyland Kirby, also known as The Caretaker, performing live on Apin Madrid, Spain. By the halfway point, upon which we've reached the "post-awareness" stages, the wistful melodies that drifted through the first three sections have been buried in barely penetrable noise, and with last year's release of the final installment, The Caretaker was put to rest for good. Over the next three years, Kirby released the work in six installments, each meant to reflect specific stages of Alzheimer's advancement. Perhaps that premise seems loaded beyond the capacities of a 40-some-minute ambient record, and Kirby must have agreed by 2016, he'd announced that the project of The Caretaker was to slip into dementia itself, as "documented" across a mind-bending six-and-a-half hour project he called Everywhere at the end of time. It was Kirby's attempt at conceptualizing his studies of Alzheimer's disease, including some that suggested playing patients the music of their youth might help lost memories resurface. Plenty of Caretaker records followed, but An Empty Bliss was clearly the masterpiece. Tracks are titled things like "The sublime is disappointingly elusive," or "I feel as if I might be vanishing." It seemed like the right soundtrack for the vertigo of the moment, that feeling of existing in a present outside of time – when I put it on and swayed around my living room, I'd sometimes pretend I had died long ago.Īn empty bliss beyond this World by The Caretaker Kirby re-works these dusty samples to crackle and fade and loop indiscriminately, occasionally repeating themselves or abruptly changing course. Arranged from edits of Jazz Age ballroom tunes found on forgotten 78s in dollar bins worldwide, the record is as dreamy as it is unsettling to listen is to be stuck within the locked groove of someone else's distant memories. It involved heavy pours from a jug of Carlo Rossi and repeated spins of The Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, the 2011 breakthrough from a cult favorite English musician otherwise known as Leyland James Kirby. Over the past week, users of TikTok began absorbing, in a "challenge," one artist's musical investigation into the realities of living through a degenerative neurological and by NPRĪround the beginning of lockdown this spring, alone in my apartment, I developed a little nightly routine.
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