Part 3 (1/2)

By now, very little a few haunting refrains lingering at the back of your mind separates you from the desert of the real.

Let's not imagine that this condition afflicts only a few unfortunates. Isn't, in fact, theoretically pure anterograde amnesia the postmodern condition par excellence? The present broken, desolated is constantly erasing itself, leaving few traces. Things catch your attention for a while but you do not remember them for very long. But the old memories persist, intact...Constantly commemorated ... I love 1923...

Do we really have more substance than the ghosts we endlessly applaud?

The past cannot be forgotten, the present cannot be remembered.

Take care. It's a desert out there...

Memory Disorder: Interview with.

The Caretaker.

The Wire 304, June 2009.

'I have always been fascinated by memory and its recall especially where sound is concerned,' writes James Kirby via email. 'Some things we remember easily and others we never seem to grasp. That idea was developed more on the boxset I did [2006's Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia] which was based around a specific form of amnesia where sufferers can remember things from the past but are unable to remember new things. To recreate that in sound was a challenge that I relished really. I realised the only way was to make a disorientating set with very few reference points. Fragments of melody breaking out of this monotonous tone and audio quagmire. Even if you listen over and over to all the songs you still can't remember when these melodies will come in. You have no favourite tracks, it's like a dream you are trying to remember. Certain things are clear but the details are still buried and distant.'

Kirby's description perfectly captures the unsettling experience of listening to Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia. With the release of the six CD boxset, his project The Caretaker crossed over from being an exercise in atmospheric nostalgia to being a harrowing investigation of memory disorder. The box set is more like a sonic installation than a record, a work whose conceptual and textural richness puts much sound art to shame. The first three Caretaker records Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom (1999), A Stairway To The Stars (2001) and We'll All Go Riding On A Rainbow (2003) swathed sampled British tearoom pop in a gaslit halo of reverb and crackle. On Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia the effects and the surface noise take over, so that instead of a gently dubdilapidated pop, there is an unnavigable murk, as abstract and minimal as a Beckett landscape. Echoes and reverberations float free of any originating sound source in a sea of hiss and static. If the earlier records suggested s.p.a.ces that were mildewed but still magnificent grand hotels gone to seed, long abandoned ballrooms Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia invokes sites that have deteriorated into total dereliction, where every unidentified noise is pregnant with menace. The 72 tracks all of them numbered rather than named simulate the amnesiac condition, and the few fragments of well known tunes that occasionally flare in the gloom are intermittent islands of familiarity in a world that has become hostile and unrecognisable.

'Maybe it's a dark humour, a kind of an audio black comedy,' Kirby says of The Caretaker, but the solemnity of the project belies Kirby's reputation as a prankster. His label V/Vm notoriously released a version of Lieutenant Pigeon's 'Mouldy Old Dough' just after appearing on the cover of The Wire 176 under the headline 'Harder! Faster! Louder!', one of a series of manglings of mainstream music tracks by Chris de Burgh, John Lennon and Elton John were also butchered and rea.s.sembled that V/Vm issued.

It is the focus on cultural memory that holds together all of Kirby's work, including the V/Vm mashups. If the V/Vm (sub)versions of pop come from the brash side of postmodern pastiche, then The Caretaker is about the dark side of cultural retrospection. Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia was in many ways an act of diagnosis of a cultural pathology. It might seem strange to describe a culture that is so dominated by past forms as being amnesiac, but the kind of nostalgia that is now so pervasive may best be characterised not as a longing for the past so much as an inability to make new memories. Fredric Jameson described one of the impa.s.ses of postmodern culture as the inability 'to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience.' The past keeps coming back because the present cannot be remembered. Memory disorders have recurred as themes in the popular cinema in the past decade or so: it is theoretically pure anterograde amnesia that afflicts Leonard, the lead character in Memento, while the ma.s.sively successful Bourne films were preoccupied with memory loss. It is not surprising that anxieties about memory should continually surface in late capitalism, where, as Jameson and others have argued, perpetual economic instability and the rapid turnover of ephemeral images leads to a breakdown in any coherent sense of temporality.

Kirby has approached the failure of the future from a different angle on another of his projects, 2006's The Death Of Rave. Here, Rave is desubstantialised, stripped of all ba.s.s weight and drum propulsion, reduced to s.h.i.+mmer and haze. The tracks sound like they are being heard from outside a club: a horribly accurate sonic metaphor, perhaps, of our current state of exile from the future-shocking rate of innovation that dance music achieved in the 80s and 90s. 'Yeah, that project really is in its infancy,' Kirby says. 'It came about as part of the V/Vm 365 project where the aim was to make one audio track a day. I used to go Raves when I was younger, went through that whole explosion in electronic music from 1987 to around 1992-93 when it seemed like there was a new genre every single week. It was an amazing time in music to hear so many things happening and so many new possibilities opening up and to see and feel the energy of new music exploding on dancefloors and in clubs. I think The Death Of Rave is about the loss in that spirit and a total loss of energy in most electronic musics across the board. I feel sorry these days for people when I go to clubs as that energy isn't there any more. I mean we have some so called very cool clubs in Berlin such as Watergate and Berghain, but you compare them to those back in the late 80s and early 90s in Manchester and it really is no comparison. Of course new things pop up but the difference now really is that if something explodes then before it can grow naturally people have strangled it to death with parodies online and often a scene or new style is dead before it even surfaces. House and Techno for instance took a long time to mature in Chicago and Detroit, now there is no time, once an idea is out of the rabbit's hat it's copied ad infinitum until the energy is gone. That is the key word 'energy', it's the one thing I have always been inspired by. For me those Death Of Rave tracks are about stripping Rave music from all its energy and spirit of fun taking the audio from the Rave to the grave, if you like.' The tracks are like energy flashbacks, frail figments of Rave reconstructed in a serotonin-depleted brain.

Kirby's other project The Stranger is organised around s.p.a.ce rather than time. 'The Stranger really is a darker version of The Caretaker,' Kirby says, 'and is its closest relative. The Stranger is about creating a physical location in sound. The last alb.u.m for example [2008's Bleaklow] was about the site of Bleaklow which is in the Peak District, it can be a grim place on the dark grey days but also beautiful on sunny days. Weirdly I had a few people get in touch with me who walk up there and they told me I captured the atmosphere perfectly and they used it as they were walking up there. I guess the odd glint of suns.h.i.+ne coming through that slate northern grey sky could be heard aurally.'

Kirby himself now lives in Berlin. 'I moved to Berlin as it has the atmosphere and opportunities of the big city but also there's a lot of s.p.a.ce here to think more and also it's easy to hide away on the dark streets here. Also it's not as brutal as Manchester here, there is more of an openess as people don't follow the media and news so much.' Like The Stranger, though, The Caretaker remains a project rooted in Britishness 'it's often only British music which has been used as source material.' A parallel for The Caretaker's excavation of pre-rock British pop is Dennis Potter's musical drama for television, Pennies From Heaven. 'The use of audio in Pennies From Heaven is amazing along with its vibrancy and colour and of course the way Dennis Potter uses the sadness in the lyrics to keep telling the story is also special as these songs really are stories in themselves. John Clifford and Herk Harvey's film Carnival of Souls (1962) was also a point of reference, the closing scenes in that film could even be audio from A Stairway To The Stars. I only saw that film after people had mentioned it to me. It works a lot that way, people will draw a line to something and I will then investigate that too.'

But of course the main initial impetus for The Caretaker was Kubrick's The s.h.i.+ning. The name 'the caretaker' was taken from the role that Jack Torrance is condemned to forever play in the haunted Overlook hotel ('you've always been the caretaker', Torrance is told in one of the film's most chilling moments). The conceit was simple: inspired by 'the haunting sequences which feature the ballroom music which is playing only in Jack's mind', Kirby thought, why not make a whole alb.u.m of material that might also have played in the Overlook? The s.h.i.+ning soundtrack includes two tracks by Al Bowlly, the between-the-wars crooner whose songs features in many of Potter's dramas, and Kirby sought out music in a similar vein. 'I spent a lot of time searching out music from that era over a two or three year period and constantly started to play around with this source material. The interesting thing for me is the fact that most of that music is about ghosts and loss as it was recorded between both the world wars. It's of a totally different era and had more or less been forgotten. t.i.tles inspired new ideas as did the audio itself. I was fortunate as there was a great record shop near where I was in Stockport which was ran by two old guys and it specialised in 78s. I would take in audio and ask then what was similar and they would scuttle off into the back of the shop and dig out some old catalogue from the 1930s and then pull out vinyls for me. It was an amazing resource sadly which is no longer there as one of the guys pa.s.sed away and the other decided to close the shop. It was like a timewarp in there, like going back 30 or 40 years. They would hand write receipts and half of their stock was in this backroom you were denied access too. They had no idea what I was doing in there buying these records, though one of them told me one time 'You were born in the wrong era as n.o.body is interested in this music who is your age.”

Kirby has tuned to more recent history for an upcoming project. 'It has been in my mind for a while to work on a Scragill/Thatcher project and this is the perfect time for this now as we approach the 25th anniversary of the Miners Strike. A lot has been written elsewhere about this conflict and its outcome and legacy, I have been scouring online and also have picked up some amazing footage to reprocess. It will link closely to The Caretaker in terms of its style as it will be like watching a half remembered version due to the processing. Some of the footage is totally ghostlike as it was recorded on VHS tapes from Miners back in 1984, so there is a real loss in quality and the sound fails to match the visuals. It's looking like a dream version maybe. This will be mainly video work with also an incredibly limited vinyl release featuring audio from these videos and some exclusive audio work.' This will fit into a series of re-stagings of the Miners Strike this decade, including Jeremy Deller and Artangel's The Battle Of Orgreave and David Peace's GB84.

Kirby decided to close V/Vm down last year. 'V/Vm was a vehicle for a lot of the work I have done but I think now as music consumers we have reached a point where labels are not so important, what is more important is delivery and availability of work.' It is partly the possibilities for the online distribution of music, which Kirby has always been enthusiastic about, that led him to end V/Vm, but he 'also found I was using the name V/Vm less and less when it comes to new works. I've been working on a very personal alb.u.m in terms of moods I want to convey and I guess I may use my own name for that.' In fact, the alb.u.m, ent.i.tled History Always Favours The Winners, will come out under the name Leyland Kirby ('Leyland is my grandather's and my middle name. There are already too many James Kirby's making music out there, if I believe Google. Now I'm only competing with a glamour model from Sheffield in the Google search.') The Leyland Kirby music was made without the use of samples, but it has clearly been informed by Kirby's time in the vaults. The tracks have an eerily untimely quality, a stately grace, a filmic scope. On 'When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart', a doleful, echo-refracted piano desolately tracks through subdued electronic textures. 'The Sound Of Our Music Vanis.h.i.+ng' is a more violent exercise in thwarted recall here it as if the memories are rus.h.i.+ng in and being obliterated at the same time, like Basinski if the tapes were being violently shredded instead of gently disintegrating. The epic 'When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die', meanwhile, has a swelling, magisterial melancholy that recalls Angelo Badalamenti.

The Caretaker project continues, however. 'I have started to play shows finally as The Caretaker, usually I just like to let the music just creep out of the speakers as if it's actually the venue playing the audio or that the sounds are in your own mind. I played in Athens last week in a pitch black room which worked well, maybe I can work some visuals into the live process but they would have to add to the audio and not distract the listening process. I am always of course interested in playing more relevant locations, so for instance Blackpool Tower would be amazing as the ballroom there is a great Victorian example and perfect for this particular audio recall.'

'More than anything it's all about research and mood when making the alb.u.ms,' Kirby replies when I ask him how he makes The Caretaker records. 'Knowing the source material, maybe hearing a lyrical phrase which opens up an idea in my mind or indeed just reading something, such as with the Anterograde boxset which sparked off another idea and offered a different tangent and possibility. Without going into the specifics, things are reworked totally in a digital realm until the right mood surfaces. It's very important too that I am in the right mood mentally to make that music which I think comes across certainly in the later alb.u.ms, as opposed maybe to the first alb.u.m. I am getting better at realising the days when I get the best results now when working on a specific project. It's strange really because there is a full range of emotions in the music when I listen back, from loss to happiness, dislocation, regret, longing. Maybe it's the source music itself which inspires this, but there are still for me a lot of personal moments in amongst those alb.u.ms. Maybe even some of my own memories are intertwined in there.'

The word 'research' keeps coming up in Kirby's discussion of The Caretaker project. 'I have been doing a lot of online research in the last couple of years and also have been watching a lot of doc.u.mentaries about people who suffer from brain disorders and memory problems. The last release [2008's Persistent Repet.i.tion of Phrases] was based around a lot of conditions where the sufferer just repeats themselves, so the audio featured a lot of loops and microloops, it was a lot warmer and more gentle than the boxset release. Not all memories are necessarily bad or disturbing memories.' On Persistent Repet.i.tion of Phrases, one of The Wire's top ten records of last year, there was accordingly a return of the some of the prettiness that was absent from Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, but there was also an icy lucidity, an exquisite poise, about the record. It felt like a distillation and a consolidation. 'The challenge now is to move the sound somewhere else brainwise and memory wise, that will take time to find the new direction. More research will have to be done before I find the best pathway for future exploration. I would also love to use this music on film as it would be perfect for this, so maybe a door will open somewhere.'

Home is Where The Haunt is:.

The s.h.i.+ning's Hauntology.

k-punk post, January 23, 2006.

1. The sound of hauntology.

Conjecture: hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension.

The pun hauntology, ontology works in spoken French, after all. In terms of sound, hauntology is a question of hearing what is not here, the recorded voice, the voice no longer the guarantor of presence (Ian P: 'Where does the Singer's voice GO, when it is erased from the dub track?') Not phonocentrism but phonography, sound coming to occupy the dis-place of writing.

Nothing here but us recordings...

2. Ghosts of the Real.

Derrida's neologism uncovers the s.p.a.ce between Being and Nothingness.

The s.h.i.+ning in both book and film versions, and here I suggest a side-stepping of the wearisome struggle between King fans and Kubrickians and propose treating the novel and the film as a labyrinth-rhizome, a set of interlocking correspondences and differences, a row of doors is about what lurks, unquiet, in that s.p.a.ce. Insofar as they continue to frighten us once we've left the cinema, the ghosts that dwell here are not supernatural. As with Vertigo (1958), in The s.h.i.+ning it is only when the possibility of supernatural spooks has been laid to rest that we can confront the Real ghosts...or the ghosts of the Real.

3. The haunted ballroom Mark Sinker: 'ALL [Kubrick's] films are fantastically 'listenable' (if you use this in sorta the same sense you use watchable)'

Where does.

The conceit of The Caretaker's Memories from the Haunted Ballroom has the simplicity of genius: a whole alb.u.m's worth of songs that you might have heard playing in the Gold Room in The s.h.i.+ning's Overlook Hotel. Memories from the Haunted Ballroom is a series of soft-focus delirial-oneiric versions of 20s and 30s tearoom pop tunes, the original numbers drenched in so much reverb that they have dissolved into a suggestive audio-fog, the songs all the more evocative now that they have been reduced to hints of themselves. Thus Al Bowlly's 'It's All Forgotten Now', for instance, one of the tracks actually used by Kubrick on The s.h.i.+ning soundtrack, is slurred down, faded in and out, as if it is being heard in the ethereal wireless of the dreaming mind or played on the winding-down gramophone of memory. As Ian Penman wrote of dub: 'It makes of the Voice not a self-possession but a dispossession a 're' possession by the studio, detoured through the hidden circuits of the recording console.'

the singer's voice.

GO?.

4. In the Gold Room.

Jameson: 'it is by the twenties that the hero is haunted and possessed...'

Kubrick's editing of the film does not allow any of the polyvalencies of that phrase, 'It's All Forgotten Now', to go un(re)marked. The uncanniness of the song, today and 25 years ago when the film was released, arises from the (false but unavoidable) impression that it is commenting on itself and its period, as if were an example of the way in which that era of beautiful and d.a.m.ned decadence and Gatsby glamour were painfully, delightfully aware of its own b.u.t.terfly's wing evanescence and fragility. Simultaneously, the song's place in the film it plays in the background as a bewildered Jack speaks to Grady in the bathroom about the fact that Grady has killed himself after brutally murdering his children indicates that what is forgotten may also be preserved: through the mechanism of repression.

I don't have any recollection of that at all.

Why does this Gold Room Pop, all those moonlight serenades and summer romances, have such power? The Caretaker's spectralised versions of those lost tunes only intensifies something that Kubrick, like Dennis Potter, had identified in the pop of the 20s and 30s. I've tried to write before about the peculiar aching quality of these songs that are melancholy even at their most ostensibly joyful, forever condemned to stand in for states that they can evoke but never instantiate.

For Fredric Jameson, the Gold Room revels bespeak a nostalgia for 'the last moment in which a genuine American leisure cla.s.s led an aggressive and ostentatious public existence, in which an American ruling cla.s.s projected a cla.s.s-conscious and unapologetic image of itself and enjoyed its privileges without guilt, openly and armed with its emblems of top-hat and champagne gla.s.s, on the social stage in full view of the other cla.s.ses'. But the significance of this genteel, conspicuous hedonism must be construed psychoa.n.a.lytically as well as merely historically. The 'past' here is not an actual historical period so much as a fantasmatic past, a Time that can only ever be retrospectively retrospectrally posited. The 'haunted ballroom' functions in Jack's libidinal echonomy (to borrow a neologism from Irigaray) as the place of belonging in which, impossibly, the demands of both the paternal and the maternal superegos can be met, the honeyed, dreamy utopia where doing his duty would be equivalent to enjoying himself...Thus, after his conversations with bartender Lloyd and waiter Grady (Jack's frustrations finding a blandly indulgent blank mirror sounding board in the former and a patrician, patriarchal voice in the latter), Jack comes to believe that he would be failing in his duty as a man and a father if he didn't succ.u.mb to his desire to kill his wife and child.

White man's burden, Lloyd...white man's burden...

If the Gold Room seems to be a male s.p.a.ce (it's no accident that the conversation with Grady takes place in the men's room), the place in which Jack via male intermediaries, intercessors working on behalf of the hotel management, the house, the house that pays for his drinks faces up to his 'man's burdens', it is also the s.p.a.ce in which he can succ.u.mb to the injunction of the maternal superego: 'Enjoy'.

Michel Ciment: 'When Jack arrives at the Overlook, he describes this sensation of familiarity, of well-being ('It's very homey'), he would 'like to stay here forever', he confesses even to having 'never been this happy, or comfortable anywhere', refers to a sense of deja vu and has the feeling that he has 'been here before'. 'When someone dreams of a locality or a landscape,' according to Freud, 'and while dreaming thinks ”I know this, I've been here before”, one is authorised to interpret that place as subst.i.tuting for the genital organs and the maternal body.'