The Caretaker — Patience (After Sebald)

Leyland Kirby’s long running Caretaker project has gone from an obscure artefact inspired by a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to become something of an avant-garde institution. Lauded by the late John Peel, co-opted by the academic exponents of Hauntology, Kirby’s reanimated take on pre-war ballroom and aberrant memory processes could easily have become a gimmick stretched too far. That The Caretaker’s output in the last 18 months constitutes some of his finest and freshest work to date is a testimony not only to the magpie like skills of this antiquarian record collector, but to his ability as a subtle and uniquely captivating composer.

Patience (After Sebald) is the soundtrack to a documentary about the life of the writer and academic WG Sebald who’s book The Rings of Saturn forms the narrative core of the piece. For this 12 track work Kirby has taken for his material a recording of Schubert's ‘Winterreise’, a song cycle for voice and piano composed in 1827. Schubert’s friend the poet Johann Mayrhofer commented that the period in which the cycle was written was for the composer one where “life had lost its rosiness and winter was upon him”. Such a description is an accurate indication of the mood exerted by the piece, and it seem that it is these melancholic and yearning feelings that The Caretaker sought to bring out in his treatment.

The Caretaker has always deployed the artifacts and distortion inherent on old 78’ records as an active component of the composition. Bringing out those facets of old recording techniques that today’s digital technology seeks to eliminate is one of his particular charms. Indeed this valorizing of the contingent artifact or hazy fug of dust and static is forgrounded throughout Patience more than ever. On The homesickness that was corroding her soul a simple repeating piano melody circulates amid the thick fog of layered surface noise. Each note peaking above the haze long enough to be registered before diving back beneath. In the deep and dark hours of the night takes this approach to its zenith, smudging the instrument and the voice into an impressionistic mark across another dense miasma of sound.

As has always been the case with The Caretaker, this record (as does the documentary) focuses on the issue of memory, in particular the status of memory in conjunction with narrative and reflection. This isn’t memory as a pure recollection of historical fact, but rather memory as an artifact of human experience, mediated through time and subjectivity. One of Sebald’s main concerns was with the holocaust, and especially the way how an event of such horrific magnitude appears as an object of historical and personal reflection. As a German growing up in the immediate post-war era the status of memory and recent history were of central importance; how to make sense of one’s origins and experience at a time of national ethical crisis.

Perhaps the darkest and most affective of the twelve tracks are those which put the male voice at their center. Here the decay of the voice, its dislocation into a series of half heard ciphers drifting in an indeterminate mix of surface noise and submerged piano recalls the sort of out of joint memory function best captured in Kirby’s massive 6 CD set Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia. There is an added poignancy in this work in that the memory seemingly being channeled through the fug is one of a German heritage prior to the horror and eternal guilt of the holocaust. What are we permitted to remember from a time that we would rather disavow, from a time that the present will never let us escape? How can we come to terms with such a history that is simultaneously Other and most authentically us? This fundamental ambiguity is at the heart of what The Caretaker is doing here. Under this pressure it is no wonder that the past appears as so many distorted and barely recognizable signs, and that the voice is stretched to breaking point to reach through the weight of sedimented time.

Thirteen years after his debut release The Caretaker has produced his first masterpiece.