'Watching Dead Empires in Decay’, an album recorded under another of Kirby’s pseudonyms ‘The Stranger’ and released on Modern Love, a label that has been close to Kirby through these last eventful 15 years. It’s a dream album for the label: perhaps the most ambitious of Kirby’s career so far. It’s complex, singular, enigmatic, percussive, dark, and you just can’t work out how it was constructed.

Gone are the sampled 78’s of The Caretaker, but it also doesn't exactly sound electronic - you just can’t quite fathom how any of it was put together: Field Recordings? Found Sounds? Sheets of metal scraped and hammered? Drum machines re-wired? It’s stark and unsettling, haunted, even troubling - but often just beautiful.

The Stranger - Watching Dead Empires In Decay

What then is 'Intrigue & Stuff' ?

Is it a comment by the late great Martin Hannett when describing Tony Wilson's Factory ? "There's an awful lot of incest that goes on," mused Hannett. "Intrigue and stuff."

This is the fourth part of a series of releases on twelve inch vinyl.

Mastered by Lupo in Berlin.

Intrigue & Stuff Vol.4

The original ‘The Death Of Rave’ project releases in 2006 was vast, over two-hundred flashbacks, using all of the dance floor hits from the time and stripping them of energy and spirit, turning them into shadows and ghosts. The material pre-dates the recent obsession younger musicians have for re-creating remembered rave textures and memories. This was not nostalgia, It was an inverted paean to a time when the music was about bringing people together for a shared experience. A time when only the music, advancement of sound and getting on one mattered. 

Leyland Kirby presents V/Vm 'The Death of Rave' (A partial flashback)

The Caretaker conjures a quieter, more introspective spirit, lost in his own mind amidst a low-lit labyrinth of ever-decaying and antediluvian shellac phrases. Sourced from a mysterious collection of 78s, these vague snippets of archaic sonics reflect the ability of Alzheimers patients to recall the songs of their past, and with them recollections of places, people, moods and sensations.

The Caretaker - An empty bliss beyond this World

The Stranger - We Are Enemies But Not Here

The Stranger - So Pale It Shone In The Night

Watching Dead Empires in Decay’, an album recorded under another of Kirby’s pseudonyms ‘The Stranger’ and released on Modern Love, a label that has been close to Kirby through these last eventful 15 years. It’s a dream album for the label: perhaps the most ambitious of Kirby’s career so far. It’s complex, singular, enigmatic, percussive, dark, and you just can’t work out how it was constructed.

Gone are the sampled 78’s of The Caretaker, but it also doesn't exactly sound electronic - you just can’t quite fathom how any of it was put together: Field Recordings? Found Sounds? Sheets of metal scraped and hammered? Drum machines re-wired? It’s stark and unsettling, haunted, even troubling - but often just beautiful.

The Stranger - Spiral Of Decline

The Stranger - We Scarcely See Sunlight

The Stranger - Providence Or Fate

Locked Into Situations

Derelict Bar

The Tar Sands

Night Owls

Wanting An Absolute Beyond

01 - Monroes Stockport

02 - Moggy & Wearden

03 - Machete's At The Banshee

04 - Acid Alan, Haggis & Scott

The original ‘The Death Of Rave’ project releases in 2006 was vast, over two-hundred flashbacks, using all of the dance floor hits from the time and stripping them of energy and spirit, turning them into shadows and ghosts. The material pre-dates the recent obsession younger musicians have for re-creating remembered rave textures and memories. This was not nostalgia, It was an inverted paean to a time when the music was about bringing people together for a shared experience. A time when only the music, advancement of sound and getting on one mattered. 


05 - Marple Libradome '91

06 - Smithy & Dave The Rave

07 - Big Eddie's Van - Bowlers Car Park

08 - XR2 Mk1 Sale Waterpark

Taken from The Caretaker album 'Persistent repetition of phrases'

THE CARETAKER - false memory syndrome

Taken from The Caretaker album 'Persistent repetition of phrases'.

THE CARETAKER - rosy retrospection

THE CARETAKER - von restorff effect

01 - All you are going to want to do is get back there

02 - Moments of sufficient lucidity

03 - The great hidden sea of the unconscious

04 - Libet's delay

05 - I feel as if I might be vanishing

06 - An empty bliss beyond this World

07 - Bedded deep in longterm memory

08 - A relationship with the sublime

09 - Mental caverns without Sunshine

10 - Pared back to the minimal

11 - Mental caverns without Sunshine

12 - An empty bliss beyond this World

13 - Tiny gradiations of loss

14 - Camaraderie at arms length

15 - The sublime is disappointingly elusive

The Caretaker returns with a long-in-the-making soundtrack to acclaimed filmmaker Grant Gee's documentary about German writer WG Sebald. 'Patience (After Sebald)' is a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss - an exploration of the work and influence of German writer WG Sebald (1944-2001), told via a long walk through coastal East Anglia tracking his most famous book 'The Rings Of Saturn'. The source material for 'Patience' was sourced from Franz Schubert's 1827 piece 'Winterreise' and subjected to his perplexing processes, smudging and rubbing isolated fragments into a dust-caked haze of plangent keys, strangely resolved loops and de-pitched vocals which recede from view as eerily as they appear.

Leyland Kirby

Pinned to spotlight

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