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 - Where Are Our Monsters Now, Where Are Our Friends ?

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. 

02 - Moggy & Wearden

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. 


Date With An Angel

CT

Related tracks