Mark of the Mould
The Caretaker
Everywhere at the end of time
Everywhere, an empty bliss
The Wire, June 2019
by Simon Reynolds
It’s twenty years now since the first
stirrings of what came to be called hauntology: Boards of Canada’s Music Has A Right to Children, Position
Normal’s Stop Your Nonsense, early
releases by Mount Vernon Arts Lab and Broadcast… and The Caretaker’s Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom.
After eleven releases under that name, James Kirby is retiring his best-known alias.
And with another leading figure in the genre-not-genre - Baron Mordant, a/k/a
Ian Hicks, the man behind Mordant Music the group and the label - also calling
time on his public self, it’s tempting to see these career-closing releases as
tombstones for the sound-sensibility. Is this the moment to give up the ghosts?
Or will hauntology enjoy some kind of after-afterlife?
In hindsight, “memoradelia” – an
alternative name proposed by Patrick McNally – might have been a better way to
go, avoiding the Derridean cargo carried by the term hauntology. Decay, the
attrition of aging, memory’s uncanny persistence and terrifying frailty are at
the maggoty core of Mark of the Mould and Everywhere at the end of time. A memory is a kind of ghost, sharing its queasy quality of ontological
instability: a present absence, neither here nor there, now nor then. One psychoanalytical explanation – or
explaining away – of the ghost (at least
ghosts familiar to us, ghosts we recognize) is that they are symptoms of
incomplete mourning: memories we’re
unable to let go.
Continuing the exploration of memory
disorders in Theoretically
pure anterograde amnesia and
other earlier Caretaker releases, Everywhere at
the end of time – a gargantuan
project launched in 2016 and now closing with its the sixth installment, plus
the free side-album Everywhere, an empty bliss - is Kirby’s attempt to mirror in sound the stages of Alzheimer’s. Identity,
memory and a sense of temporality are interdependent. As the first two props of
the self crumble, perception of time also erodes away. What ensues is – as far
as we can tell - - a prolapse of consciousness, an undignified slide into a hellish
limbo of non-time. That threshold is reached on the latest batch of Everywhere: where earlier tracks lasted three
or four minutes each, the new pieces dilate monstrously, ranging from 21 to 23
minutes. Listening to these entropic epics models the ego-death of advanced senility:
it’s virtually impossible not to drift off into inattentive vacancy.
The first Caretaker record took its
concept (and artist name) from the ballroom scene in The Shining: Jack Nicholson’s writer turned hotel caretaker turned
revenant psychopath hallucinating the sound of the 1930s light-jazz ballads
that the Overlook’s guests had decades earlier slow-danced to (specifically the
songs of Al Bowlly, a British entertainer popular between the wars but now
almost completely forgotten). Listening
to the drawn-out death rattles of these final Caretaker pieces, you might think
of another iconic Kubrick scene: the uncomprehending horror of HAL the rogue computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey, as his brain is dismantled bit by bit, the
blanks in his consciousness getting bigger until all that is left is the steadily
decelerating ditty “A Bicycle Made for
Two”.
The Caretaker could have renamed himself
The Caregiver, for on this project he resembles a sonic nurse in a hospice for
the terminally ill. Kirby is a custodian in another sense. For over two
decades, he’s collected thousands of dirt-cheap shellac 78 rpm discs of Bowlly-type
music, from which he’s lovingly sampled, looped, and filtered to create these
tracks. The result is an alchemized archive of popular song: music whose original “people” are either dead
or on the downward slope. For to be capable of remembering this music as a
real-time, living culture, you’d have to be in your nineties now. What Kirby presents here could be heard as the
faint, faded memory-fragments of once-beloved tunes as they waver on in atrophying
minds.
It’s a style of music that, as Kirby
has noted, always already ached with nostalgia, oozing a woozy maudlin warmth
as comforting as a mug of Ovaltine. His treatments layer an extra sepia-tint
patina of Pathé pathos. Suffused with a kindly “golden hour” glow,
the earlier instalments of the project loop sonorous horns, harp twinkles and
piano ripples into cul de sacs of consciousness: the melodic equivalent of
those mental glitches that Americans call “senior moments” (a self-deprecating, uneasily humorous term
that shows you are still in command because you are able to identify them as
aberrations). Now and then, there’s a resemblance to the Gas albums, but
replacing Alpine grandeur with fireside intimacy. The titles are heartbreaking
(“I Still Feel As Though I Am Me”) and often describe the music more
effectively than the reviewer ever could (“Long term dusk glimpses,” Internal
unravel”).
Across Everywhere’s nearly seven hours duration, everything seems to wilt
and yellow as the album progresses, or rather, regresses. Sound starts to reach
our ears as though through a swaddling ball of fluff that’s wrapped itself around
the needle. Where before the rhythm of the pieces was a gently bobbing sway
like the rise and fall of a merry-go-round horse, now it’s an agonizingly
protracted pestle-and-mortar grind, slowly pulverizing thought into sparkly
dust. By the end – the 20-minute long pieces - there’s no discernible motion,
just a sandstorm standstill, eternity-as-abyss.
The Caretaker faces decay and death
with serenely fatalistic acceptance, aestheticizing the inevitable extinction
of personality. On Mark of the Mould
Baron Mordant’s subject is middle age and the response is different: he’s not
going down without a fight. There’s a feeling of writhing struggle to this
album, a man at war with the spores he’s inhaled. Comprising fifteen tracks
plus the bonus inclusion of their instrumental versions, Mould is the grand bouffe
finale to a career, Hicks sicking up a feast of all his favorite riddim tics
and danktronica textures.
Much of Mould resembles the vastly more compelling music that dubstep could
have been. True, few things could be more boring in 2019 than manifesting a dub
influence, but Mordant’s idea of it descends more from Cabaret Voltaire than
Lee Perry: it’s a dead-aired, dessicated, deep-underground-silo version of dub,
built around cold delays rather than misty-mystic reverb. Imagine Shackleton
unshackled. Call it Middle-Aged Echo. Other portions of Mould supply a banging ‘n’ clanking update of early Nineties techno
- “(It’s A) MariMba (You Knob)” could be a great lost track from the sessions
for DHS’s “House of God” – that exploits the capacity for detail and dimension
afforded by current software.
Elsewhere Mould overlaps with eMMplekz, Hicks’s glorious collaboration with
Ekoplekz’s Nick Edwards, except that in this case the Baron is handling not
just the verbals and lyrics but the backing tracks too. Being a genius word-wrangler
means that the Baron is better equipped to describe what he’s doing than me.
Trying to tag his unique delivery and idiom - a Tourettic monologue riddled
with floridly fetid imagery and gruesomely tortured puns - I toyed with formulations
like “mental effluent,” only to be outmatched by a passing reference to “spoken
turd” on one track here. Likewise, hoping
to pin down the particular tone of sour derision in Hicks voice, I realized eventually that le mot juste was in fact “mordant”.
Peter Cook, or certain characters that
the comedian played, could be a reference point for the vocal tone – gruffly
classless, indeterminately Southern English, withering, withered, the sardonic
sneer undercut by its own impotence – but doesn’t capture the uniquely macabre
brand of Anglo-surreal humour on offer. That voice and the encrypted private
slanguage are maintained not just on record, but in press communiques, email correspondence
and interviews, making you wonder if Hicks uses it in everyday life too, when
shopping or making up bedtime stories for his kids.
As for what Hicks rants about, one ripe
terrain is the sort of modern-day U.K. ugliness that inspires online forums
like Shit London and Boring Dystopia. A Robert Macfarlane of built-up Britain, Hicks
is an accomplished “visual noticer” with a keen eye for the unsightly and
characterless. But he’s equally
observant when it comes to the unreal life of the Internet – the not-so-great
indoors - especially the fatuities of today’s music scene. Many lines here read
like snippets from blog reviews or Boomkat blurbs. “The Internet Did It” points
the finger obliquely at, well, all of us, probably: the crime is left undefined
but could refer to the economic nonviability of the leftfield musician’s life
in the age of streaming, or to a creeping paralysis and hemorrhaging of meaning
and momentum. Choice phrases fly by almost too fast to register: some near-abstract
(“lichen 2-step”, “are you being serf?”, “Disneyhole”) and others nearly too on-the-nose
as parody or invective (“make an avant sound-design tune that drops into a
chamber of grimy vox”, “listen to these cunts waffle on about branding
themselves”).
But – and here’s where midlife-crisis
comes in – much of the time the target of the tongue lashing is Hicks
himself. “Anything With a Pulse”
self-berates with cries of “you’re nothing nearly / there’s just nothing coming
through” that suggest a battle with creative block, and it’s followed by “Somebody
Wake Up Hicks” whose title makes it
clear that the “you” in the previous song was really “me”. Defying his own
sense of abject futility - “there’s thousands of LPs out there like this” goes
one line –this album froths over with a last-stand surge and splurge of
creativity. And, a vague affinity with Sleaford Mods aside, there’s really
nothing else out there in modern music that resembles the Baron’s particular
blend of sound and spiel.
Themes of deterioration, self-doubt, and
declining powers pervade, even as the sounds and beats rattle and ping
ferociously. “Blong” features a child-voice jeering “Dad is a dick”. “Insane Note” has a line about being “persona
non grata” and a grim, sinking-feeling chant “you know that / I know that,”
while its title could be read as one step further along from the “sick note”
that gets you off school or work. “Percussive SuMMer” is a piss-stream of
consciousness spraying into a latrine of sound: the lyric reads like a
real-time vignette of Hicks musing to himself in a local tavern, supping a pint,
roaming through random memories and rejoicing that a deferred jury summons will
allow him a few days to make some tunes.
“KFC’s Toilets” might be an answer record to Burial’s “In McDonalds.”
The little kid’s voice – presumably Hicks Jnr - reappears on “Aldi Bin Bag” chanting
something indecipherable (“Arseland, oh yeah”?).
All the verbal bile and brackish sound
roil towards a clammy climax on “Only For Fun Game,” the penultimate track.
Framed with voice-shivers that lurch upwards in pitch, it’s a lament for a life
wasted onscreen. “There’s a day out there I really should get to,” goes the
chorus. “A life under sky that’s vented and Lenten…. These are the days you can’t get back/ the
melted clocks on Dali’s back.” After a flurry of lyric-shards ranging from
abstract to uproarious - “turned on by
budget sportwear”, “senile stepovers”, “reduce the risk of a fall while
bathing,” “no notifications are good
notifications,” “everyone’s over-compensating for a Tavares deficiency” – Hicks signs off with “this is a gentle
piss-take”. It’s the last decipherable utterance on the album – the closing
track “Back in the US(S)B” fades out with mumbled vocal sounds – and perhaps
the last words of a career.
On “MeMbrane” from 2016’s “criminally
overlooked” (a Mordant Music joke, that, but true) eMMplekz album Rook to TN34, Hicks described himself as
“mildly embittered since the turn of the century”, a reference to the very earliest
Mordant emissions. Two decades on,
hauntology remains a surprisingly bustling field, with records, books, events,
conferences, still occurring regularly. Only last month, there was the unexpected
appearance of a BBC Ideas Film titled ‘What Is Hauntology? Why Is It All AroundUs?’. But as a “news item”, it felt tardy
not topical. For there is a definite sense of this region having being mapped out long ago, the footpaths worn
bare by visitors.
Elsewhere on Rook to TN34, Hicks crooned mordantly: “Well,
I should be moving on / Singing the same old song.” Perhaps it is time to open the windows and clear away the soupy staleness with
a ventilating blast of otherness and newness.
A gust of youthful energy to chase away the ghosts for good.
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