Take Care

The Caretaker

Everywhere at the End of Time

2019

History Always Favours The Winners

(part of Resident Advisor's 2000-2025 Best Albums) 

Memories are ghosts inside your mind; samples are ghosts extracted from records and trapped in forever loops. Starting from these premises, The Caretaker takes snippets of maudlin balladry from pre-World War II crooners like Al Bowlly and subjects them to escalating levels of erosion, simulating the stages of dementia. These nostalgic wisps of decaying music gradually disintegrate until all that's left is a howling dust bowl where there once was a self. Conceptually immaculate, consummately executed and emotionally devastating, Everywhere at the End of Time is the ultimate work of hauntological electronic sound art. 

– Simon Reynolds

The Caretaker

Everywhere at the end of time

Everywhere, an empty bliss

Baron Mordant

Mark of the Mould

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.

JAMES KIRBY: V/VM AND  THE CARETAKER.

"It's very Northern British, very working class," says James Kirby, about the sample-based music he made in Stockport during the late Nineties using the name V/Vm. "A lot of the material on those albums reminds me of being at a horrific family 40th birthday party where all of a sudden fights erupt because somebody owes somebody else cash or looked at their girlfriend in the wrong way.  V/Vm is heard through drunken lager ears for sure."

The arc of Kirby's sampladelic career stretches from Plunderphonics/KLF-style vandalizing of mainstream pop through to some of the most consummate hauntological music made this side of Ghost Box.  Early V/Vm releases like AuralOffalWaffle and The V/Vm Christmas Pudding seemed driven by a weird ecological recycling impulse, creating "new" music by digitally mutilating the records that nobody wanted anymore: chart-busting but now unsellable crap by middle of the road entertainers like Russ Abbott and Shakin' Stevens.  Like John Oswald, Kirby focused on single artists and single tracks, rather than sampling and combining bits and bobs from all over. Technology had advanced by the late Nineties to the point where using some cracked software, he could feed whole tracks into the machine and subject the song/performer to cruel and unusual punishment.  Indeed Kirby uses the term "butchering" : "It was all an experiment, to hack up what was considered the offal, the forgotten embarrassing output of the music industry."

But there was already a proto-hauntological aspect to V/Vm, later to flower with his alter-ego The Caretaker. Kirby was tomb-raiding pop's cemetery, defiling the corpses. He was  "bringing dead pieces of audio back to life " as zombies condemned to some twilight zone version of the cabaret circuit, where they sang their greatest (s)hit night after night with clumps of pop-flesh falling off their bodies.  Another pre-echo of Ghost Box, et al was V/Vm's focus on strictly British sources:  the kind of massive-in-the-UK novelty singles and M.O.R. that never crossed over to America or Europe. Our unique national crud: the British equivalent to schlager, Germany's light entertainment and variety show fare. 

Eventually Kirby wearied of spattering the post-rave electronic scene with V/Vm matter and shifted in a more atmospheric, pensive direction. The Caretaker's  Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom (1999) drew inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, in which Jack Nicholson plays a hotel caretaker who succumbs to the supernatural malaise hanging over the place and ultimately reenacts the murders committed by an earlier caretaker, who went insane and butchered his family.  Specifically, it was the "ballroom scenes which play out in Jack's head" that inspired the album and track titles like "Thronged With Ghosts". "He is having some kind of emotional breakdown and  walks into the empty ballroom and then, right there in his own mind, the empty ballroom is full again and music is playing. "  The project's main musical source was as British as V/Vm's raw material but from a couple of generations earlier: pre-World War Two British popular song and specifically the "tragic figure" of Al Bowlly. "He was the golden voice of his generation but he was killed by a parachute mine outside his London home. Bowlly always sang as if haunted, his voice is otherworldly.  It's very strange music from this time between the two World Wars: optimistic but also very much about loss and longing, ghosts and torment.  It seems haunted by the spirits of those who went to the trenches and never returned."

The "haunted ballroom" trilogy peaked with A Stairway to the Stars, which included the resonantly titled song "We Cannot Escape The Past".  Kirby then shifted his focus to memory itself, and specifically memory disorders. Theoretically pure anterograde amnesia was about the absolute horror of escaping the past altogether. Disorienting in its scale and abstraction, this six-CD work was an attempt to imagine what it would be like to suffer from a rare form of amnesia in which sufferers are incapable of forming short-term memories and exist in a depersonalized void.  Deleted scenes/forgotten dreams and Persistent Repetition of Phrases explored similar zones of queasy amorphousness. 

Collective memory was the subject of the Death of Rave project, inspired by Kirby's participation in the Manchester club scene of the late Eighties and early Nineties. "The energy in clubs at this time was amazing. Nobody knew what to expect next." But by the middle of the 2000s, Kirby felt that when he visited dance clubs "the energy and adventure seemed completely lost. I just wanted to reflect that. I took old rave tracks and stripped them down, removing all their life."  Spectral echoes of familiar rush-inducing riffs and anthemic refrains intermittently flicker through the dense smog of sound, but "the beat and drive have gone." Recalling the surge years of rave between 1988-1996, Kirby says "Everyone thought everything was possible on those long nights. The world was ours.  Now I think this generation is very disillusioned. They saw a glimpse of light on the dancefloors but that light has gone out and the future seems grim and predictable."

Kirby's most recent work is the first music he's released under his own name, James Leyland Kirby. Sadly, The Future Is Not What It Was is a three-CD opus mingling his signature style of gaseous decayed sounds with Harold Budd/Erik Satie style piano (the first time that his own physical self, as a player of an instrument rather than a programmer, has been present in his music). "Maybe it was a year 2000 thing," Kirby mused in one interview. "2000 was always the future for us. We expected something significant from that year. When it came it was just the same as it ever was except we had no 2000 to look forward to anymore.  It could be a psychological post-millenial hangover for us all which will take some time to pass for this generation."