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V/Vm is a project that English electronic musician James Kirby started in the
1990s to modify well-known songs to turn them into parodies. He made dozens
of such recordings.
Kirby's more serious project is Caretaker, that operates at the border
of sampling (ancient pop and dance standards), glitch electronica and ambient music.
This one too produced an endless series of recordings, but instead of parodies
these sounded like post-modernist revisions of stereotypes that were full
of meaning; evocative and nostalgic but also intellectually challenging.
Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom (V/Vm Test Records, 1999),
A Stairway To The Stars (V/Vm Test Records, 2001), perhaps the best one,
and We'll All Go Riding On A Rainbow (V/Vm Test Records, 2003)
sounded like concept albums, and with a high-brow concept actually.
At the same time, the general concept of music "not to be listened to" was
reminiscent of the original manifesto of
Brian Eno's ambient music.
A Stairway To The Stars opens with the gloomy whirlwind of murmurs of
We Cannot Escape The Past, that sounds like a biblical omen.
It then journeys through vignettes that are
ethereal and otherworldly (Emptiness),
gothic industrial (Consigned To A Yesterday),
abstract and shapeless (Masquerade Ball),
menacing and dissonant (Malign Forces Of The Occult),
angelic and timeless (Friends Past Re-united),
brooding electronic muzak (Date With An Angel),
psychedelic distortion (Home),
etc.
The seven-minute closer, A Stairway To The Stars, provided a manual
of instructions on how to create Caretaker-like music as it mauls and mutates
a carnival-like melody to become an anguished metaphysical drone.
This album marked a pinnacle of Kirby's art, as there was little left of
the original sources and mostly one heard a solemn symphony of the collective
subconscious.
This was basically highly emotional musique concrete, whose
outcome was actually often akin to classical music.
The massive Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia (V/Vm Test Records, 2005) collected 70 more imitations.
After
Additional Amnesiac Memories (V/Vm Test Records, 2006) and
Deleted Scenes Forgotten Dreams (V/Vm Test Records, 2007), the Caretaker
had refined its art to an almost baroque degree.
Persistent Repetition Of Phrases (V/Vm Test Records, 2008), wrapped in
waves of static noise, signaled an even more existential
(Rosy Retrospection, one of his best recreations of the ballroom of the Titanic)
and cosmic (Poor Enunciation)
mission,
next to sophisticated William Basinski-esque games (Persistent Repetition Of Phrases),
to abstract soundscapes (Past Life Regression) and to almost
musique concrete (Von Restorff Effect).
Recollections From Old London Town (V/Vm Test Records, 2009)
Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (History Always Favours the Winners, 2011)
sounds deliberately like a collage of vintage jazz records.
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