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Berlin-resident English composer
Leyland Kirby,
also active as Caretaker and V/VM,
composed ambient music from snippets of old 78RPM records on the
three-volume six-LP box-set (two LPs in each volume) titled
Sadly The Future Is No Longer What It Was (History Always Favours The Winners, 2009).
The music is purely instrumental, but rarely have titles meant so much, and, in
fact, been more poetic than the usually trite lyrics of popular music.
The first volume was
When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die (76:40). Its title-track recycles
plaintive piano and street noise into a melancholy adagio, the most touching
moment of the set.
The Sound Of Music Vanishing is a whirlwind of shapeless sounds
intersected by brief melodramatic drones that are eventually swallowed up
by a puffing machine.
The Beauty Of The Impending Tragedy Of My Existence is an unnerving,
suspense-filled concerto for metallic drones and snore-like glitches.
The turbulent ocean of
And As I Sat Beside You I Felt The Great Sadness That Day emits
an anthemic organ-like melodic figure, an ecstatic ode to the
titanic aspect of the human condition.
The gentle slow-motion lullaby of Tonight Is The Last Night Of The World sounds like a requiem for all living beings.
The 20-minute To The Place Between The Twilight And The Dawn is a more
unstructured dialogue between jazzy piano, electronic hisses and distant voices
that seems to die under the weight of an invisible but palpable superhuman force.
The second volume,
Sadly The Future Is No Longer What It Was (78:57) tries in vain to
emulate the magic of
When We Parted with the tenuous piano sonata of
When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart?.
A shamanic flute and bells push the ambient drift of Not Even Nostalgia Is As Good As It Used To Be into dejavu new-age territory.
The 20-minute title-track relies too much on a Morricone-like leitmotif that
simply repeats itself as if looking for the right way to make an emotional dent
and ultimately overstays its welcome.
Hence the first half of the sophomore album is a mediocre imitation of the first
one. However, Kirby still has enough inspiration to deliver the blurred wall of
glitches of Stay Light There Is A Rainbow A Coming, slowly revealing
a choir and a wealth of peripheral movements, as well as the (finally) moving
serenade of
I've Hummed This Tune To All The Girls I've Known, another Morricone-like
theme but this time more solemn in tone and rivaled by a secondary string-like
theme.
The tender and nostalgic
Not As She Is Now But As She Appears In My Dreams
is typical of Kirby's unique concept of a piano sonata: the notes of the piano
flow slowly, and their timbre is not particularly pretty, thus emphasizing
the silence in between.
Memories Live Longer Than Dreams (79:58), the third volume,
recovers some of the poetry that was lost in the second one, and it does so
by relying more on Kirby's timeless style of piano sonata.
Memories Live Longer Than Dreams is a sentimental music-box refrain
lost in lugubrious wind, the distance causing a time warp between the notes.
The even more ghostly piano notes of
Don't Sleep I Am Not What I Seem I'm A Very Quiet Storm are immersed
in a soft murmur that oscillates like ocean waves.
The pandemonium of industrial and nuclear dissonance abruptly unleashed by
A Longing To Be Absorbed For A While Into A Different And Beautiful World
is a welcome shift of mood: a hyper-charged symphony of musique concrete
that ends in subsonic rumbles and cryptic radio signals.
The 17-minute Stralauer Peninsula too represents a new form in Kirby's
ouvre: the equivalent of an impressionistic watercolor. Some murky watery
fluctuations play the melody, sometimes sounding like a female Japanese singer,
while some other feeble droning and glitchy elements fill the
We All Won That Day Sunshine returns to the piano sonata form, slowly
hammering one of his cinematic themes over a sinister, burbling background
radiation;
and
And At Dawn Armed With Glowing Patience We Will Enter The Cities Of Glory
surprisingly intones an old-fashioned country melody that an orchestra joins
and turns into a celestial hymn.
Taken together the three album represent one of the most monumental efforts
to redefine music as an art of recycling.
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