V/Vm and Caretaker

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, starting with the EP Up-Link Data Transmissions (1996) and the four EPs Machine Components (1999), for example: Masters of the Absurd (2000), Sick-Love (2000), The Green Door (2000), One Amazing Day (2001), Puff Pastry Steak & Kidney Pie (2001), Sometimes, Good Things Happen (2002), the EP The Queen Mother Is Dead Boys and It's So Lonely on a Mechanical Limb (2002), Dimitri Shostakovich "The Missing Symphony" (2003), Stigma (2004), the EP I Wanna Fuck Miss Nicky Trax (2005), Sabam (2006), the EP Rough Sex (2006), and White Death (2006). The 111-song The Death of Rave (2006) debuted Kirby's "V/Vm365 project", a project to provide free downloadable song for each day of the year, for a grand total of 52 hours of music. There Was a Fish In the Percolator (2008) is a sample-based tribute to a TV show.

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) is a collage of vintage dance jazz records.

Leyland Kirby used his own name for the much more musical triple-disc Sadly the Future Is No Longer What It Was (History Always Favours the Winners, 2009), originally, a three-volume six-LP box-set (two LPs in each volume). This time Kirby composed ambient music from snippets of old 78RPM records. 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.

Eager To Tear Apart The Stars (History Always Favors The Winners, 2011) is basically its continuation and contains one of the most haunting composition in that vein, They Are All Dead, There Are No Skip At All.

The four-LP Intrigue & Stuff (History Always Favours The Winners, 2011), credited again to Kilby in person, expanded the style of those works to psychedelic electronica (Video 2000) while retaining the principles of Caretaker's "hauntological" music.

Patience (History Always Favors The Winners, 2012), conceived as the soundtrack to a documentary on German writer Sebald, was constructed from 78 RPM records of Franz Schubert's lieder.

After a ten-year hiatus, Kirby resurrected the V/Vm moniker for Between Nothingness & Eternity (2016), that "reversed engineered" Tim Hecker's album Love Streams, and for the EP Brabant Schrobbeler (2017), old compositions remixed by Miles of Demdike Stare.

Caretaker, meanwhile, launched the project Everywhere at the End of Time (2016), that eventually consisted of six albums in 4 years, a sequence meant to simulate the onset of dementia, starting with an album of blissful nostalgic sample-based songs and ending with white noise, for a total of 50 compositions and over six hours. For example, Stage 4 (2018) contains the 44-minute Post Awareness Confusions and Stage 5 (2018) contains the 45-minute Advanced Plaque Entanglements and especially the 21-minute Synapse Retrogenesis. Stage 6 (2019) contains A Confusion so Thick you Forget Forgetting (21:52), A Brutal Bliss Beyond this Empty Defeat (21:36), Long Decline is Over (21:09), and Place in the World Fades Away (21:19). As a depressing bonus, Everywhere an Empty Bliss (2019) is a compilation of outtakes from the six-part project, mainly about late-stage dementia. Take Care It's a Desert Out There (2019) is a droning requiem in memory of writer Mark Fisher, who died in 2017.