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2LP
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HAFTW 007LP
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2019 restock, last copies... Originally released in 2009. The third of the three 2LP editions in James Leyland Kirby's When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die series. The synthetic luster of Memories Live Longer Than Dreams already appeared cracked and damaged the first time around, and in 2017 its phosphorescent glow remains a beacon of shelter for contemplation and secluded mind-drift, offering a surreal, nostalgic night-light to the gloomy and confused world it diagnosed and predicted nearly ten years ago. Written during James Leyland Kirby's forlorn purgatorial years spent in Berlin during the period which shaped the modern world as we know it -- a time when global financial institutions collapsed, YouTube's all-encompassing archive was beginning to spill over, and Facebook and Twitter were starting to enmesh the entire planet -- this final instalment finds Kirby channeling osmotically absorbed visions of the future, as spelt out by Vangelis, Lynch and Badalamenti, Eno, and Kirby's own The Caretaker alter ego, into a waking dream sequence of quietly anguished sound poems for the contemporary echo chamber, relinquishing a traversal of the hive mind's private fears and shared nightmares rendered in ghostly scrolls of synth noise and sweepingly emotive cinematic gestures. It effectively diagnoses a sort of cultural malaise that was perhaps embryonic in 2009, as the golden age of dance/pop form and optimism which resulted in radical acts such as V/Vm and the Ccru was now left shimmering in the rearview, with the momentous energy of its accumulated, independent scenes being diffused into institutions or calcifying into hyper commercialism, leaving little or no room for ambiguity, irony or subversively socialist thought within its increasingly binary wake; a wake which has now bifurcated into extreme left and right-leaning politics with a gulf of misunderstanding in between. Keening and reeling away his own thoughts on the matter in that inter-zone of negative space, Kirby draws on ever tightening coils of cultural feedback loops and the infidelity of memory to parse, process, and secrete a slow, plasmic ooze of melancholic musical form that perhaps best represents the feelings of our age; of our shared future occluded by an inglorious or illusive past that promised much, yet never paid up.
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2LP
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HAFTW 006LP
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2019 restock, last copies. Originally released in 2009. The second part of Leyland Kirby's uniquely prescient dark ambient masterstroke, Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was (2009) finds the listener returning to Kirby's draughty corridors of processed 78s and midnight keyboard meditations is a sublime, haunting experience like no other. The listener can read his melancholic diagnosis of capitalist malaise, deferred futurism and thwarted social utopianism as a genuinely uncanny foresight of what has played out in contemporary society, in an age when Facebook and Twitter have become an all-encompassing filter for daily life and effectively assuaged the rich analog ambiguity of collectivism in favor of cold, hard, binary politics and reflexive, unthinking emotional responses. Especially in the wake of Mark Fisher's tragic passing earlier in 2017, Kirby's hauntological sentiments, embedded quite literally in titles such as "When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart", and figuratively perfused through its stark negative space, now feel to resonate stronger than ever; using shared echoes of the hive mind such as classic film scores from Vangelis and Lynch/Badalmenti -- both quite literally omnipresent in imminent sequels right now -- as cues for sorrowful elegies and meditations which aesthetically resonate as much with Deathprod's liminal scapes, as a sort of mildewed modern classical flocking to Satie's tasteful ambient wallpaper. Yet it's not all doom and gloom. There's a sense of underlying sense of resilience, of resistance to Kirby's hushed, ribboning expressions which flows with a considerate pathos and open-ended emotional curiosity which belies the narcissistic reaffirmations of social media's echo chambers and dialectic cul-de-sacs, quietly striving to wrench something beautiful and affective from the clutches of a manipulative mainstream.
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12"
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HAFTW 014LP
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Limited restock, last copies... James Leyland Kirby returns with an uncompromising, poetic and unexpected fourth and final installment in his long-dormant Intrigue & Stuff series, dispatched from his new base in Krakow for his own History Always Favours The Winners label. Since we last heard from the provocateur, he's issued brilliant albums as The Caretaker and The Stranger, a cracking 12" for his formative heroes R&S/Apollo, and marked his 40th birthday with a 40-track album of piano pieces... yet we can't help but feel that he's saved some of his most deliriously spannered and heartbreakingly personal intimations for this new LP. Opening with a proper shock-out modeling mutant fractals and strobing loops that are almost junglist in tempo and structure on "Locked into Situations," the spirit-crushed and sozzled boogie-sludge of "Derelict Bar" follows and marks out territory in a dark, dank corner. Over on the B-side, he yields the intoxicating whiskey fume shimmer and viscous roil of "The Tar Sands," plus a strange percussive piece that sounds like lonely seamen performing drum rituals in a ship's hull, and concludes with the somnolent symphony of spectral siren chorales, synth brass and claggy bass in "Wanting an Absolute Beyond." We'll never quite know the intentions behind these tracks, but we can tell you they function equally as escape pods and ideal drinking soundtracks. Imbibe deeply and responsibly.
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CD
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HAFTW 010CD
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James Leyland Kirby is a prolific artist with a remarkably long and varied career working inside, outside and beyond the electronic underground. From his roots as one-half of renowned audio pranksters and sonic agitators V/VM, to his critically-acclaimed work as The Caretaker and, most recently, Leyland Kirby -- he's always attracted the attention of an often bewildered audience, although his stature and position as serious auteur has somehow grown exponentially with every year that has gone by since his beginnings in rainy Edgeley back in the mid-'90s. Eager To Tear Apart The Stars is his follow-up proper to the now-classic Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was trilogy of LPs, which were released in 2009 to widespread critical acclaim. Since then, he's quietly ushered in the demented white label vinyl series Intrigue & Stuff, and released another album as The Caretaker, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. Eager To Tear Apart The Stars echoes and refracts the maverick solo synth classics of Roedelius and Harold Budd, but with a temporal warping and sense of decayed decadence individual to Kirby's oeuvre. There's an ostensible sadness to these six pieces, but of a life-affirming and subtly ambiguous kind, evoking almost indecipherably mixed emotions of a rare and enigmatic variety which continue to haunt long after the record has come to a close. The album artwork features another specially-commissioned painting by Ivan Seal. Housed in a digipak CD. Mastered and cut at Berlin's Dubplates & Mastering.
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2LP
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HAFTW 001LP
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2019 restock, last copies... Originally released in 2009. It's a prescient hauntological elegy somewhere between Vangelis' Bladerunner OST (1982), Lynch and Badalamenti's Twin Peaks score, Erik Satie's solo Piano works, William Basinski's gradual tape decompositions, and James Ferraro's washed out visions. Back in 2009, James Leyland Kirby explained: "Here we stand, twenty years on from the first CD, and our optimism has been gradually eroded away collectively. 'Tomorrows World' never came. We are lost and isolated, many of us living our lives through social networks as we try to make sense of it all, becoming voyeurs not active participants. Documenting everything. No Mystery. Everything laid bare for all to see." A decade later, it could hardly have been more prescient. It's with this pessimistic sense of being that Kirby constructed these incredible pieces, creating a sequence of music designed to overwhelm and absorb, affecting our sense of time and place by tracing and retracing musical steps into a blur, re-using the same motifs with incremental differences, trapped in our own feedback loops of lost emotion. On this long double album, James Leyland Kirby once again acts as a spiritual bridge, holding fast against the perceived current of time and culture in order to afford a slow, lingering gaze on its ambiguous, ever-shifting ripples and eddies. Like staring at a body of gently moving water, the effect is strangely soothing and meditative, encouraging immersed reflection and dilated focus...
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3CD
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HAFTW 001CD
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These pieces are the first released by The Caretaker's James Kirby under his own name and are the result of an intense period of production aimed at encapsulating a deep feeling of loss and alienation. What started as a concept for a simple single album soon turned into a double-album, then into a double double-album before finally ending up as a triple-double- vinyl album and triple CD soundtrack. As James Leyland Kirby himself describes it: "Here we stand, 20 years on from the first CD, and our optimism has gradually been eroded away collectively. "Tomorrow's World" never came. We are lost and isolated, many of us living our lives through social networks as we try to make sense of it all, becoming voyeurs, not active participants. Documenting everything. No mystery. Everything laid bare for all to see." Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was is the soundtrack to a world in decline, the heroism of modern life, a document of loss, an essay in gloom, delivered with a brutally honest appreciation of the pitiful truth. Time-worn, ambient drone-hauntology.
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