Listening to this download from James Kirby. Lp already ordered. This is his first soundtrack....
Boomkat words:
James Leyland Kirby returns with a long-in-the-making soundtrack to acclaimed filmmaker Grant Gee's documentary about German writer WG Sebald. 'Patience (After Sebald)' is a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss - an exploration of the work and influence of German writer WG Sebald (1944-2001), told via a long walk through coastal East Anglia tracking his most famous book 'The Rings Of Saturn'. Much like The Caretaker's oeuvre, Sebald's works are particularly focused on themes of memory, both personal and collective, making Kirby the ideal candidate for this score. Grant tasked him with soundtracking responsibilities, but rather than thrift shop shellac, the source material for 'Patience' was sourced from Franz Schubert's 1927 piece 'Winterreise' and subjected to his perplexing processes, smudging and rubbing isolated fragments into a dust-caked haze of plangent keys, strangely resolved loops and de-pitched vocals which recede from view as eerily as they appear. The album is adorned with another specially commissioned painting by Ivan Seal.
At long last, having originally surfaced on CD via the Install label, this genre-defining masterpiece gets a long overdue digital release. Although this album invites aesthetic comparisons to works by the likes of Philip Jeck, William Basinski and Janek Schaefer - draped as it is in an obfuscating, soupy crackle - there's a very specific conceptual agenda at work here. Part of 'Persistent Repetition Of Phrases' success comes from the attention it pays to the function of 'the loop', not only as a narrative ordering system in modern music, but as a means by which the brain itself recalls and interprets information; it's as old as recorded sound itself, but in this context the repetition of small shards of auditory information becomes an elegy to fading memory and the worn-out synapses of old age. The track titles offer signposts through Kirby's labyrinth of faulty remembrances, pointing their way towards the peculiarities dictating the manner by which the mind stores and attempts to recover information: 'Lacunar Amnesia' references a condition that leaves a specific event absent from the sufferer's memory, and Kirby's music sounds suitably stuck on a prelude to something that never happens. Bathed in gusts of crackle, the piece gets stuck on what might be a start of something, but we never get to hear what. Many of the pieces refer to different ways the memory might find itself caught in a holding pattern: 'Von Restorff Effect', 'Rosy Retrospection' and the title track itself are all suggestive of re-living a single event or point in time - here, both music and memory are united by the notion of 'glitch', whereby a fault or fissure causes the replaying of the same pocket of data over and over again, but what distinguishes Kirby from so many other musicians operating within the field of loops and broken recordings is the unnerving, ghostly sentimentality that courses through this process. 'Long Term (remote)' is particularly explicit in its reaching back through the first half of the 20th century, exhuming snatches of music hall romance, now warped into a sinister new form by the erosions of time. It's like watching John Carpenter's The Fog only to find that instead of vengeful phantoms emerging from the mist, it's The Glenn Miller Band. More eerie still is the detachment from authorship endemic to this sound - at no point do you really sense the presence of a composer's hand; this album just... is. A remarkable thing that only seems to have improved with age, Persistent Repetition Of Phrases wears and fades just as the memory does.
Last edited by cybot on Fri Jan 13, 2012 10:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Time I started going back to my EG vinyl collection or what I jokingly call my iClick collection :)
Anyway I'll try and devote this week to all things Eno, Hassell, Budd etc etc starting with this dark exploration from 1982...
