The Caretaker

Jon Fletcher described the sound as "'instantly recognisable musical identity of British tea-room pop (dance-band and swing music from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s) plugged into a multitude of effects to create a Proustian Replicant inverse. It's a stranger's past relocated within your own memories, a re-imagined history from an alien past. The mannered romantic swing of a bygone era is rendered beguilingly uncanny. These first releases flitted from bursts of noise (September 1939) to gaseous ambience (We Cannot Escape The Past) to subtly-soaked moments of outright beauty (Stardust). Despite the uncanny affect and despite the eeriness, there is something warmly seductive about this debut triptych. Kubrick’s film, like the best horror, still injects a thrill and there a remnant of comfort in being haunted, a strange warmth. These early forays have the allure you find in childhood ghost stories.

By the time of the third release though, it was hard to imagine what more could be done with the project.

Never less than beautiful, it was just hard to conceive of actually needing any more of it.'"

Kirby has always been driven by innovation and frustration with his own past, saying "I can’t carry on for another ten years looping old 1920s music" and seeking to make a final break, and expressing a quixotic desire to frustrate fans of his earlier work, describing them as "a certain type of listener who will be buying this for a particular type of sound".

Kirby's score for the film uses a 1927 record of Franz Schubert's piano-and-voice-only composition Winterreise (1828) as its main audio source.

It also differs from other works of the project where hissing sounds are used instead of crackles, the loops are shorter in lengths, and the non-musical aspects of each track (the hiss sounds) serve as the foreground of the mix.

After another break, the Caretaker returned with his final project, intended as an end to the Caretaker persona.

He conceived of six interlinked releases, which would explore the progression of dementia stage by stage to its end.

Later stages reprise loops and motifs from both earlier albums in the series, and from throughout the Caretaker's back catalogue.

In order to immerse listeners, Kirby released each album 6 months apart.

His first several releases comprised treated and manipulated samples of 1930s ballroom pop recordings.

Most of his album covers were painted by one of his friends, Ivan Seal.

The Caretaker's works have received critical acclaim in publications such as The Wire, The New York Times, and BBC Music.

The Caretaker was a long-running project by English ambient musician James Leyland Kirby (born 9 May 1974).

His work as the Caretaker is characterized as exploring memory and its gradual deterioration, nostalgia, and melancholia.

The project was inspired by the haunted ballroom scene in the 1980 film The Shining.

Simon Reynolds refers to the Caretaker's first three releases as "the haunted ballroom trilogy", spanning 1999–2003: Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom, A Stairway to the Stars, We'll All Go Riding on a Rainbow.

Everywhere at the End of Time is also influenced by technological changes since 1999, most notably advances in recording and mixing technology, and the new opportunities of sourcing music cuts online rather than scavenging in a physical record store.

Everywhere at the End of Time was released to wide critical acclaim.

Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia was released in 2005 as a series of 72 free MP3 downloads.

The release found much critical acclaim.

Reynolds identifies it as a shift in the sound, "disorienting in its scale and abstraction", with his period 2005-2008 "exploring similar zones of queasy amorphousness".

Doran also sees the album as "a change in direction for the project conceptually, as it started to explore different aspects of memory loss as the music itself became more texturally and structurally complex."

Jon Fletcher describes the release as "the labyrinthian set is a k-hole for the mind. Vague clouds of noise, barely flickering signals of life, only the starkest traces of past romanticism (no matter how poignant)- nothing to cling onto."

Mark Fisher contrasts this album with the Caretaker's previous output: "If his earlier records suggested spaces that were mildewed but still magnificent - grand hotels gone to seed, long-abandoned ballrooms - Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia invokes sites that have deteriorated into total dereliction, where every unidentified noise is pregnant with menace."

Persistent Repetition of Phrases combines overt interest in amnesia and memory distortion, with a more melodic piano-centered atmosphere, with fewer recogniseable samples than the Haunted Ballroom period: "After a few minutes you realise that something is stuck...Each song is tightly looped, a single event, chasing its own resignation. No development, no narrative, no story. Not every locked groove is entirely hopeless. Rosy retrospection fixates on an event with a sense of less-bereft nostalgia - the memory trap seemingly resting on a happy moment.".

Kirby described it as "a lot warmer and more gentle...Not all memories are necessarily bad or disturbing memories".

At the time, this album was seen as his masterpiece, with Kirby describing himself as "surprised" by the level of reception, as it was created in a "bleak" and difficult period of his life.

After 2008, the Caretaker's website announced that "work has begun on a new release for early 2010 which will shift focus completely towards the brain and brain function, recall and error".

During this time, Kirby released Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was under his own name, which was described by Pitchfork as "music of stasis that doesn't announce itself as much as it seeps."

Kirby's focus at this time was on another album, and did not plan out making another Caretaker record of this kind - the album was made because of "pure chance in action at all times.".

The critical impact of An Empty Bliss Beyond This World is explored in detail on its page.

He also completed the OST for Grant Gee's film Patience (After Sebald) (2012) in this period.

In 2017, Kirby released Take Care. It's a Desert Out There..., following the suicide of his collaborator Mark Fisher, who was suffering with depression.

It features a single track in its 48-minute runtime, with previously unreleased music by the Caretaker.

Kirby's initial intention would be to give Take Care for people attending at his Kraków Barbican performance.

However, its high demand caused him to share it on the internet.

Released in a CD, it included a message stating its proceeds would be donated to the mental health charity Mind.

Kirby's last work as the Caretaker, released alongside 2019's Stage 6, is Everywhere, an Empty Bliss, a collection of unreleased archival works.

The Caretaker describes himself as "fascinated by memory and its recall", as well as suggesting the project is "a kind of audio black comedy".