It “makes the dimension of time audible.” This was, Mark would continue, the importance of the vinyl crackle to this music. It’s that you always will be - as far as you (and the environment in which you are trapped) are concerned. As Mark would write, Kirby’s main contribution to the late 2000s discourse surrounding hauntology has been “his understanding that the nostalgia mode has to do not with memories but with a memory disorder.” It’s not that you were the caretaker, Mr. It is a project that feels so painfully present, despite itself. Many hear every Caretaker album as a soundtrack to the ballroom in Kubrick’s The Shining but, whilst it was an inspired conceptual beginning, this project has not remained there for me. It was listening to the echoes of a contemporary culture echo around its own edges, bleeding into the virtual world I was escaping into - an empty bliss, indeed. There was nothing hauntological about it - at least in the sense that most people deploy that word. I felt like I had my finger on the pulse. There was no thinking about the past, as such. I’ve written about this once or twice before: how I spent most of the final months of 2011 - the first semester of my second year at university - in my room in Newport, South Wales, listening to An Empty Bliss Beyond This World and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica back-to-back-to-back-to-back as I crept around dungeons silently dispatching skeletons with my longbow, with the crackle and pop of vinyl perforating the Caretaker’s ballroom loops sounding more like the arrhythmic drip-drip of tearful stalactites on mossed stone floors than the spectral physicality of an imagined musical object re-recorded somewhere in Berlin.Īll three were brand new releases at that time. Many people around these parts have long associated The Caretaker with Mark Fisher’s writings but I’ve never had that immediate association.
0 kommentar(er)
