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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.
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(Translation by/ Tradotto da Claudio Vespignani)
V/vm e' il
progetto che il musicista elettronico inglese Leyland Kirby avvio' a meta' anni
90 per storpiare canzoni estremamente popolari fino a tramutarle in vere e
proprie parodie. In questo stile realizzo' una moltitudine di dischi.
Il suo progetto
serio e' The Caretaker, con cui opera ai confini del sampling (pop e standard
da ballo anni '20/30), elettronica glitch e ambient. Anche con questa sigla ha
prodotto una serie infinita di registrazioni, ma anziche' parodie ha realizzato
revisioni post-moderne di stereotipi ricchissime di significati, evocative,
nostalgiche e intellettualmente stimolanti. Selected memories from the
haunted ballroom (V/vm test records, 1999), A stairway to the stars (V/vm
test records, 2001), forse il migliore di tutti, e We'll all go riding on a
rainbow (V/vm test records, 2003), suonano come dei concept album, ma con
concetti altamente intellettuali. Al contempo, la teoria di musica "da non
essere ascoltata" riportava al manifesto originale della musica ambient di
Brian Eno.
A stairway to
the stars si apre col
cupo vortice di mormorii di We cannot escape the past, che suona come un
presagio biblico, dopodiche' passa attraverso vignette eteree ed ultraterrene (Emptiness),
gotico industriali (Consigned to a yesterday), astratte ed informi (Masquerade
Ball), minacciose e dissonanti (Malign forces of the occult), angeliche
ed eterne (Friends Last re-united), sottofondi elettronici meditabondi (Date
with an angel), distorsioni psichedeliche (Home).
In chiusura, i
sette minuti di A stairway to the stars forniscono un manuale di
istruzioni su come creare musica da Caretaker, tramite la mutazione di una
melodia carnevalesca in un angoscioso, metafisico ronzio. L'album segna un
picco dell'arte di Kirby, dato che era rimasto ben poco delle fonti originarie
e ciò che si ode nel complesso e' una solenne sinfonia del subconscio
collettivo. Si tratta sostanzialmente di musica concreta ad alto tasso emotivo,
il cui risultato finale si avvicina sul serio alla musica classica.
Il gigantesco Theorerically
pure anterograde amnesia (V/vm test records, 2005), raccoglie altre 70
variazioni sul tema.
Dopo Addictional
amnesiac memories (V/vm test records, 2006) e Deleted scenes / Forgotten
dreams (V/vm test records, 2007), Caretaker ha elevato la propria arte ad
un livello quasi barocco.
Persistent
repetition of phrases (V/vm
test records, 2008), avvolto in ondate di rumore statico, rivela una missione
ancor più esistenziale (Rosy retrospection, una delle sue migliori messe
in scena della sala da ballo del Titanic) e cosmica (Poor enunciation), prossima
alle trame sofisticate di William Basinski (Persistent repetition of
phrases), a scenari astratti (Past life regression) e alla musica
concreta (Von Restorff effect).
Recollections
from old London town (V/vm
test records 2009).
An empty bliss
beyond this world (History
always favours the winners, 2011) e' un collage intenzionale di vecchi dischi
jazz da ballo.
Kirby ha usato il
proprio nome per il ben più musicale triplo Sadly, the future is no longer
what it was (2009 History always favours the winners), originalmente un
cofanetto di tre doppi vinili. Per l'occasione Kirby ha composto musica ambient
partendo da frammenti di vecchi 78 giri. La musica e' interamente strumentale,
ma raramente i titoli hanno avuto così tanto significato ed infatti sono molto
più poetici delle solite e trite liriche della musica popolare.
Il primo volume
e' When we parted, my heart wanted to die (76:40). La title-track unisce
un lamento pianistico a rumori stradali per creare un adagio malinconico che
rappresenta il momento più toccante dell'intero lotto. The sound of music
vanishing e' un vortice di suoni deformi intersecato da drones rapidi e
melodrammatici, che alla fine viene risucchiato da una serie di sbuffi
meccanici. The beauty of the impending tragedy of my existence e' una
serie snervante e ricca di suspense di ronzii metallici e glitches ronfanti. Il
turbolento oceano di And as I sat beside you I felt the great sadness that
day e' una figura melodica di grande enfasi per organo che rappresenta un
ode estatica agli aspetti titanici della condizione umana. La dolce ninna-nanna
al rallentatore di Tonight is the last night of the world suona come un
requiem per tutti gli esseri viventi. I venti minuti di To the place between
twilight and dawn si basano su un dialogo destrutturato fra fraseggi di
piano jazz, sibili elettronici e voci che sembrano soccombere sotto il peso di
un'impressionante forza umana invisibile, ma ben presente.
Il secondo
volume, Sadly, the future is no longer what it was (78.57) tenta
vanamente di ripetere la magia del primo con la tenue, pianistica When did
our dreams and future drift apart so far?. Campane e flauto sciamanico
spingono l'ambient di Not even nostalgia is as good as it used to be verso
territori new age fin troppo conosciuti. Nei 20 minuti della title-track Kirby
indugia troppo su un tema morriconiano alla ricerca del climax emotivo ma che
si ripiega eccessivamente su se stesso. Così, la prima metà del secondo volume
e' una mediocre imitazione del primo.
Tuttavia, Kirby
ha ancora sufficiente ispirazione per creare la fosca muraglia di glitches di Stay
light, there is a rainbow coming, che schiude lentamente un coro e
movimenti periferici in abbondanza, così come la serenata in movimento di I've
hummed this tune to all the girls I've known, altro tema morriconiano ma
questa volta dai toni più solenni e rilanciato da un motivo d'archi in
sottofondo. La delicata e nostalgica Not as she is now but as she appears in
my dreams e' il tipico prototipo della ballad pianistica di Kirby; le note
scorrono lentamente ed il timbro non e' particolarmente accattivante, in modo
da enfatizzare i silenzi fra di esse.
Memories live
longer than dreams (79:58),
terzo volume, recupera parte della poesia che si era persa nel secondo, e lo fa
affidandosi maggiormente all'eterno stile di Kirby al piano. Il tema
sentimentale di music box della title-track si perde in un vento lugubre, e la
distanza fra le note crea una deformazione temporale. Note che si fanno persino
più spettrali in Don't sleep, I am not what I seem, I am a very quiet storm,
immerse in un mormorio tenue che oscilla come un onda oceanica.
Il caos
industriale di dissonanze nucleari bruscamente rilasciato da A longing to be
absorbed for a while into a different and beautiful world segna un salutare
cambio d'umore; una sinfonia stra-carica di musica concreta che termina fra
rombi subsonici e segnali radio criptici. Anche i 17 minuti di Stralauer
peninsula rappresentano una nuova modalità espressiva per Kirby,
l'equivalente di un acquarello impressionistico. La melodia e' fornita da
fluttuazioni acquatiche torbide, rievocanti a tratti i vocalizzi di una
cantante giapponese. Altri deboli ronzii e glitches segnano il ritorno alla
ballad pianistica con We all won that day, sunshine, che sfodera un
altro dei suoi temi cinematici sopra una sinistra e gorgogliante radiazione di
sottofondo. And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the
cities of glory intona sorprendentemente un vecchio country a cui si unisce
un orchestra che lo tramuta in un inno celestiale.
Presi nel
complesso, i tre dischi rappresentano uno degli sforzi più monumentali di
ridefinire la musica come arte del riciclaggio.
Eager to tear
apart the stars (History
always favours the winners, 2011), e' sostanzialmente un suo breve proseguio e
vanta una delle composizioni più ossessive in questa vena, They are all
Dead, there are no skip at all.
I 4 volumi della
serie Intrigue & Stuff (History always favours the winners, 2011),
ancora accreditati a Kirby, ampliano lo spettro di tali lavori all'elettronica
psichedelica (Video 2000), pur conservando i principi base della musica hauntologica
di Caretaker.
Patience (History always favours the winners,
2012), di Caretaker, concepita come colonna sonora di un documentario sullo
scrittore tedesco Sebald, e' costruita partendo dai 78 giri delle romanze di
Franz Schubert.
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