Review: The Caretaker's 'Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom'

Time Capsule: The Caretaker, Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom

Before his work became a TikTok trend during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Caretaker burst into my view thanks to one of my nightly descents into a Wiki-hole. It was Christmas Time 2016, my family’s first without my grandmother. She’d died a month earlier, just a week before Thanksgiving, from dementia, which she’d been living with for seven-ish years. I had, in my own way, been grieving her death nearly a decade before it actually came, but it wasn’t until after that I started reading about the disease that slowly stripped her for parts. You quickly learn the reality of dementia, that the findings we do have on it yield very few answers. No amount of internet scrolling can take away the truth: It’s a terminal ailment with no cure, and there’s virtually no treatment of ease for the people living with it. You cannot slow dementia down; it’s an erosion somebody lives with and somebody watches. There’s no surrender there.

By late 2016, the Caretaker had already released Stage 1 of his Everywhere at the End of Time recording, a six-part, six-hour project of degrading loops of sampled ballroom music. The idea was to portray the lifespan of dementia, from diagnosis to death. Releasing each “stage” six months apart, it took three years for Everywhere at the End of Time to arrive in full. And when it did, it was meant to be a final goodbye from James Leyland Kirby to the alias he had introduced 20 years earlier. It was an experimental and plundering success, of ballroom songs unraveled into nauseous, claustrophobic expiration. Stage 1 is the part of the record I return to now, because it is the most pleasant of the six chapters—though there is no part of Everywhere at the End of Time with a grievous splendor like “Libet’s delay,” the rosy, eerie centerpiece of An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. I listened to all six hours of Everywhere at the End of Time consecutively and I’ll never do it again.

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The song titles are meant to convey a dementia patient’s emotions, and some are far more upsetting than others, like “Aching cavern without lucidity,” “A confusion so thick you forget forgetting” and the preposterously damaging “I still feel as though I am me.” Neurological researchers were supportive of the album, calling the transition from calm to confusion a “chilling reality” and “a much welcome thing” in the world of dementia patient caretakers. At its most deconstructed, Everywhere at the End of Time remains full of empathy. It’s scary and frustrating, a fall into blistering, noisy static inexplicably othered by itself. You can’t piece it out; the dilapidation is simply too much. And yet, even in regression, there is still music. Even on her deathbed, my grandmother sang. Now, when I hear “The way ahead feels lonely,” I weep while its decaying whimsy hits me like a Pavlovian response for grief.

Kirby is perhaps one of our strangest and most-provocative living curators. His work dares to turn its listeners inside out. The Quietus’s Jon Fletcher wrote 17 years ago that the Caretaker’s music was “British tea-room pop plugged into a multitude of effects to create a Proustian Replicant inverse,” and that it’s “a stranger’s past relocated within your own memories, a reimagined history from an alien past.” That’s a good way to say “hauntology” without actually saying it. Derivative of Jacques Derrida’s neological thesis on the matter—how interrogations of the past, socially or culturally, can be spectral—hauntology first showed up in a book of his, Spectres of Mark, in 1993. Within 10 years, it became a genre popularlized, loosely, by electronic musicians like Burial and Philip Jeck in mid-2000s Britain. Hauntology, in music, was theorized by critic Simon Reynolds and blogger k-punk, and the genre’s effort worked well on intrigue alone.

Hauntology was this cut-and-paste collaging and meshing of audio from “library music,” aka film and television soundtracks and public information films. Artists stacked the samples on top of each other, drowning the source melodies in thick, soupy washes of noise and drone. The idea was to make a listener remember; the nostalgic compositions of the now, like hypnagogic pop or even something more widescreen, like chillwave, are descendants of Derrida’s deconstructive concepts. In the company of hauntology, we are anthropologists. The Caretaker’s work, across 20 years, was sometimes too uncanny for the valley.

The Caretaker’s debut album, Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom, is not a spectacular introduction by any means. It’s a rough-around-the-edges, milquetoast manipulation of 1920s music. Kirby had found influence in The Shining and wanted to make a record that could have played throughout the Overlook Hotel when the cameras weren’t rolling. Boil it down to the bones and the LP is aural fan-fiction. At the time, Selected Memories was a detour from Kirby’s previous work, namely his pop-to-noise deconstructions under the V/Vm alias. So, rather than cutting up rave instrumentals, he started slowing down big band records and adding atmosphere to them. All he had was a turntable, a DAW and effects. The Caretaker alias was meant to be a survey of nostalgia before it became a vehicle for memory. Later on in his career, before his An Empty Bliss Beyond This World breakthrough, Kirby had explored the effects of amnesia. The reception among critics remained favorable.

Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom does echo the music used in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 novel of the same name, and that part of the process works quite well. It doesn’t hurt that the album’s final track, “Midnight, the stars and you,” is a torn-apart exploit of Ray Noble and His Orchestra’s Al Bowlly-sung foxtrot song of the same name, which appears during the credits of the film. But Kirby’s ability to take ambient, choral, drone and industrial techniques, apply them to big band and chamber music, and stretch them out in such menacing, noisy measures remains consequential and influential. There are textures of vinyl crackle and reverberating vocals, and the samples are chopped, widened, flipped and muted. The use of big band songs in exercises like Selected Memories is important, too. The music needed to be beautiful so the Caretaker could regale it into a melancholic ruse of gibberish torment.

Parts of Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom’s sampling are still unspecified, because some of the compositions are just far too blown-apart for identification. The sample on “Friends past reunited” was widely sought after and eventually identified as “Lasst mich ihn nur noch einmal küssen,” an aria from Bach’s St. Luke Passion, BWV 246. But the performance captured in the sample remains unknown. Kirby sampled many ensembles for the project, including the likes of Hal Kemp & His Orchestra (“Haunting me”), Ray Noble and His Orchestra (“Thanks”), John Gregory and His Orchestra (“The haunted ballroom”) and Roy Fox and His Band (“In the dark”). He also manipulated the works of Welte Orchestrion (“By the seaside”), Jesse Crawford (“A summer romance”), Al Bowlly (“Midnight, the stars and you”), Bill Rayner (“‘Excuse me’ for ladies”), George Melachrino (“In days of old”) and Vic Damone (“From out of nowhere”).

Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom can often be as disorienting as the film that inspired it. It’s full of vacancies, panning and faraway voices, as if you are listening to the songs playing in another room with your ear pressed against a locked door. “Thanks” is one of the Caretaker’s finest efforts, as is “A summer romance.” Some of the noisier parts of the album, like “Den of iniquity” and “September 1939,” share DNA with Japanese industrial and free-improvisation. The works of Merzbow, Pinkcourtesyphone and labels like Perc Trax and HANDS come to mind. The hisses of “Reckless night” and the growls of “Thronged with ghosts” authors a template that William Basinski surely looked at while making The Disintegration Loops three years later.

Cohesion is a rarity in Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom’s hour, as is coherency. “By the seaside” is an outlier in that sense, as is “Request dance,” the latter sounding like something a lo-fi rapper might sample—it could be a stretch, but I think that there are connectable dots between a song like “Request dance” and the contemporary work of a creator like DORIS. There is nonsense present on Selected Memories, too, in a meritorious sense. The 47-second “The revolving bandstand” is a brief recording of footsteps on talkative hardwood, while “One thousand memories” is aimless sludge. Halfway through “From out of nowhere,” a damp, low-register voice comes out of the shadows like a deity delivering a hex. And “Garden of weeds,” for the most part, is the kick of a bass drum in a storm of static—what little melody is present sounds, albeit briefly, like Hoagy Carmichael’s “Heart and Soul.” On “You and the night,” the Caretaker takes two separate vocals and pitches them differently, creating the illusion that both a man and a child are singing.

Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom was innovative at the time of its release, even if hindsight has damaged the longevity of its usefulness. It doesn’t help that the Caretaker went on to make far more compelling, ambitious and canonized ambient records. But “September 1939” is remarkably sore on the ears, while “Disillusioned” is glorified white noise. But, if you can slink your way through the pitch-black squelches of strangling noise, there are salves to be found, in the whimpers of an abandoned dance hall. While An Empty Bliss Beyond This World and Everywhere at the End of Time were both successful efforts that sped past thematic clichés, the albums were closing doors for Kirby and the genre he pioneered.

But Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom was a door opening, even in its infancy. When Kirby made it, his acres of ambience had not yet followed such challenging direction. Still, there is comfort even in the confusing debris—in these sounds that have existed for far longer than you and me. The album is falling apart all around us, the gala’s intensity seeking resolve in spite of its own chaotic unnerve. “Midnight, the stars and you” ends and everyone has to leave. But the tape hiss stretches onwards. I remember what Delbert Grady said to Jack Torrance in The Shining: “You’ve always been the Caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been here.” I, too, feel like I’ve known these ghosts forever.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

Time Capsule: The Caretaker, Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom

17 years before making one of the most audacious and groundbreaking ambient projects ever, James Leyland Kirby's debut album as the Caretaker was an innovative introduction to hauntology at the time of its release, even if hindsight has damaged the longevity of its usefulness.