Perhaps there are those in the know but this was a new sound for me, even with all the time spent recently exploring ambient music/sounds. From Wikipedia:

“An Empty Bliss Beyond This World is the eighth studio album by The Caretaker, an ambient music project of English musician Leyland Kirby. The LP comprises modified samples of pre-World War II vinyl ballroom jazz records Kirby bought very cheaply at a Brooklyn store in December 2010. The record’s editing of the audio sources is based on a study regarding people with alzheimer’s disease being able to remember music they listened to when they were younger, as well as where they were and how they felt when they listened to it.

An Empty Bliss Beyond This World was The Caretaker’s breakthrough album, garnering critical acclaim upon its release and making its way into numerous year-end lists by publications. Pitchfork has called it the 75th best album of the first half of the 2010s as well as the 14th best ambient album of all time.”

It falls well outside anything else I’ve been listening to of late and resonates on a much deeper level with me. It could be the familiarity of the music itself, despite or probably because it’s pushed so far back in the space that it hits my brain more like a memory than sounds.

It’s one of the few albums I’ve listened to and instantly added to my Amazon shopping list without hearing the entire thing. The phenomena described in the Wiki entry seems perfectly natural for me and I think I’m a few years away from dementia. Music commands the brain on a very base level. Just this week I was recalling some of the first songs I ever learned and sang. My early childhood fell right into the folk music boom of the 60s. Folk was sort of the music of enlightened rebellion prior to being subsumed by rock and roll. It was the end of the Woody Guthrie/Pete Seeger era and with that there was also an obsession with what was considered “black music,” including field songs and gospel, Mahalia Jackson etc. It was the soundtrack of the early anti-war and civil rights movements. I still remember exactly where I was sitting listening to Go Tell It On the Mountain, and who was there and who sang what parts, etc. The memories of these moments from 50 years ago are more clear than the lyrics of my favorite pop/rock tunes of the last 10 years.

The sounds on this recording above though, and the way they’re mastered, are similar. It’s beyond conscious memory. It’s more a case of actual identity apart from how I choose to identify. It’s a haunting almost, or a possession. It’s a part of a collective memory and identity. It’s worth reading up some on how Derrida’s “hauntology” has been applied by more recent writers to music, film, literature, etc. It goes further to explain nostalgic trends in pop music, like the cyclical reemergence of rockabilly, ska, and such than simply writing it off to plagiarism and marketing. That constitutes lazy critique and says nothing for why audiences are hungry for old sounds to begin with.

So, added to some Basinski and Gorecki, The Caretaker, and click the button to complete the purchase.

p.s. The people at Pitchfork are still a bunch of boring, pretentious cunts.