Leyland Kirby: a man who never stops or even slows down. Unless he’s just released a giant batch of music over a short span of time. Then he probably slows down for a while. He probably takes that day to run the bath in the late afternoon, waiting for the water to rise with his heels up on the coffee table, smiling at the test-pressing of the 6xLP he released into the world that morning. Then the bath is ready and he steps into it with the door shutting behind him, and we think: now Leyland Kirby has stopped, or at least slowed down. In this moment we understand that he is a mortal man like any other, and we are comforted.
But how wrong we were to make such an assumption! For Leyland Kirby, the moment his foot hit that bath water, immediately set to work on his next project. (Apparently the man had musical equipment set up in his bathroom within reaching distance of the tub — a clear safety hazard, but again: Kirby is not mortal.) Now all we can do as ravenous consumers and celebrity stalkers is wait outside his bathroom with our wallets at the ready. This was taxing enough in 2009 when he shot out of the tub carrying 3xCD and 6xLP sets of his album Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was (TMT Review), but this year is going to be the real doozy.
Along with the magnificent, expectations-shattering follow-up solo album we were expecting (Eager to Tear Apart the Stars), Leyland has burst out of the bathroom this year burdened with much more material: a soundtrack to the Grant Gee documentary Patience, recorded under his long-time alias The Caretaker, a separate album as The Caretaker called An Empty Bliss Upon This World, and a four-part white label series titled Intrigue & Stuff — all set for release this calendar year on his own label, History Always Favours the Winners.
In fact, the first volume of Intrigue is available now from Boomkat, and will be showing up at places like Aquarius and Forced Exposure soon. Anyone expecting a rehash of 2009’s glacial tones on this 12-inch should note that one track is described as a “slopped & screwed raver dreamstate” and another is a John Denver cover. The standalone Caretaker album is planned for that liminal period between May and June, and everything else is a little further down the road. If you can’t get enough Kirby in your life but can’t afford a metric ton of vinyl, be one of 500 lucky digital subscribers who will get everything mentioned above in Mp3 format for as low as £15. Again, this is limited to 500 people, and the offer evaporates on June 1. The money made from these subscriptions will be used to make ~300 albums for release in 2013. Keep an ear to that bathroom door for any future announcements.
Intrigue & Stuff Vol. 1 tracklisting:
01. Video 2000
02. Re-Record Not Fade Away
03. Neon Lit Atoms
04. Live for the Future, Long for the Past
05. Low Entropy
06. Ruined Visions
• Leyland Kirby: http://brainwashed.com/vvm/index.html
