At a time when so many artists seem preoccupied with time and the past in various ways, perhaps nobody working with music now is more committed to the act of exploring memory than Leyland James Kirby.

One of his main methods of doing this is via his Caretaker project and a famously mysterious bunch of '78 records that, one imagines, he plays repeatedly, listening to the surface noise that signify their age as much as the music itself. His most recent album as Caretaker is this year's "An Empty Bliss Beyond This World," which is constructed of samples from those '78s. Inspired by a study that showed Alzheimer's patients have an easier time remembering information via music, this album is full of fragments of ballroom songs that slowly reach forward, backward or loop, and are never allowed to play right through.

Kirby's other current project concerns music released under his own name, no less committed to mangling memory than The Caretaker, albiet in a different way, involving everything from ambient to highly experimental tracks that evoke a sense of loss, and, once again, time passing.

For Unsound, Kirby is using both his aliases at once. What this signifies, we're uncertain, but we do know that he intends to refer to or source material from the documentary adaptation of Alvin Toffler's book "Future Shock," of which he is a long-time avowed fan. For someone who was also behind the V/Vm project, Kirby is not afraid to provoke as well as move - and the results of this one-off show should at the least be "memorable."

Now here's a Kirby quote that relates, very much, to "Future Shock": “Here we stand, twenty years on from the first CD, and our optimism has been gradually eroded away collectively. ‘Tomorrows World’ never came. We are lost and isolated, many of us living our lives through social networks as we try to make sense of it all, becoming voyeurs not active participants. Documenting everything. No Mystery. Everything laid bare for all to see."

http://soundcloud.com/experimedia/the-caretaker-an-empty-bliss