caretaker: persistent repetition of phrases

ltd repress. Having already been chosen as one of The Wire magazine's top 10 albums of 2008, as well as featuring on numerous "end-of-year" charts, The Caretaker's highly acclaimed Persistent Repetition Of Phrases is finally made available on a limited vinyl pressing, the inaugural release on UK-based James Kirby's very own History Always Favours The Winners label. James Kirby's work as The Caretaker has always dealt with the suggestion of haunted memory and the obscuring of temporal motion, and this album makes that more explicit than ever, with titles that reference amnesia, Alzheimer's, past-life regression, and other such memory misfires and short circuits. Musically, this album might be compared to Philip Jeck's manipulated vinyl tracts, featuring similarly oceanic swells of crackle and dust, with faded pianos or big band sounds wafting wraith-like across the mix. After conjuring the sinister atmospherics of The Shining with his debut album Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom (V/Vm Test Records 1999), The Caretaker has been chasing this idea of sound leaving its indelible mark on space and time, so consequently, these creepy, semi-dissolved musical passages sound no more tangible than shadows, and the album for the most part comes across as some sort of séance held via wax cylinder. Arguably the most accomplished and rewarding Caretaker album to date, Persistent Repetition Of Phrases is an album you'll want to snap up fast -- dark ambient ghost-jazz for night-blooming flowers and the shadows of phantoms.