Leyland Kirby: Eager To Tear Apart The Stars (CD, History Always Favours The Winners, September 2011)

The other day, I was listening to Raudio's stream of Leif Inge's 9 Beet Stretch, which slows the glorious Ninth of Ludwig van down to fill 24 hours. (I assume this must have been inspired on some level by Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho?) In places, this is what Leyland Kirby's latest reminds me of: an unmistakable classical sound, but stretched out into an ambient drone, what used to be vibrato now a glacial ebb and flow which takes the place of melody, so I find myself getting obsessed with the minute shifts of tone and timbre as strings bend and harmonics beat. Elsewhere, there is distortion, and reverb, and even — gasp! — actual melodies played at the right speed, melodies whose tinny and echoey appearance somehow makes them seem more intimate. For me, this doesn't (yet?) have quite the same classic status as his epic Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was... but it comes pretty close, and that'll do for now.

I bought this from Boomkat. They call it Electronic.

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