The Caretaker, and the patience of listening

One of the mini-essays in Mark Fisher's fractured but brilliant book Ghosts of My Life (Zero Books, 2013) discusses Grant Gee's 2011 film Patience (After Sebald), where the film-maker 'replays' W.G. Sebald's walk along the Suffolk coast in his prose-work The Rings of Saturn. Fisher's interest in the film is reflected in the more general themes of the book: on forms of 'formal nostalgia' in today's popular culture, not so much feeling nostalgic for the past as endlessly recycling past cultural forms; and the traces of a 'popular modernism' in forms of pop and electronic music that push beyond this redundancy and lack of innovation. Gee's film, like Sebald's work, plays with the idea of memory being embedded in a landscape, and therefore with the question of how one confronts that past-in-the-present, what an ethical or political stance towards it would look like. Fisher was largely unimpressed with Sebald's writing and ambivalent about the film: the writing he dismisses as a po-faced “easy difficulty” and contrived profundity; the film follows in Sebald's footsteps with no particular pay-off, as Gee acknowledges to an extent (indeed, during the film interviewees ironically dismiss the idea of doing the walk from Rings).

There's a part of Fisher's review of the film that resonates: noting that people often misremember the contents of Sebald's book, Fisher expresses his “suspicion... that misremembering of a different kind contributes to the Rings of Saturn cult; that the book induces its readers to hallucinate a text that is not there, but which meets their desires... In The Rings of Saturn, Suffolk frequently (and frustratingly) recedes from attention, as Sebald follows his own lines of association”, unlike the film. As a fan of Sebald, I'd accept there's a level of truth in this; his books certainly do wrap themselves around you, inducing a trance as you plunge head-long into elongated sentences and sleight-of-hand moves from one place and time to another. But I like this idea of hallucination, and of thinking things are there which are not, for another reason. Patience is accompanied by a full album from The Caretaker (and an additional album of left-over pieces, Extra Patience). James Kirby's music acts as a wonderful counterpoint to the film, precisely because it plays with the listener's perception of memory and time; paralleling Fisher's discussion of nostalgia, Kirby's playfulness isn't just a matter of subject, of his using old music to make new music and so on, but of formal musical strategies. Memory and time are not just themes here, they are within the fabric of the pieces themselves. And perhaps fittingly, given Sebald's unfair reputation (echoed by Fisher) as a miserabilist, this fabric makes the music a joy to experience.

The joy of one track, 'When the Dog Days Were Drawing to an End', is tied up in the lilt in the sampled piano phrase, the way it hits that high major third note at the very beginning so that it rings out. When the sample then starts to loop, this note is key: the piano phrase ends by seeming to pause or almost slow down, the left hand arpeggio slowing and a gap being left, making it unclear that the musical phrase is about to start up again; a male voice can even be heard starting to sing a note. But then the piano starts up again, and this induces questioning: is this the exact same recording or phrase we are hearing? We start to misremember, because we remember the overall arc of the phrase, that low start to that high note and then the tumbling down, but the exact timing of the left and right hands, their synchrony, isn't quite as lined up as we think it should have been, they're off slightly at points, or just not falling on the same beats as we expect they would. Perhaps the notes are out of place this time around; but as the repeat goes on we start to suspect they have always been falling 'wrong', our hearing them 'right' was an invented memory. And that repeated major third note makes this developing pattern pivot on that high plateau – everything seems to jump off it, to the point that the notes following to the end of the phrase sound like an extended coda. So the joy comes from waiting for that high note but always then being surprised when it does come, because of the denouement of the following notes and the pause in the playing, and the voice coming in, before the next sample. Every repeat is a revelation, a wonder that it should happen again despite the previous phrase suggesting it would be the last. The notes of the repetitions are rhythmically off, and so the music plays tricks with us – is that really always the same recording sequence playing? The phrase is alive with this uncertainly, this blissful tension. Kirby has managed to mimic the tricks memory can play on you, the way the past is never the same once circling in your head. The tune will just keep on going and you'll never be sure who is playing and how they're playing it, if it's looping and when...

It's surprising that Fisher doesn't mention Kirby's music in his review of Grant Gee's film. Fisher's reference to the easy difficulty of Sebald is in response to what he perceives as the latter's supposed ignoring of modernism and twentieth century experimentation and stylistic innovations, sticking instead to an anachronistic, deliberately archaic writing style. Any “playfulness”, Fisher says, is curbed by the over-the-top seriousness of Sebald's prose. Fisher, it seems to me, misses a lot of the humour in Sebald's work, his arch knowingness when he writes of lost sources and odd, too-good-to-be-true coincidences (often manufactured by Sebald himself). Can the music of The Caretaker not be seen as having a similar relationship to form and content to that which Fisher misses in Sebald's work? In both works, old forms are ostensibly simply repeated, styles taken from simpler times – to the unsympathetic, Kirby is simply cutting up recordings of Schubert's 1827 piece 'Winterreise' and looping them round and around – in order to tell historical stories. But the tellings of these stories are convoluted and scattered, the forms being used to tell them ramble and digress, stopping to switch back to a previous subject or phrase, they echo older stories or previous recordings in ways that are uncanny, or which you struggle to accept are unimportant repetitions, or things which don't fit your memory of them. The stories become hypnotic in their rambling echoes, and so the form becomes something alien to itself, it is not simply something being mimicked based upon past use (“as if many of the developments in 20^th century... popular culture had never happened”, as Fisher would have it), it is part of the message, its dreamlike breakdown is the message: that the past can never be fully recalled and retained, that you will forever wander these landscapes following the associations that these fragments trigger, with no resolution, only a quiet certainty of a fading world that has lost its own axis.

Another joy: 'Increasingly Absorbed in his Own World' feels as if it starts mid-phrase, which is immediately (because of background hiss and the experience of the album so far) interpreted as mid-sample, due to its beginning with seemingly-incidental or concluding low notes, and the pause which follows. You'll never get certainty in the track as to where the phrase starts: it enters a ladder climb of notes that come tumbling down to an over-and-over series of notes in the middle of the piano keyboard, then a close set of chords that slow suddenly, repeat, and leave you with silence; is this, then, the end of a much longer passage of music that what we've actually been able to hear? Then those first low notes enter again, followed by that first pause, and the cycle of uncertain phrase-borders begins again. The grandeur of the gestures made by these chords, their long balance on a major 5^th with suspended notes, keeps the whole loop charged with the possibility of something changing, of our not quite remembering the phrase correctly (for the chords and pause feel too grand for the little that we hear preceding them, over and over again).

Other tracks, like 'So run down' (from Extra Patience), are so reverby we can't quite get a hold on on the metre, on the beginning of the bar, the result being that the loop keeps coming out of the ether of its own accord – it doesn't quite seem to be propelled by a regular metre so much as glide on a breeze, the cavernous operatic voice letting all its pitch inflections float away from it, carried by the wind.

Meanwhile, 'After the Earth has ground itself down' sounds like what would happen if Sebald's narrators were forever lost in their spatial and temporal wanderings. The memories have finally collapsed into one another so that you can form no coherence from them, no meaning can be gained from a surprising repetition, a coincidental association, or a delightful trick of the light that makes the next phrase sound different from the last. Only a smudge of remembrances, caked as in mud by the surrounding ambiance, pressed down by the boot of an endless repeating. As Fisher might say of Sebald's writing, this is a rootless but seductive place...