Kindly recall the last ambient album that you listened to. Now, try and remember anything about that album that was musically outstanding in any way. Okay, so this might not work if you just listened to Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks by Brian Eno, but if your consumption of ambient music is anything like mine, then you’ll quickly realize where I’m coming from. It’s a genre utterly stuffed with talented artists from around the globe, but for which memorability is an extremely difficult feat to achieve.
With the massive undertaking that was his 2009 triple-album Sadly, the Future is No Longer What It Was (TMT Review), Leyland Kirby, combined with his more hauntingly sinister work as The Caretaker, has increasingly solidified his status as one of the relatively few, prominent, and noteworthy ambient artists currently active. And with the release of Eager to Tear Apart the Stars on October 3, he has the palpable opportunity to secure his place alongside comparable musical demigods like Tim Hecker, William Basinski, or Stars of the Lid.
According to The Quietus, Kirby’s own label, History Always Favours the Winners, describes the album as evincing a “temporal warping and sense of decayed decadence individual to Kirby’s oeuvre. There’s an ostensible sadness to these six pieces, but of a life-affirming and subtly ambiguous kind.” In other words, all signs point to Eager being just as beautifully affecting as his previous work.
Eager to Tear Apart the Stars tracklisting:
01. The arrow of time
02. This is the story of paradise lost
03. To reject the World
04. No longer distance than death
05. They are all dead, there are no skip at all
06. My dream contained a Star
• Leyland Kirby: http://brainwashed.com/vvm/artists/leyland_kirby.html
• History Always Favours the Winners: http://brainwashed.com/vvm/artists/index.html
