Leyland Kirby - Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was - The Caretaker

$

32

New, sealed. Some sleeve wear, great shape overall.
  2017 repress; Originally released in 2009. The second part of Leyland Kirby's uniquely prescient dark ambient masterstroke, Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was (2009) finds the listener returning to Kirby's draughty corridors of processed 78s and midnight keyboard meditations is a sublime, haunting experience like no other. The listener can read his melancholic diagnosis of capitalist malaise, deferred futurism and thwarted social utopianism as a genuinely uncanny foresight of what has played out in contemporary society, in an age when Facebook and Twitter have become an all-encompassing filter for daily life and effectively assuaged the rich analog ambiguity of collectivism in favor of cold, hard, binary politics and reflexive, unthinking emotional responses. Especially in the wake of Mark Fisher's tragic passing earlier in 2017, Kirby's hauntological sentiments, embedded quite literally in titles such as "When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart", and figuratively perfused through its stark negative space, now feel to resonate stronger than ever; using shared echoes of the hive mind such as classic film scores from Vangelis and Lynch/Badalmenti -- both quite literally omnipresent in imminent sequels right now -- as cues for sorrowful elegies and meditations which aesthetically resonate as much with Deathprod's liminal scapes, as a sort of mildewed modern classical flocking to Satie's tasteful ambient wallpaper. Yet it's not all doom and gloom. There's a sense of underlying sense of resilience, of resistance to Kirby's hushed, ribboning expressions which flows with a considerate pathos and open-ended emotional curiosity which belies the narcissistic reaffirmations of social media's echo chambers and dialectic cul-de-sacs, quietly striving to wrench something beautiful and affective from the clutches of a manipulative mainstream.
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A few notes on the condition of vinyl records:I generally don't grade any items mint, since records and packaging sometimes have minor cosmetic flaws that one can't see if the shrink wrap is still sealed. However, I do my best to mention any visible flaws in the item description, and I'm usually very thorough. I'm happy to give more details on, or send photos of, any item upon request, so please feel free to ask. Please be aware that I don't guarantee sound quality or anything that could be considered a common quirk of vinyl production, as I don't have any control over the manufacturing process. Some pressings are noisier than others (particularly glow in the dark vinyl), and sometimes a record will have a slight wobble or some other imperfection. Some pressings are better than others, and that's just the nature of vinyl. If something is clearly damaged, though, that's a different story, in which case, I'm willing to accept a return. Also, I'm happy to open the shrink wrap and ship any record outside of the sleeve to prevent sleeve splits. If you don't state a preference, I'll assume you prefer the record remain sealed, in which case I'm not to be held responsible for any splitting that may occur. Thanks for understanding!