When I started putting this list together a few months back, I was unsure whether this album could really be counted as a 2014 new release. Appropriately enough given its creator’s methodology and general concerns, ‘The Death of Rave’ is a collection of sounds that, though first unveiled in their current form in 2014, nonetheless drag us back toward several previous temporal flashpoints, but hey, The Quietus had it on their new releases list, so if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

So the story goes that, back in 2006, James Kirby (aka V/Vm, aka The Caretaker, aka… well, you know the rigmarole by now, I’m sure) produced and offered for download a total of 19 hours of raw audio, all of it generated from tapes & sundry recordings he had accumulated during his youthful immersion in England’s ‘90s rave culture. Reflecting on the sad demise of the naïve utopian spirit that fuelled that scene, Kirby had subjected these recordings to the same sinister processes he applied to 1930s ballroom music in his work as The Caretaker, with, it must be said, markedly similar results. Returning to this mammoth outpouring of undifferentiated sound eight years later, Kirby has, for reasons best known to himself, seen fit to issue a few selected highlights from the project as an LP, entitled ‘The Death of Rave (A Partial Flashback)’.

Whilst this aesthetic of mournful, depression-fogged middle-aged rave nostalgia has been a common trope for a good few years now (at least since all the palaver surrounding Burial and Tim Hecker’s similarly conceived ‘Ravedeath 1972’), you’ve surely got to give Kirby the nod for being slightly ahead of the game dropping this stuff in 2006, and, even if the whole concept arguably feels rather tired here on the first day of 2015, the beauty and resonance of the selections herein retains a more elemental power, untarnished by such fleeting trends.

Indeed, what we have here is some real Prime-era Kirby, reminiscent of the crushing, intangible poignancy of The Caretaker’s ‘A Stairway to the Stars’, but furnished with a set of personal/emotional ties that reject that project’s comforting sense of generational distance and historical enquiry, instead cutting straight to the quick in its examination of the way an era that lays safely within the lifetime of all of its listeners already seems as dead, dusty and far removed from the present as the ghostly manoeuvres of The Haunted Ballroom.

Sonically, the tracks here are often more abstract but also more concrete than the Caretaker material, as the maximalist approach of house music finds itself boiled down into slabs of pure, undifferentiated sound whose weight is sometimes over-powering. The Caretaker’s music, I suppose, at least allowed for the *recollection* of friendship and community, long departed and fading into the oblivion beyond living memory perhaps, but somehow graspable all the same. The scenes and feelings lurking behind ‘Death of Rave’ on the other hand are far closer to home, but already feel as if they simply never were.

Whereas the original 2006 recordings went unnamed, Kirby has here gifted his chosen extracts with scene-setting titles of great and touching specificness, the simple act of naming increasing the power of these largely abstract chunks of sound enormously, cementing them forever in a time and place whose human inhabitants have moved on, leaving their memory to ferment and rot in isolation. As buildings are torn down or repurposed, fields tarmacked, tarmac cracked & replanted, ghosts of the life-changing youthful revelry that once took place on the same spots are chained, buried and forgotten.

In ‘Monroes, Stockport’, Kirby’s slow-drag treatment creates a sound akin to a giant, dematerialising tardis, beating like a bubble through the brain of some doomed raver, as the faint echo of some intractably vast, transcendent melody line warps into a melancholy that suggests his fate wasn’t pleasant. ‘Machetes at the Banshee’ meanwhile is a dense and terrifying few minutes, full of gate-clanging boneyard dread and creeping, Eraserhead-like squeaky skree.

‘Moggy & Wearden’ brings a feel of epic, inhuman vastness, like some big reveal of a Giger-esque alien cathedral, or an accompaniment to a stage-play of Lovecraft’s ‘At The Mountains of Madness’, drifting toward a more soothing, womb-like beauty in it’s final minute, whilst ‘Acid Allen, Haggis & Scott’ offers descending helicopters and the sound of an alien invasion blurring into the primeval hum of seaside video arcade.

The heart-rendingly titled ‘Big Eddie’s Van, Bowlers Carpark’ mixes busted speaker bass distortion with what sounds like the relentless churn of a giant subterranean waste disposal system, but ‘Marple Libradrome’ is perhaps the track that most clearly represents ‘The Death of Rave’s particular heart of darkness - a distant hum of crowd chatter just out of earshot beneath the threatening, subliminal buzz of electronic security fences and rotor-blade reversed percussion pulses, invoking the loneliness and lurking quietude of the empty, 4am carpark in which this entire LP seems to take place.

Do these feelings in any way reflect the experience of looking back on ones attendance of provincial early ‘90s rave events? Or one man’s foggy exploration of the emotionally-twisted emotions associated with such activity? Or simply nothing at all? As an outsider – young enough to have to rely on 2nd hand recollections of such events, if that - I have no idea. Maybe the conceptual aspect of this album may seem contrived or tedious or even offensive to some, but the depth and gut-level power of the resulting sonics is undeniable. An extraordinary record.

Listen and buy from Leyland Kirby via Bandcamp.

Labels: best of 2014, Leyland Kirby, V/Vm