Stranger, The

Stranger, The

Watching Dead Empires In Decay

Modern Love

***Polymath JAMES LEYLAND KIRBY must surely have one of the most confounding CV’s in the business: he spent years taking the piss out of the music industry with anthems rallying against the (VV)MCPS, he notoriously fell out with various well known record labels for reasons you’ll just have to google, goaded Aphex Twin with a series of ‘tributes’ and channelled his love of everything from Falco (Rock Me Amadeus), Chris De Burgh, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Stockport karaoke nights into a stream of increasingly bizzare 7”s back in the early noughties. But at the same time he was responsible for releasing some of the very earliest material from Boards of Canada (Hell Interface: 1997), made a ruck of frankly groundbreaking industrial electronic records, brought New Beat to the world’s attention and, in 1999, made his first album as THE CARETAKER, a project that would go on to release some of the most loved Ambient/ Lynchian albums of recent times. Since then he’s also produced an incredible suite of releases under his own name, scored various film projects and released three EP’s under the ‘Intrigue & Stuff’ banner which are, for our money, so ahead of their time they might just start sinking in properly by the end of the decade. All of which brings us to Watching Dead Empires in Decay, a new album recorded under another of Kirby’s pseudonyms THE STRANGER and released on Modern Love, a label that has been close to Kirby through these last eventful...