Sometimes it feels like I’ve been on a years-long quest for a certain kind of ambient that doesn’t exist, or at least that I haven’t yet found. Black Swan came pretty damn close with their 2010 debut Black Swan in Eight Movements, which was in fact one of my favorite albums of that year. But, they’re all I really know that fits into this category I’ve never been able to truly discover or describe, a weird line between ambient and drone. Behold the next contender: The Caretaker, a project by electronic musician James Kirby. His newest album An Empty Bliss Beyond this World takes a fascinating approach to the genre. He took a bunch of old-timey vinyl ballroom singles and in a way un-mastered them by adding tons of reverb, emphasizing the lows, looping bits, and even amplifying the characteristic cracks and pops of old records. The result is astonishingly beautiful: dance music that has been so manipulated it sounds and functions like ambient. Listen to “The Sublime Is Disappointingly Elusive.”
