The wings of flies, gentlemen, represent the aerial power of the psychic faculties.
"An Empty Bliss Beyond This World follows the mind of a person who tries and struggles to remember even small parts of his life using broken sounds.[6] The record was based on a 2010 study about the ability of people with alzheimer's disease to remember music they listened to when they were younger, as well as where they were and how they felt when they listened to it.[8][9] The Caretaker project was inspired by the use of ballroom music in films such as Carnival Of Souls (1962), The Shining (1980), and the television series Pennies from Heaven (1978), which drew James Kirby to themes of memory loss that appear on An Empty Bliss Beyond This World: "Famously, people as they got older have started seeing dead people, people from the past, and that's their reality because the brain's misfiring. I'm very interested in these kinds of stories. Music's probably the last thing to go for a lot of people with advanced Alzheimer's. There are a lot of people who suffer from Alzheimer's who just hum the same songs over and over again."[10]
читать дальшеCritic Rowan Savage compared the album to Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves (2000) due to its "endless and fearfully cavernous space (the ballroom) existing concealed by the deceptive limitations of familiar domesticity" represented with a deep resonant sound.[1] Some tracks on An Empty Bliss Beyond This World have another slightly-different version of it that appears later in the album and have the same name, such as the title track and “Mental Caverns Without Sunshine.”[11][5][12] Kirby explained this was done to give it a déjà vu vibe: "Immediately upon first listen, you’re already questioning where you have heard this song before."[5] The second version of "Mental Caverns Without Sunshine" is only half as long as the first version of the track on the LP.[11] As Savage analyzed, the repeating of samples and loops on the LP questions the listener if "[their] sense of familiarity spring[s] from the loop[s] [themselves] or from the very patina that inheres in the scratchy turntable record as such," as well as "if samples are being looped or whether the pieces chosen, in their role as background to an always already arriving vocal line or dance step, are repetitive in and of themselves."[1] While most of the tracks on the album suddenly end, the album's closer fades out which, according to Savage, is a "memento mori that must go hand-in-hand with the resurrection of sounds as temporally distant as these, with the re-giving of the name and hence finitude, the entry (or, rather, re-entry) into mercilessly linear history."[1]
An Empty Bliss Beyond This World has retrofuturistic themes of disputes between the distant past and the envisioned future similar to Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela (1969).[13] Savage labeled the album a commentary on modern music that "coloni[zes]" and "dehistoricize[s]" works from the past.[1] He compared the album to when Gary Numan sang "I'm Vera Lynn" on the track "War Songs."[1] Describing "War Songs" as a "peculiar evocation of the 30s and 50s as vocodered through eerie 80s electro," Savage explained:
Where [Numan] was content to tell, The Caretaker [...] has shown, and in doing so gone one better — he’s given us the shade of Lynn herself, while making apparent its ghostly, absent nature. It’s as if Kirby, speaking to a postmodern generation steeped in Stone-cold revivalism [...] is asking: “You call that retro? This is retro” (but also, this is what retro is, and that may not be the comfortable appropriation you’re familiar with).[1]"