LEYLAND KIRBY

Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was

Genre: MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT

MP3
FLAC
WAV

Boomkat Product Review:

The 2nd part of Leyland Kirby’s uniquely prescient dark ambient masterstroke, Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was [2009] finds us returning to Kirby’s draughty corridors midnight keyboard meditations >> a sublime, haunting experience.

Almost a decade on from its original release we can read Kirby's morose 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 social feeds have become an all-encompassing filter for daily life and effectively assuaged the rich analog ambiguity of collectivism in favour of cold, hard, binary politics and reflexive, unthinking emotional responses.

Especially in the wake of Mark Fisher’s passing, Kirby’s sentiments - embedded in titles such as When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart, and figuratively perfused thru its stark negative space - use shared echoes of the hive mind thru classic film scores from Vangelis and Lynch/ Badalmenti - both quite literally omnipresent - as cues for sorrowful elegies and meditations which aesthetically resonate as much with Deathprod’s liminal scapes, as a sort of mildewed flocking to Satie’s tasteful ambient wallpaper.

It’s not all doom and gloom; there’s an underlying sense of resilience, of resistance, ribboning expressions which flow with pathos and an 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 hollow mainstream.

MP3 Release (7)