Basics

Suffering a bit from ‘Printers Block’ - I think it’s down to the slight adjustment of thinking that switching to screenprints requires. Anyway, I’ll try stripping the image down to basics, working out the shapes that underpin the design and working up from that. Strip it down, layer it back up, create something different and yet still the same, echoing the original – this is what I like about printmaking. I was thinking how a similar process is at work in the music of Grouper, whose new album ‘Ruins’ is an imminent example – redolent, chiming piano lines buried in a sea of accretions of echo, tape hiss and distortion; something haunting about memory and decay. This was yesterday’s theme too, hence the title of my blip (it seemed fitting, somehow, for the picture.) There seems to be a similar feeling at work in much of the music that Leyland Kirby puts out under his various aliases – particularly his releases as the Caretaker, of course, but it’s there too in his latest release as the Stranger, ‘Bleaklow’, which I’ve also been listening to this week and which is, scarily-enough, possibly even better than his ‘Watching Dead Empires In Decay’ album from last year. Turns out it’s a re-release from 2008 – who knows how much undiscovered (to me, at least) discography Mr. Kirby has tucked away in his archives…