MUCH NEEDED REPRESS
When the first Caretaker albums started to appear at the start of the century, their impact wasn't so much seismic as shaped by a slowly developing sense of the sui generis, texts that spoke, subsequent release after subsequent release, clearly to the ideas of hauntology, identity and nostalgia that pop culture theorists like Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds were beginning to explore elsewhere in (mostly) other contexts. Looking back in 2026, on the occasion of this latest reissue of one of the best in the catalogue, it now feels like James Kirby was creating a new emotional language for ambient music, one that has since been widely mimicked, regurgitated and mutated by endless numbers of producers under the spell of his influence. Funny to think that someone who started out with the prankster electronics manipulations of V/VM would end up becoming the poster child for emo-ambient. Of course, Patience (After Sebald) exists far beyond genre codification, a wistful suite of ghostly vignettes beamed from the radio static of memory, love letters to a world and, most meaningfully, people who are gone. Be careful where this music finds you in your day - it'll break the parts of your heart not already broken if you let it. The power of the wordless nameless endless rarely channelled so thoughtfully. No need to accept any imitators now this is affordably back in print.
FFO: WIlliam Basinski, Tim Hecker, Juho Toivonen
