Leyland Kirby's 'We Drink to Forget the Coming Storm': A Most Beautiful Doom

Motherboard readers should already have some familiarity with the Caretaker's melting cloud of forgotten memories set to music—slow, drifting loops of ethereal death-waltzes that might have filled the hallways of the Overlook Hotel in its haunted decline. The Caretaker makes ambient music that might also be described as baroque, which just means it's part of two musics, while the Caretaker beyond the alias, Leyland Kirby, inhabits a different kind of ghost. It's cloudforms deconstructed into discrete pieces of modern not-quite-classical sounds, fragments for the end-times when all we have left are fragments. If that's too pretentious or music writery, just take it as short works of saddish dream music and listen anyway.

Also as a Motherboard reader, you should have some familiarity with this week's apocalypse predictions, a tangible statement of what exactly there is to forget within the 40 tracks of Kirby's immense compilation, We Drink To Forget the Coming Storm. He explains:

For just forty days and forty nights it is available for free (and for a donation) as a thank-you for your support and interest in my works. For those wishing to pay for this album you can. As this is released for my birthday I would suggest the price of a birthday whisky to be a fair price for this collection should you wish to pay. Then I feel we will raise the virtual glass connected together for good health and fortunes. Running in total at over three hours. It is not a fixed release and should be used sparingly in your own favourite track combinations. It can be used to uplift on the low days, to gain strength and clear the mind. Each track combines the same elements piano, digital strings and synthesized choir. There are dark twists and light passages. It leads you somewhere whilst going nowhere. A reflection of a time passing, a glimpse back into my own past, a look forward into the forthcoming abyss. Recorded through the darkest night hours during periods of disillusionment. There were no second takes, so we enjoy the errors and misadventures. Like life itself wrong notes may be hit, there maybe the odd distortion, melodies drift and we hope to gain strength from the introspective nature of the work. We cover no new ground. We wear our hearts on our sleeves. Wishing you all the best from Krakow where I raise the glass of good spirit.

As you digest the several hours worth of music embedded below however you see fit, consider that they are all new recordings. Quite a gift for these the last days.