James ‘Leyland’ Kirby, Quietus favourite and crafter of keening instrumentals about life, death, loss and the fluid nature of time itself, has announced the release of a new full-length album on October 3rd. Entitled Eager To Tear Apart The Stars, it is his first album under the Leyland Kirby name since 2009’s massive, three-disc Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Once Was. In the interim period since that record, he’s released a pair of shorter EPs which touched on Blade Runner-ish sci-fi noir synth (Intrigue & Stuff Vols 1 & 2) as well as a recent album of knackered ballroom music under his Caretaker alias.
Eager To Tear Apart The Stars is as beautiful as you’d expect from a Kirby album, centred largely around piano, canned strings and a constant wash of static crackle. It will be released on his own History Always Favours The Winners label, who describe it as "[echoing and refracting] the maverick solo synth classics of Roedelius and Harold Budd, but with a temporal warping and sense of decayed decadence individual to Kirby’s oeuvre. There’s an ostensible sadness to these six pieces, but of a life-affirming and subtly ambiguous kind."
Its tracklist is again concerned with time and memory:
‘The Arrow Of Time’
‘This Is The Story Of Paradise Lost’
‘To Reject The World’
‘No Longer Distance Than Death’
‘They Are All Dead, There Are No Skip At All’
‘My Dream Contained A Star’
