The Caretaker’s 'An Empty Bliss Beyond This World' Turns 10: How the Haunted Ballroom Defined a Generation

Dyl reflects on Leyland Kirby's eighth studio album as The Caretaker.

by Dyl

Faded photographs line up behind an abandoned bar, the bottles on the shelves long ago emptied of their contents, leaving behind only small glass statues. The floor creaks, the building settles, cracked velvet-colored wallpaper fades from layers of dust. You are old now—or imagine you are—and yet you can still hear the crooning of brass horns and the clinking of piano keys from the main stage, overlooking tables long since devoid of the life they used to service. The music keeps calling back to you, and suddenly you are young again—or imagine you are—and the room glows with a golden accent again. A beautiful woman you cannot remember—your wife?—beckons to you from the bar, once again stocked and ready for the bustling crowd all around you. For a brief moment you feel home again, warm and safe and loved, and desperately you try to make this fleeting memory last for eternity. 

This is the haunted ballroom, the sonic realm of British ambient composer Leyland James Kirby, the man behind the Caretaker moniker and now, inexplicably, one of the most famous ambient musicians of his generation. Ambient musicians aren’t meant to become famous, and particularly Kirby, in his experimental deconstructions of old sampled ballroom music, is perhaps the last musician you would expect to gain any significant recognition. 

Over the past couple years, Kirby’s profile has grown immensely. His most well-known albums, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World and Everywhere at the End of Time, have racked up over 16 million listens on YouTube, and consistently tops Bandcamp’s best-selling releases charts; Kirby’s work has been profiled in nearly every conceivable publication, from Pitchfork to NPR to the New York Times; and his latest opus, the over six-hour long Everywhere at the End of Time, has become a viral social media trend that has found a large & passionate fanbase, dedicated to analyzing the project & making memes out of existential dread & tired longing. Ask any teenager who’s spent enough time on TikTok, and it’s possible The Caretaker (or at least, “the dementia album”) is as well-known among young music listeners as the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and Olivia Rodrigo.

The music of The Caretaker puts it in a unique position to speak towards the new hyper-aware digital generation, raised under the looming crises of climate catastrophe & the collapse of neoliberalism’s friendly veneer. Ten years after the release of Kirby’s breakout release, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, The Caretaker has come to define a youth culture ravaged by unchecked mental health crises, economic disparity, looming climate catastrophe, and technological malevolence. That an album centered around the pains of memory loss & identity disruption would appeal to such a young audience, endlessly scrolling & absorbing the worst of the world without a second glance, makes An Empty Bliss the perfect by-product of its time—in the face of unending instability & impending doom, the fragile peace of the haunted ballroom beckons to listeners, the distorted loops of music long since passed evolving into grotesque visions of histories that never were, and futures that never will be. 

An Empty Bliss’s execution is simple enough to understand—old swing & ballroom records Kirby found digging through dusty store crates, sampled & edited into a fractured portrait of a life fading away before the listener’s ear. Kirby’s craft comes not in creating original compositions (although he would eventually do this for Everywhere at the End of Time) but in a mastery of sound design—the crackle of old vinyl, the warp of the records, the distortion & re-organizing of material—all coinciding into an album bridging the gap between analogue memories & digital futures. The process naturally draws comparison to William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, and An Empty Bliss, with its ghostly subtexts & undefined yearning, cements itself as the perfect spiritual successor to Basinski’s opus. The legend of The Disintegration Loops looms large over Kirby’s work—the trauma of a post-9/11 society fraught with anger & paranoia, using pervasive technology as a cudgel for security, with an entirely new generation of music listeners raised under the never-ending gaze of a digitized surveillance state. An Empty Bliss is not an album responding to trauma, but born of it, western paranoia giving way to psychological exhaustion where nostalgia’s warm embrace beckons to listener’s of all ages. 

The siren song of nostalgia was not just limited to An Empty Bliss upon its 2011 release, as the year also coincided with two other albums which defined the last decade—Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, a purely digital exploration of fractured audio samples into songs of longing & isolation; and Macintosh Plus’ Floral Shoppe, the album that marked vaporwave’s arrival as a major internet subculture and still to this day defines the genre’s sonic & aesthetic stereotypes. The cultural significance of these individual works are not all similar, yet like all great movements in art each work upholds the other’s importance, and the fact that all three albums released within six months of each other is not a coincidence—a shift in the musical counterculture had begun. Floral Shoppe and Replica represent the entrapment of the online hellworld—purely digital art fighting to break free of futuristic ruins, calling back to a past that’s been irreversibly tainted by the present. All the albums are hollow husks of themselves, filled only with empty, omnipresent yearning. Yet the saving grace of An Empty Bliss is in its analogue origins, the actual escape that is so yearned for and that, if only for a brief moment of time, can seemingly be returned to. 

It’s likewise impossible to separate the primary digital format of An Empty Bliss from its analogue design. The rise in popularity of “liminal spaces”—images of empty, surrealist areas of unknown origins, such as abandoned shopping malls or playgrounds at dusk—pushes the experience of everyday online existence further into the eerie. The unsettling nature of digital life bleeds from its inherent social qualities—always plugged in, interconnected with everyone & everything all the time, until the point when isolation loses its edge and becomes a sort of comfort, a respite from a world of action & noise. For a younger generation raised in these hyper-aware spaces, the draw of the void is an illusion of sanctuary, a security that The Caretaker’s music evokes vividly. The haunted ballroom is not the setting of any horror tale, but a process by which listeners escape from an increasingly-terrifying reality into the dust of times immemorial—before the internet came to swallow us all into its abyss, there was just The Caretaker, and his ballroom. 

This existence has a term, hauntology, and its lineage within the realm of crisis capitalism has been well documented in recent times by philosophers & social critics, most notably in the works of the late Mark Fisher. Ambient music increasingly finds itself in the realm of hauntology, ranging from vaporwave to Basinski to Boards of Canada, with the retrospective promise of a shining future which never materialized. An Empty Bliss fits into this category as well, yet the album finds itself existing beyond structural time and into a strange realm of longing and desperation. As the album progresses, all notions of time grow blurry—the past recedes into a murky cacophony of droning horns, more & more pieces from the past that made the music “whole” suddenly don’t fit as well into the present, leaving the future in a state of paralysis & uncertainty. The music of The Caretaker, in the most literal sense, becomes timeless—the ballroom is eternal, always has been, always will be. 

Ironically the future of The Caretaker is also uncertain—Kirby declared that the completion of Everywhere at the End of Time would be his last release under the moniker, and there has been no hint of new music anytime soon. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World represents everything that ambient music can achieve—far beyond simple background noise for random environments, the simplicity of the album’s execution begets incredible introspection, evoking deep emotions from listeners unlike anything found in other genres & styles. No other set of historical circumstances could’ve helped produce An Empty Bliss, or could’ve possibly propelled The Caretaker into defining this generation so perfectly.