What Happens When TikTok Looks To The Avant-Garde For A Challenge?

Around the beginning of lockdown this spring, alone in my apartment, I developed a little nightly routine. It involved heavy pours from a jug of Carlo Rossi and repeated spins of The Caretaker's the 2011 breakthrough from a cult favorite English musician otherwise known as Leyland James Kirby. Arranged from edits of Jazz Age ballroom tunes found on forgotten 78s in dollar bins worldwide, the record is as dreamy as it is unsettling; to listen is to be stuck within the locked groove of someone else's distant memories. Kirby re-works these dusty samples to crackle and fade and loop indiscriminately, occasionally repeating themselves or abruptly changing course. Tracks are titled things like "The sublime is disappointingly elusive," or "I feel as if I might be vanishing." It seemed like the right soundtrack