Patience (After Sebald)

2026 pressing of The Caretaker’s score for ‘Patience’ (2012), a documentary by Grant Gee about German writer WG Sebald.

Leyland Kirby’s mid-period masterpiece ‘Patience (After Sebald)’ was conceived as The Caretaker to accompany Grant Gee’s feature-length documentary, tracing author W.G. Sebald’s journey across the East Anglian landscape. In the context of the film, the haunting score, entirely derived from a 1927 recording of Franz Schubert’s C.19th song cycle ‘Winterreise’, is an ideal allegorical device for the film’s use of themes revolving the Holocaust, and the decay and fidelity of memory, key to its subject’s work, often derived from his formative experience of life growing up in post-WWII Germany. 

Within The Caretaker’s catalogue the score stands out for blurring classical, rather than ballroom, music, and for its arrangement of halting loops loomed by a pall of sibilant hiss, as opposed to the project’s signature patina of crackle. For those reasons, and the record’s starkly liminal effect, it’s become a modern classic and firm fan fave over the years; a temporal bridge between the preceding ‘Persistent Repetition of Phrases’ (2011) and the ‘Everywhere At The End Of Time’ stages that would follow a few years later...