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

Kirby's been an underground fixture since the mid-'90s, and to call his output prolific is an understatement on the level of referring to the past year as "these uncertain times." There are the early provocations as V/Vm, where he'd mutilate chart-pop and perform in a pig mask; the 20-hour compilations of f****d-up, blown-out rave tunes; the sprawling threnodies for a dying world, released under his own name. But it's his music as The Caretaker that's resonated most. Named for Jack Torrance-by-way-of-Nicholson's slowly unraveling hotel groundskeeper in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, the project debuted with 1999's Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom, glitchy waltzes to echo through an empty Gold Room.