V/Vm.

V/Vm is the British plunderphonics catalogue of the late 1990s and 2000s, conducted by James Leyland Kirby from Stockport and (later) Berlin and Kraków under the V/Vm operator-name and about thirty other aliases. The Bureau files V/Vm at Tier III on the position that the catalogue is the case of post-Oswald plunderphonics worked at sustained scale, in a deliberately provocative copyright-violating mode, against the pop superstructure of the period. The V/Vm-project-proper ran from about 1994 to 2006, when Kirby concluded it by releasing one new track per day for an entire year (the 365-day project, an exercise Kirby has later described as having nearly killed me). The V/Vm Test Records imprint, the operator's own founding label, continues to handle the V/Vm back catalogue alongside the parallel projects.

The V/Vm method is plunderphonics worked through the sleeve, the package and the marketing apparatus as much as through the audio. Kirby's position is that the parody is a complete artefact: the record-sleeve, the catalogue number, the rack-placement, the legal-and-marketing surface all participate in the joke. The catalogue's best-known sustained operation, the Help Aphex Twin series (HAT 01 and HAT 02, both 1997, as 3-inch limited-edition CDs; HAT 3.0 as a 2002 vinyl compilation on V/Vm Test; HAT 4.0 a later CD continuation) shows the method whole: Kirby packaged the records in artwork directly mimicking Aphex Twin's Richard D. James Album (1996) on Warp, so that the records would infiltrate Aphex Twin racks in record shops by mis-filing and be bought by listeners expecting an actual Aphex release. The audio inside is V/Vm's mangled, copyright-aggressive treatment of Aphex-and-related source-material put through what Kirby's own later gloss has called a meat grinder. The packaging-and-rack-infiltration prank is the method working all the way through to the retail surface.

The pop-culture targets span the Top-40 superstructure of the late 1990s. The Frankie Goes To Hollywood Relax treatment provoked legal action from ZTT Records, the one case where the copyright provocation entered an actual record of legal correspondence; the Chris De Burgh Lady In Red treatment (a gravel-throated-swamp-creature vocal over the Burgh original) is the catalogue's signature instance of pop-vocal-as-monstrous-puppet; the Spice Girls / Posh Spice treatments occupy a similar vein through the late 1990s. Across the V/Vm catalogue the principle is consistent: the target is the most-saturated, most-commercial, most untouchable layer of the period's pop superstructure, and the V/Vm method is to demonstrate that this layer is in fact infinitely mangleable and accessible to the home-studio operator working with sampling tools. The provocation is partly aesthetic and partly political: a sustained editorial position that copyright law and pop-industry sanctity are jointly maintained against operators like Kirby, and that the V/Vm method is the appropriate response.

The 365-day project (2006) was V/Vm's exit-event. Kirby released one new V/Vm track per day for one calendar year via the operator's own website; the resulting body of work was later compiled into The Death of Rave (A Partial Flashback) and adjacent collections. The 365-day project is plunderphonics worked at total-production-saturation scale, and the documented terminus of the V/Vm period, after which Kirby's own later account is that the V/Vm method had reached its natural conclusion and there was no further productive work available within the operator-name. Kirby has noted in later interviews that the V/Vm period polarised people, they either loved or hated it, and that the V/Vm project itself, having achieved the saturation it sought, became unsustainable as a sustained provocation.

The V/Vm catalogue's later influence runs in two directions. The first is the hauntology cluster around Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada (whose Hell Interface alias appears alongside V/Vm in the period), Mark Fisher's critical writing, and the surrounding Ghost Box / Mordant Music / Position Normal cluster of the mid-2000s; V/Vm is one of the documented precursors of the hauntological turn in British electronic music, particularly via the source-material aesthetic of mangled-and-degraded pop. The second is the vaporwave / plunderphonics-revival lineage of the 2010s, in which V/Vm's 1990s working idiom (mangled pop, deliberately-degraded fidelity, copyright provocation, sleeve-as-prank) became the founding aesthetic vocabulary of an entire later micro-scene. The V/Vm catalogue precedes both clusters; the Bureau's reading is that V/Vm is one of the early documents for both. Kirby has described the operating principle as the best of the worst, the worst of the best, which is as exact an account of the method as the Bureau has found, and one it has quietly declined to improve upon.

One correction the Bureau enters to the record: in its earliest form V/Vm was not a solo operation. The V/Vm Test Records imprint was set up by Kirby together with Andy MacGregor, the Manchester DJ and noise-maker who recorded as Jansky Noise, and for a stretch of the late 1990s the two were the V/Vm crew in equal measure. MacGregor was, by the label's own affectionate account, as central to the V/Vm world as anyone, the operator with the swagger of a pirate; his Jansky Noise work ran from antimusic and glitch through to the abrasive-and-gentle noise of Mi^grate, issued on Planet Mu in 2003.

MacGregor's most visible work came through the duo Speedranch^Jansky Noise, formed with the Warrington DJ Speedranch (Paul Richard), whose turntable-and-CDJ noise-collage met MacGregor's expanded sonics. Both based around Manchester and operating at the extreme fringe of its electronic scene, the pair drew an infamous Wire cover feature in October 1998 ("Harder! Faster! Louder!"), and released the Execrate mix and album in 1999 and a run of FatCat split 12-inches. They belong to the same antimusic and glitch micro-scene the V/Vm catalogue helped found, the British wing of the cluster that also held Stock, Hausen & Walkman and the early glitch operators.

The parallel and successor project, The Caretaker, is the operator's second alias and the most-discussed body of work outside the V/Vm period proper. The Caretaker was founded in 1999, initially as a direct reference to the haunted ballroom scene in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (the Jack Torrance character's 1920s ballroom-spirit predicament), with the debut record Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom (1999, V/Vm Test) establishing the catalogue's working source-material: degraded samples of 1920s and 1930s big-band and ballroom-pop records, looped and treated to convey both nostalgic recollection and the unsettling sense of mediated memory operating across decades. Simon Reynolds later characterised the first three Caretaker records (Selected Memories, A Stairway to the Stars, We'll All Go Riding on a Rainbow, 1999–2003) as the haunted ballroom trilogy; the trilogy established the Caretaker working language and the foundation for the later expansion of the project into a full investigation of memory, recollection, and (most centrally) dementia and Alzheimer's.

The Caretaker's mid-period record is An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (2011, History Always Favours The Winners), which was widely received as the project's mature statement and the immediate creative source of the later six-album project. Everywhere at the End of Time (Stages I-VI, released across six six-monthly intervals from September 2016 to March 2019, all on History Always Favours The Winners) is the catalogue's late work: a deliberate six-stage portrayal of the progression of Alzheimer's disease, with each stage corresponding to a clinical phase of cognitive decline. The early stages preserve the recognisable Caretaker ballroom source-material; the middle stages introduce increasing decay, fragmentation and reprise of motifs from across the Caretaker back catalogue; the late stages collapse the source-material into near-pure noise and abstraction. Kirby's own account of the conceptual frame is that he gave the project dementia, allowing the work's formal apparatus to break down in deliberate parallel with the dementia symptoms each stage addresses. The complete six-album sequence runs about six and a half hours.

Everywhere at the End of Time is the catalogue's most-discussed sustained work and one of the documents of post-2010 ambient and conceptual electronic music. The work received critical attention during its 2016–2019 release period (The Quietus named the completed project at the top of its 100 Reissues list in 2019). It found a second life on social media from 2020 onwards, after a viral TikTok and YouTube listening-challenge phenomenon brought the complete six-album sequence to a generation of listeners well outside the original Caretaker audience, with dementia-care professionals later praising the work for the empathy it generated in younger listeners. The viral-second-life period also drew the work into adjacency with the analog-horror, liminal-spaces and Backrooms internet-aesthetic clusters of the early 2020s, in which Everywhere at the End of Time functions as one of the founding soundtrack-and-aesthetic reference points. Kirby has continued the surrounding operator-catalogue under his own name (the Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was 2009 triple-album, the Eager To Tear Apart The Stars 2011 record, the Intrigue & Stuff 12-inch series 2011–2013, and later work) but the Caretaker name itself has not returned since the 2019 conclusion of Everywhere at the End of Time.

One further record requires direct mention. Take Care, It's a Desert Out There... (2017, V/Vm Test / History Always Favours The Winners) is a 48-minute single-track Caretaker release made in direct response to the January 2017 death of the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who was a sustained Kirby collaborator and one of the critical advocates of both the V/Vm and Caretaker projects. The record was initially intended as a take-home item for Kirby's Barbican Hall London performance of the same year; the demand exceeded Kirby's expected pressing run and the record was issued as a general release, with proceeds donated to Mind, the mental-health charity. Fisher's critical writing on V/Vm and the Caretaker (in k-punk and elsewhere) is the critical-theoretical apparatus through which Kirby's work entered the surrounding hauntological-cultural-theory conversation of the 2000s and 2010s; the loss of Fisher in 2017 is registered in the catalogue at a documentary level.

The Bureau files the V/Vm catalogue at F·15 plunderphonics, with adjacencies into hauntology, vaporwave, dark-ambient, and the surrounding post-2010 conceptual-ambient cluster (via the Caretaker direction). The reading the Bureau holds is that James Leyland Kirby is one of the catalogue's clearest single cases of an operator working at sustained scale across considerably-distinct adjacent forms (plunderphonics-and-provocation in the V/Vm period; haunted-ballroom and dementia-themed ambient in the Caretaker period; the own-name extended-ambient work in the Leyland Kirby period) with a continuous editorial position underneath: the working investigation of memory, mediation, the degraded archive, and the conditions under which sound-objects from a previous historical moment can be recovered, manipulated and unmade. The Bureau's position is that V/Vm and the Caretaker should be read together rather than separately, the pop superstructure mangled outward and subjective memory unmade inward being two directions of one method, even though the present file is mainly indexed to the V/Vm operator-name.

Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the High Middle Ages · last revised c. the Anthropocene