page_title: Patience (After Sebald) (soundtrack)
section_title: Composition and sound
hierarchical_section_title: Patience (After Sebald) (soundtrack) / Composition and sound
caption_attribution_description: oilmedium QS:P186,Q296955 painting, After watercolormedium QS:P186,Q22915256 (1825)
context_page_description: The soundtrack for Patience (After Sebald), a film by Grant Gee, was composed and produced by English musician James Leyland Kirby under his ambient music project The Caretaker. The official soundtrack album was issued on 23 January 2012. Unlike other albums of The Caretaker that used old recordings of playful and bright ballroom music, Kirby's score for the film uses a 1927 record of Franz Schubert's piano-and-voice-only composition Winterreise as its main audio source. It also differs from other works of the project where hissing sounds are used instead of crackles, the loops are shorter in lengths, and the non-musical aspects of each track serve as the foreground of the mix. The soundtrack was favorably received by professional music journalists.
context_section_description: The soundtrack is a set of classical ambient piano-based music categorized by Jordan Cronk of Coke Machine Glow as "one of the warmest, most tangible examples of modern drone music." Unlike past works of The Caretaker where the audio snippets used were from bright, playful ballroom records, the main audio source of the soundtrack is a degraded 1927 78-rpm recording of a rendition of Winterreise (1828), a piece by Austrian composer Franz Schubert. The record was bought by Gee and given to Kirby for making the film's music. 
  Labeled by critic Andrew Ryce as "one of Kirby's most consistent and stylistically severe" works, the soundtrack only consists of pianos and vocals. As the official press release for the film describes, the soundtrack uses parts of the 78-rpm recording and turns them into a "dust-caked haze of plangent keys, strangely resolved loops and de-pitched vocals which recede from view as eerily as they appear." The samples are repeated, stretched, and detuned to the point where, in the words of AllMusic journalist Heather Phares, "they're nothing but ghostly shadows of themselves" and "literal rings of melancholia." The snippets are altered in ways that results in pianos sounding like organs or synthesizers and, in the words of Knapman, voice parts that turn into "almost operatic arias." 
  Knapman noted that the loops on the soundtrack are shorter in length than what would usually be heard on other releases of the Caretaker. "Increasingly absorbed in his own world” uses a repeated sample that is the longest in length out of snippets from all the tracks. Jonny Mugwump, a critic for Fact magazine, wrote that the music doesn't have "narrative development" and instead uses "world-weary atmospherics and heavy repetition and loops," a structure identical to The Caretaker's album Persistent Repetition of Phrases (2008). The score also differs from previous Caretaker works in that hissing sounds are used instead of vinyl crackles and the non-musical elements of the music serve as the main focus (the hiss sounds). As Rory Gibb of The Quietus analyzed, the pianos are "half-vanished" by the sounds of static noises and dark mist, while Ben Beaumont-Thomas of The Guardian wrote that the pianos "lollop along, drenched in static, while detuned voices burble from the murk." 
  Each piece of Patience (After Sebald)'s score has audio samples and static sounds with different timbres and moods as well as varied amounts of processing, and the soundtrack balances between both calm pieces such as "Increasingly Absorbed in His Own World" and sinister cuts such as "No One Knows What Shadowy Memories Haunt Them to This Day" in a chiaroscuro-like technique. The most processing takes place on the second half of the original album release, where, in the words of Mark Richardson of Pitchfork, "transformation becomes the prevailing theme." Throughout the soundtrack, the tone of the hiss textures range from calm to harsh to the point where it "separat[es] the listener from the melody" on "Approaching the Outer Limits of Our Solar System," Phares analyzed. Certain samples are used in more than one track but significantly change in terms of how they are processed or change in speed. For instance, “I have become almost invisible, to some extent like a dead man" consists of a piano sample with only very little static sounds in the background. The same snippet is used in “In the deep and dark hours of the night" but with the sample being slowed down and the static being much more present in the mix. 
  The soundtrack also varies in the way samples are edited. On "As If One Were Sinking into Sand," the piano loop cuts out and starts over when it perform a melody that starts to "trail up hesitantly," which "expresses Sisyphean frustration" in the words of Phares. She wrote that the track "When the Dog Days Were Drawing to an End" involves a loop where a piano "anticipates a murky vocal," but the loop repeats before the vocal line can finished, thus "leaving listeners craving a resolution that never comes." On "The Homesickness That Was Corroding Her Sou
caption: The main audio source used for the soundtrack of Patience (After Sebald) is a 1927 recording of Winterreise (1828) by composer Franz Schubert.
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