the caretaker everywhere at the end of time

But instead of a house, this place is your mind. And you imagine what might have led to this ruin, and what caused people to leave so suddenly, and the things they might have left hidden behind. You imagine and remember the voices and the bodies that populated these rooms-their blissful joy. Upon finishing Stage 2, in which signs of deterioration slowly become apparent over songs you’ve already heard (but you’re not quite sure, or won’t admit it), I described it to a friend as that eerie, indescribable feeling you get while standing on the grounds of an abandoned house.

A song staining itself in your brain, unknowingly plaquing your synaptic canals with each echoed croon, slowly anticipating a phase where it will render into minor fragments which may only crop up as a trace, or glimpse, of itself later on. A backdrop for words you might have said or things you might have done-a burning memory. This is not ‘Heartaches’ as it was, but as it might be remembered under the needle’s soft hiss. Take the opening track from Stage 1: Al Bowlly’s ‘Heartaches’ (billed here as ‘It’s Just a Burning Memory’). “It is that grave-damp, mildewed odour which the perfume and the preservative never quite covered up which has always made The Caretaker’s music uneasy, rather than easy, listening” ( Ghosts of My Life, 110) In the sleeve notes for a previous album, Mark Fisher writes: It’s like the crackle is more prominent than it should be, and some piano ballads are less formal than the genre would suggest, more impressionistic even. As a first experience with his music, it’s uncanny. In 2011, with An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, Kirby made his first direct foray into exploring Alzheimer’s disease using the ‘haunted ballroom’ collections, fixated on the decay of music itself as an analogue for the deterioration of the mind.īut as if sensing that time itself was the key in expressing the gradual process of this decline, Everywhere At The End Of Time represents the pinnacle of this concept: a 6.5 hour odyssey across his aesthetic goals as an artist, as well as the completion of an empathetic outpouring.īeginning with Stages 1-2, the ballroom selections begin, a retread perhaps of what The Caretaker was attempting with An Empty Bliss. Since then, The Caretaker’s work has been marked by memory, or memory disorders, as his primary theme. It ushered in a hauntological new mode of experimental music in the 2000s, marked by the likes of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, Burial’s first two albums, and the writings of theorists like Mark Fisher.

In 1999, Kirby released Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom, an unnerving debut in which, for the most part, ballroom samples were slowed down and treated with reverb and crepitational textures. Twenty years ago, The Caretaker began as a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, specifically the scenes in the Gold Room in which we hear the haunting, crackly melodies of old-time ballroom crooners like Al Bowlly and the Ray Noble Orchestra. If we take him at his word, it ended in 2019 with the release of the final stage of his masterpiece Everywhere At The End Of Time-a remarkable collection of music which sutures us into the degenerative process of dementia. The Caretaker was one of several monikered projects by UK artist Leyland James Kirby.

The caretaker everywhere at the end of time