Everywhere at the End of Time | The Caretaker
As always, I highly suggest you listen as you read…
especially for this one.
Today I discovered the music of Leyland Kirby (a.k.a. The Caretaker), a 46-year-old British composer of electronic music, whose catalog has been described with words like, “ambient,” “experimental,” “hauntology,” and “plunderphonics.” As you can probably guess by my desire to share my experience almost immediately, I’m sure you could predict that I was blown away by it.
Nearly all of ‘The Caretakers’’ works, at least under that moniker, deal with one specific topic: memory loss. Over the many years of his musical career, he’s released a number of albums that delve into diseases like Alzheimer’s and the related ideas of memory, identity, and loss. Which, just as it stands, is already such an intriguing project for a medium like music to tackle. As an aspiring composer, I have learned time and time again the frustration of wanting to say something with my music, only to find myself unable to find the sounds to express the idea. Yet something like dementia, despite its complexities, fits almost perfectly into just what the musical art-form can express better than any other: time and fluidity. And, from what I’ve been able to tell, Everywhere at the End of Time is the most magnum of opera by this curious artist.
Before you consider listening to it all as you read, know that the project Everywhere at the End of Time is divided into six albums—or stages—that span just over six and a half hours. It comprises fifty tracks that slowly toil along the path of mental degradation, recalling the music from long ago with constantly deteriorating clarity and consistency. Nearly all of the tracks included were sampled from 78-rpm ballroom records from the 1930s, starting as clear as the vinyl itself, but slowly relinquishing their identity as the memories fade. If you can, I highly suggest listening to bits of the first few tracks, and then sitting through some of the final tracks, just to understand exactly what happens across this quarter-day listening experience.
Frankly, it’s a bit hard to tell what about this project is even true. The final of six albums released back in March 2019, nearly five years after the first. In September 2020, it became a viral phenomenon on TikTok. Listeners claimed it was composed in tandem with cutting-edge dementia research and was clinical in its accuracy in relating the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Others said listening to all six and a half hours in one setting broke them, and was the most formative musical experience they ever had. On TikTok, rumors floated that elderly patients were able to hum along with many of the tunes despite having never heard them.
To my knowledge, most of it is myth. It does really seem that ‘The Caretaker’ did his research though, and is deliberate in the effects on the music, beginning with “burning memories” accompanied by the nostalgic sound of vinyl cracks. Followed by the frustration of self-awareness that something is happening and being lost, only to be lost to confusion and horror. The two hours, stages 5 and 6, are described as ‘Post-Awareness’ where any coherence of self-identity is lost, and memories roll out at random, unconnected and untethered. Drones overtake melodies, vinyl surface noise is amplified and the tempo of what melodic fragments remain lose all structure. A church choir enters after a long moment of silence to demonstrate the phenomenon of terminal lucidity, or a sudden return to mental clarity and memory only hours before death. Silence fills the rest of the runtime.
Say what you will, but I can’t think of many more interesting music projects I’ve heard of. This is a surreal and haunting experience, that is tragic and beautiful and absolutely massive. I am reminded of the first time I ever sat with the score of The Rite of Spring while listening to the recording, only able to muster the single thought:
My God, how could anyone have come up with that?
