Haunting.
Perhaps the single most pain-inducing and existentially intimate thing I’ve ever listened to. The work in question? The Caretaker’s “Everywhere at the End of Time.” This six and half hour long musical project portrays dementia, a debilitating neurological disease that gradually strips one’s ability to think and remember. The project consists of six albums, corresponding with each of the six stages of dementia (although dementia technically has seven stages, stage 0 is not represented as it basically portrays no symptoms).
The creator, Leyland Kirby (operating under the name The Caretaker since 1999), brilliantly utilizes the leitmotif–a recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation. For example, in Stage 1, we can hear old ballroom music from the 30s–a nostalgic, beautiful melody. By Stage 5 we hear the same instrumentation, yet this time the melodic voices are distorted creating a confusing, disorienting atmosphere. Hence, we are left second guessing, have I heard this melody before? It’s deeply uncanny.
“For to be capable of remembering this music as a real-time, living culture, you’d have to be in your nineties now. What Kirby presents here could be heard as the faint, faded memory-fragments of once-beloved tunes as they waver on in atrophying minds.” – Simon Reynolds
Seal, Ivan. beaten frowns after. 2016. Oil on canvas. Cover art for Everywhere at the End of Time – Stage 1 by The Caretaker.
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