The Caretaker – Everywhere At The End Of Time - Stage 6

Review of the whole series:

Everywhere at The End of Time is a monumental achievement in music. Drawing inspiration from The Shining, William Basinski, John Cage, and others, Leyland Kirby has very effectively captured the tragedy, horror, confusion, and final release of dementia. Beginning with the echoes of old ballroom and lounge music, we gradually descend into pure noise and oblivion (especially by album 4), while desperately attempting to form some semblance of reality. By album 6, all we have left is the echoes of the echoes of the echoes. The nothingness of the final stage. It is only by the very end, the end of the very last track, where the audio suddenly cuts out and we are finally allowed to have a kind of release in the form of one more musical number. It is here where we experience one final moment of "terminal lucidity," then followed by a 60 second period of silence for mourning.

From my childhood, I witnessed the gradual decline of my only living grandmother to Alzheimer's disease. For her, it was quite slow. Every year, my family would visit her first in her own home, and then in a nursing home. When she could no longer who we were, or how to feed herself, she was placed into a special section. There, the staff were inattentive and unknowledgeable. People roamed around the halls screaming into the air. People would be placed in front of the TV with informercials playing. I prayed for her to return to us, but of course, nothing helped. The staff put up eerie portraits of elderly people in clown makeup all over the building. Most of the people were not smiling in these pictures. It was one of many perplexing decisions intended to somehow brighten up the day for residents. Visiting for several weeks every year and seeing my grandmother in this place, deteriorating until she could no longer perform any tasks on her own, was both a devastating and surreal experience. This woman was once vibrant and talkative. She was loving and wonderful, but this disease slowly took her mind and she lost all understanding of the world around her. By the time she ed away, she had already been unresponsive and bedridden for several weeks. For my mother (her daughter), she had died long ago. For me, it was beyond comprehension.

This series is definitely not for everybody. It also could have easily ended up sounding insensitive and pretentious in the wrong hands. What Kirby has done here is open us up to the possibilities of better emotionally connecting with the state of a certain kind of loss, attempting the perspective of the one experiencing this mental transformation. For someone close to people who have declined in this way, this series may be very impactful. I know it is for me. I found myself getting very emotional, especially by the end. Leyland Kirby's recontextualization of otherwise banal ballroom and lounge music was already a stroke of genius. Here, he has conceptually tied it all together into one 6 and a half hour series. It is both a disturbing and tragic nightmare represented as sound. It is a masterpiece.

Having gotten through five hours of music already, you reach the last stage in this sequence. Has the experience been worth it or rewarding? Only you can say, but at this point you are nearing the decayed culmination of this strange musical spiral you have been falling down. Perhaps you begin to forget it is even there as it fades into a background hum, as your mind is near empty after the audio assault of the last two stages. This is not the point you decide whether the experience was worth it, but it is the point where it will be clear what you got out of it, or what you did not. I would not recommend this full project to everyone, and to those I do recommend it to I say with the advice that you should try to make sure you listen to this when you are in a good mental position, as I feel for some the ending could be quite distressing as the music forgets what it was. It may have no effect at all on some people save for being very bored. I think the whole 'THIS ALBUM WILL BREAK YOU' idea isnt a given, I think this album could very much just bore you, but it is still worth giving that warning to people to make sure they are in an ok place before giving it a full listen.

The D side hits different. It’s a very emotional experience. Especially the last 5 minutes.

This final piece of the puzzle fits in place like an ironic time honored memory. The darkness has taken over and the sounds of being buried underground crackle and fizz like a freshly poured carbonated beverage. The sound of insects burrowing beside you. The slowing of the breath. These minimal aspects of sound are so cleverly utilized. There is more than atmosphere going on here. It's like we are peering into our own future. But it doesn't feel eerie or empty. It does feel like sadness. Especially when the final few minutes of this composition come to light. The notes now sound like a voice being splayed through a dense haze trapped under a frozen lake. The music is fading to a blur, translucent in nature, pouring light from the notes crying to reach our ears. It's a devastation. A true denouement. It's the end of time. Everywhere.

The D side is definitely one of the most heartbreaking pieces of the project, especially in the last minutes of it. What a sad way of closing the sonic journey that is Everywhere at the end of time. But don't get me wrong, It is absolutely amazing.