The Development of Alzheimer’s Disease
Released between 2016 and 2019, Everywhere at the End of Time (from now on, Everywhere) is the 11th and final recording by Caretaker, aka British electronic musician Leyland Kirby. His six studio albums use samples of derogatory ballroom music in describing the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Kirby created the record as his concluding significant project under a pseudonym and in response to the popularity of An Empty Bliss Beyond This World.
He released and produced the album in Kraków over six months to give the impression of the passage of time. The series consists of six hours of music with an abstract cover by his friend Ivan Seal. It depicts a wide range of emotions and is characterized by noise. The last three stages depart from Kirby’s previous ambient work, apart from the first three stages being similar to An Empty Bliss.
Briefly, the album reflects on the death and breakdown of patients, their feelings, and the phenomenon of terminal lucidity. As Kirby released each stage, the series received increasingly positive reviews from critics. The lengthy concept that dementia drives it made many reviewers feel emotional about its complete edition. Everywhere is one of the most critically acclaimed music releases of the 2010s.
Background
Considered Kirby’s masterpiece, caregivers of dementia also credited the album with increasing empathy for patients among younger listeners. When it first appeared as a hearing challenge on social media in the early 2020s, it quickly became a sensation on the Internet. On the other hand, it also appears as an internet meme. Kirby adopted the pseudonym The Caretaker in 1999, whose work sampled big band recordings.
As heard on the alias’s inaugural album, Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom, he drew inspiration from the ballroom sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. His first record featured an ambient style that would stand out in his later releases. First time exploring memory loss; the project is titled Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia. It is a three-hour album that describes the disease of the same name.
Persistent Repetition of Phrases saw Caretaker gain a greater fan base and critical attention in 2008. Kirby began releasing An Empty Bliss in 2011. He gained recognition for his exploration of Alzheimer’s disease. According to Kirby, so many people love An Empty Bliss and feel that the only concept left for us is to explore the stages of dementia. It became his final release as Caretaker, saying he could not see where to take it after the album.
Symbolic Death of the Musician
Therefore, Everywhere represents a symbolic death of the Caretaker alias itself. Kirby has described the album as an exploration of the totality and progress of dementia. It presents a descriptive and poetic title track in every stage, representing a person with feelings and dementia. Kirby’s work presents ideas of abstraction, confusion, melancholy, and decline. It raises significant questions about the West’s attitude to death.
For most of the album, the swan anthem of Caretaker threatens every moment to give way to nothing. By combining themes of vaporwave and Everywhere, the albums showcased avant-garde experimental metal concepts. Everywhere, it has the physical form of an aura with subtle catharsis. Such exploration of serial corruption incidentally focuses on an attack and not a software decay representative of a neuropathic disease.
According to Kirby, his works belong not only to the broken loop. It is about why they break and how. The sound of Everywhere has been compared to the Caretaker’s electronic style. When analyzing Stage 1, the samples returned constantly and became more degraded with each album. The songs become increasingly distorted with each stage, reflecting the patient’s memory and deterioration.
Wax cylinder and gramophone record loops are used in the jazz manner of the first three acts.
Beaten Frowns After
The songs are shorter on Stage 3, lasting one minute, and usually avoid fade-outs. The penultimate two stages brought chaos to their sound. It represents the patient’s altered perception of reality. The last stage describes the emptiness of the suffering person’s mind. The final 15 minutes feature a minute of silence, a chorus, and an organ, playing the role of death. Stages 4 and 6 are often the focus of the composition and concept of Everywhere.
While Kirby describes the series as more about the final three stages, the confusing cuts of slurred memories bathe in an echoing haze. Enter Stage 1 with the last of the great day’s artwork, Beaten Frowns After. It is a newspaper scroll against an ombre blue background, the most visually calming. Very well, it depicts a simple memory of a time when unaware of the troublesome future.
The stage marks a line of old jazz songs, creating an ominous and bitter feeling. The songs will make us smile as if we are looking back on the best moments in life. However, the echo and static effects are amazing against sweet and bitter. It makes the listener feel worried when we realize something is wrong.
Pittor Pickgown in Khatheinstersper
Therefore, the stage depicts an early sign of memory decline and is the closest album in the series to beautiful daydreams. Its vinyl release featured text reading “Memories That Last a Lifetime.” The stage features the opening seconds of records from the 1920s and 1930s. Mostly, the album displays a range of emotions based on the ones the title track evokes. Despite being upbeat releases, some lovable big band compositions are more distorted than others.
In Stage 2, Pittor Pickgown in Khatheinstersper becomes the title under the name of the art of denial. The slowly collapsing flower vase resembles the art of transition, and true beauty becomes a fading reality. The stage sounds scary but beautiful. It has an atmospheric sound with echo and static effects but overtakes jazz. If jazz songs represent memories, the memories fight against something from Stage 1.
The existing jazz songs drag on as if the person holding the memories is getting tired and sad. The stage acts as a self-realization that something is wrong because of a refusal to accept it. Kirby describes the second stage as having big differences between moods. For example, A Losing Battle Is Raging represents the transition between Stages 1 and 2.
Hag
In addition, it features a more emotional tone than Stage 1. With a more buzzing, condescending, yet melancholy sample, the source material features a more abrupt ending. It explores a hauntological setting and represents the patient’s awareness of her grief and the anguish that comes with it. On the stage, the songs run longer and feature fewer loops. However, the quality could be better.
It symbolizes the patient’s faulty memories and the resulting feelings of denial. Therefore, Kirby describes Stage 2 as the stage where a person remembers and tries more than usual. Going into Stage 3, Hag has a bold green color that is good at things. It featured a more distorted album, notably by being more chaotic halfway through. Apart from depicting repeated grief, the overlap of someone in the late stages of Alzheimer’s is similar to Stage 2.
However, the distorting effects become stronger. Abruptly, the music sinks in and out, skipping around but briefly slipping out of tune before moving on to the next song or memory. We can still feel the patient’s awareness onstage because of jazz music. However, it could have gone faster. Therefore, the stage assumes the role of the patient experiencing the last few coherent memories before complete confusion sets in.
Struggles and Despair of Patients
A gray mist formed and slowly started to dissipate. Returning underwater depicts the struggles and despair of patients in preserving their memories. Songs in Stage 3 end abruptly, always featuring the fade-out common to other stage tracks but becoming more abstract. It incorporates song names from previous stages and creates phrases such as Internal Bewildered World and Sublime Beyond Loss.
It focuses on the conscious patient, similar to An Empty Bliss from the series. According to Kirby, Stage 3 is the closest to An Empty Bliss because it is a happy stage. We realize that we have dementia. The last track of the album is the last melody we can recognize. The stage represents the final embers of consciousness before we enter the post-consciousness stage, regardless of its almost lost melodic quality.
On Stage 1, the opening theme—It’s Just a Burning Memory—introduced a sample from Al Bowlly’s Heartaches, which degraded throughout the series. Bowlly is one of the main people that Kirby sampled in Caretaker. On the third track of Stage 2, Heartaches returns languidly using a different cover of the same song. In this particular version, it sounds grim to Kirby.
Giltsholder
Stage 3’s second track contains the final coherent version of Heartaches. The horn aspect becomes more akin to white noise. In Stage 4, the confusion within Giltsholder imagines that the mind slowly begins to fade. The state of uncertainty and loss plays the role of a kind of human head. However, it lacks features that we can easily see and remember in underlying sufferers. The stage took quite a turn where bits of jazz music lingered but did not stick around for long.
In creating a joyful musical experience, there is a strange feeling of peace throughout the stage. Despite clearly falling apart on the stage, it represents the point where the ability to recall single memories gives way to horror and confusion. Unlike the first three stages; it presents a style more akin to noise. Besides displaying the same style as An Empty Bliss, it marks the beginning of the Post-Awareness stage.
Four compositions occupy the entire vinyl side, with Post Awareness Confusions as the clinical name. Incoherent melodies introduce the surreal aspect and prepare the listener for the last two stages. Most compositions also ignore style aliases and use more distortion than the previous stage.
Eptitranxisticemestionscers Desending
For example, Temporary Bliss State is a quieter track with a smoother sound. The mood serves as a representation of the memory echoes and melodies. Stage 5 acts as familiarity in the abstract. Eptitranxisticemestionscers Desending has a dull color, and no parts are visible. In this stage, memory loss takes full effect based on complex simplicity. However, the stage goes far beyond the feeling of peace as the music gives way to absolute chaos.
Now, the static effect gives the impression of a misfired synapse. What is left of jazz is utterly broken except for the rare moments when it is firmer. The memory lingers for about 10 seconds before going back into a frenzy. The dark ambient sound became a major contributor to the recording. Therefore, Stage 5 has more extreme splits, repetitions, and attachments that we can substitute for more serene moments.
The album broadened its noise influence. The pitches get louder to the ear, the coherent melody loses significance, and the samples overlap. The stage is a traffic jam in audio form, equating it with different neurons from previous albums. In specific tracks, it uses source material whose volume can be a whisper.
Necrotomigaud
Stage 5 shows a complete breakdown in contrast to the first signs of Stage 1. The recording uses most of the vocals from the series, including English lyrics toward the end of the opening track. The stage uses neurological references such as retrogenesis, synapses, and entanglement hypotheses. Finally, Stage 6 explores nothingness. In a nutshell, Necrotomigaud represents acceptance with the calm after the storm.
The upright cardboard box with painter’s tape covering it without a hint of jazz feels like a vast wasteland with little light. Swish sounds moved erratically above the roars and booms. Like an endless abyss, the occasional strong static sound visited everything hopelessly. However, there was still something, even if it was something terrible. Place in the World Fades Away became the last song from Stage 6 and is the title of the entire record.
Unlike the other series, the stages are less glorious and end like being stranded in a desert. Near the end of the track, what sounds like a melancholy and ethereal hymn that a small choir sings marks the last minutes. According to Kirby, the stage has no description, being the most iterative stage of the series. Most would describe it as the sound of emptiness. However, Stage 5 has sound and instrument cuts.
Depicting the Patient’s Apathy
In Stage 6, an empty composition consisting of crackling and hissing is interpreted as depicting the patient’s apathy. The title track also features more emotional and less clinical phrases such as A Brutal Bliss Beyond This Empty Defeat and A Confusion So Thick You Forget Forgetting. Everywhere is a great experience, redefining music as a universal language. The album tells a different story, opening up a different musical feeling.
The unpredictability yet familiarity of the entire album makes for a very inclusive experience for listeners. If we were to describe dementia by the album accurately, then it must be one of, if not the scariest, for us to go through. May the ballroom remain eternal.
Bibliography
- Doran, J. (2016). Out Of Time: Leyland James Kirby And The Death Of A Caretaker. The Quietus.
- Ezra, M. (2020). Why Are TikTok Teens Listening to an Album About Dementia?. The New York Times.
- Hazelwood, H. (2021). Rediscover: The Caretaker: Everywhere at the End of Time. Spectrum Culture.
- Lore, A. M., & Savage, A. (2016). The Caretaker, Memory Loss and the End of Time The Suburbs’: A Majestic Drive Down Memory Lane. Uwire Text. UWIRE. p. 1.
- Vukos, L. (2021). Remembering | The Caretaker & Everywhere at the End Of Time. HeadStuff.
