‘Everywhere at the End of Time’: A Short Review of The Caretaker’s Album
For every human being, music is bound with all sorts of emotions. We perceive music in different ways. Some people have a wide range of music tastes, and some are stubborn with their music tastes. By embracing a broad range of music or being picky with the genres, categories, themes, or languages of music, they certainly pave a certain path in their lives as well. This behaviour of one person’s listening is very reflective in every other aspect of life, or it can be said in the opposite as well. What I want to talk about is neither the issue of music taste nor preaching to everyone to listen to a beautiful six and half-hour-long avant-garde masterpiece in the history of post-modern music released from 2016 to 2019 by Leyland Kirby AKA The Caretaker titled ‘Everywhere At The End Of Time’. I just want to talk about this certain piece and how this music piece, since changing a perception of music is also changing a view of life itself, can effect one’s perception of life itself, from my own experience, despite its overwhelming length, which gives off a sigh from most people with a seemingly impossible-to-do kind of mindset. But the mystic aspect of this album is what makes it worthwhile. ‘Everywhere at the End of Time’ pulls us into a mystic state and makes us wander through the soundscape of a certain theme (dementia) for six and a half hours. By the end of the final track of the album, we come back with an ineffable treasure of an experience. I have had this same mind-blown “Woah” moments in my life while reading some philosophy texts and stories, especially quiet a lot when I’m watching or reading One Piece, one of the greatest stories ever told by the genius Eiichiro Oda. Unlike the philosophical, narrative, and political liberations it enables through the story, this one musical wraps us in more of a haunting, bothersome, nightmarish world that dwells more into the emotional well and tries to make us go through the fearsome experience of dementia. The scary aspects of one’s decaying mind and the horrible state of not having the memories that make us the people we are now are perfectly conveyed through this art piece. It can be said that its length is appropriate and well-paced, with the theme and intention of conveying the experience of having dementia rather than producing just an avant-garde experience in name.
‘Everywhere at the End of Time’ consists of six stages that are composed throughout the span of three years. ‘The Caretaker’ starts with the title track ‘It’s just a burning memory’ in stage 1 and ends with the final and 50th track titled ‘Place in the world fades away’ with the very (symbolic) death of Kirby’s alias ‘The Caretaker’. Since this is the journey of a person with Alzheimer’s disease and how it eventually kills the person that is affected, The Caretaker’s symbolic death adds to the ending of this musical experience with a realistic and satisfying ending. The cover art by Ivan Seal, Kirby’s friend, for all six parts is perfectly in sync with the music. The detailed information is available on Wikipedia, as are other interviews by Kirby himself. It provides more details on his music and Seal’s cover art as well.
The minimalist approach in the music (which is mostly plunderphonics or creating music from playing with already existing samples) as well as on the cover art made me wonder about the aspects that made this such a masterpiece and the aspects that made me look at music from an entirely new perspective. Never have I thought in my life that an experience that is so far from me can be perceived, even as a glimpse, through music and that music can be used and perceived in such a way. Of course, everyone understands and perceives the emotional aspects of music, and that music connects with people outside of language without even needing to mention it. Like an arpeggio, a common type of broken chord, gives off the feeling of suddenly wanting to cry and feeling depressed; like the G major and other keys or a piece played with pentatonic scales that gives off the serene and calm or melancholic feeling to us, the music world conveys so much on an emotional level. Some genius artists like Kirby take it to another level by widening the horizons of musical experience and what it can convey by sometimes breaking the norms of the orthodox way of musical theory tradition and experimenting with things by putting their lives and souls into the art. That’s how this six and a half-hour music piece stands on its own horizon with the new musical experience it provides. It not only takes us into a very longing melancholic nostalgia that any adult wishes to go back to, but it also takes that nostalgic feeling as a tool to create the foundation for a shared memory and an eventual demise of it and the very memory of that person themselves by creating a certain experience of our very self from that nostalgic piece, which he samples from Sid Phillip’s Heartbreak (1931) and ideas influenced by the haunted-ballroom scene of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s work The Shining (1980) and others. By crafting such a lengthy music piece, he hypnotizes us to be in the state of a person with dementia, and little by little, he haunts us with the horror of having to forget those memories, sometimes with the interference of the glitches and dissociations in the musical flow. With my very little musical knowledge, this is all I can say about the unique approach of this avant-garde postmodern masterpiece. These kinds of music experiences that go beyond emotional or linguistic boundaries are still to be explored and are being explored by people like Kirby. Rap music is another example of this. This view or experience makes the point that there is still much to be explored in art, even though everything seems repetitive and feels like there is nothing more to the music of art in this post-modern world. After all, Pythagoras must have realized when he put music in the quadrivium the infinite potentiality of music, like he saw in the other three, which are mathematics, geometry, and astronomy.
People who believe art is a synonym or medium for happiness can find the contradiction of such beliefs through this musical and other similar art pieces and will be left with two choices. One will be to accept art beyond the concepts of entertainment, politics, and information and to embrace it as a free, whole, and large monad as of the Lebinizian substance or as much complicated as the universe itself. The latter choice will be to reject any art or the concept of art that is beyond one’s taste and understanding and continue to be on the crude and narrow path as they have been going on.
