Living with Everywhere at the End of Time
Warning: This article contains upsetting themes (dementia, death) and spoils the ending of “Everywhere at the End of Time” by The Caretaker.
It’s about 8:50 a.m when you wake up. In half a minute or so a little switch inside your head will flick on, and memories of who you are, where you need to be, and what you need to do will all come back but before that there’s a grace period. Those thirty seconds are marked by… nothing. Nothing. Not a thought passes through. Though stimuli of various colour, loudness, sweetness, pressure, and intensity are still experienced, there’s no effort to turn them into something real, something to understand. You can’t really make sense of it, but in no time at all those memories come back, and with them *you* come back.
There’s something really fickle about memory. The ten-foot stumble from bedroom to bathroom is one you’ve taken every day of your life, the slight tension of getting ready in time for work is one you’ve felt almost as many times, but you can’t recall the specifics of these experiences past maybe four weeks ago. You remember what you had for lunch today, you’ll remember it tomorrow, but in a fortnight’s time you won’t know whether you had that sandwich on a Tuesday or a Friday. There’s overlap and entanglement. It’s fine.
Despite forgetting some of the less exciting stuff you can remember your name, and your birthday, and all about the smaller things that really add to life. One of those things is music. In the bathroom as you mindlessly brush your teeth you reach with your free hand for your phone. Unlock. Bandcamp. Play. Soft, fuzzy piano loops fill the room with a carefree sense of vacancy. The song is called “An Autumnal Equinox”; it takes all of the tension out of your shoulders, and puts your conscious mind into a state similar to that waking emptiness, but something’s indistinctly off about the tune you’re hearing. It’s not engaging enough to become boring, but goes on a touch too long. The fuzziness heard at first is now clearly some kind of flaw. The mindlessness that just minutes ago was the day’s welcoming mercy now seems too seductive, too alluring, too sedative. You remember now where this song is from.
“Everywhere at the End of Time” is the final album by The Caretaker, a project of composer Leyland James Kirby that deals with memory and its destruction. Over the course of three years (2016–2019) Kirby released “Everywhere” in six stages, each one corresponding to a stage of dementia, specifically the kind that arises from Alzheimer’s disease. Dementia is one of the world’s most evil conditions. It’s hard to be succinct when discussing such an all-encompassing illness, which is why “Everywhere” in it’s entirety runs well past six hours, most of it a knotted mockery of the source material. See, The Caretaker doesn’t record music in the traditional sense. Kirby uses vinyl records of big band and ballroom music of the 1930s and 1940s to represent the memories of today’s older generations, and proceeds to warp them in ways that progress from light twising to blunt and chaotic slaughter. He applies reverb, looping, noise, and filters to great effect, the result of thousands of hours’ work. Even with the chaos of later stages, though, there’s no sense of joy from the artist. With the release of “Stage 1" Kirby ‘diagnosed’ The Caretaker persona with dementia, attracting some criticism from the likes of Pitchfork in the process. Ultimately however this pays off; The Caretaker is not the guide of a composition, but the undertaker of a process. “Stage 3” is rife with distortions of the artists own prior works, a truly sad struggle to reclaim takes place on tracks like “Libet Delay”, the title itself a misspelling of “Libet’s Delay” from 2011. The meta-narrative at play isn’t an essential one, but it does foreshadow the album’s ability to bleed from headphones or speakers into the real world.
In the bathroom you switch the track over to something more cheery. You’d sworn that you had stopped thinking about this ‘dementia music’ after weeks of reading, studying really, following that first full listen. But the unlit chambers of “Hidden Sea Buried Deep” and “Long Term Dusk Glimpses” won’t go away. The monstrous beyond of the “post-awareness stages” won’t go away. At another lunch break you sit listening to the desperate roar of “Stage 4 Post Awareness Confusions”, one of three identically titled tracks, each a pathetic attempt to remount crashed trains of thought. There are pieces of “Stage 1” here somewhere, but like the colours of your bedroom walls just after waking they can’t be understood, only let in. You tell yourself that this is some kind of education, but there’s nothing to learn as speech, violins, trumpets, and God knows what else fire off into nothingness. By the time the next track, “Temporary Bliss State”, starts you’re so battered that any sense of beauty is embraced, even if it’s born of profound wrongdoing. The chimes and bells of this song are in the wrong order. The chronology makes no sense, it seems to go forwards, then backwards, then, somehow, off to the side. It’s a sickly hell, but in there is a chance to be mindless yet again. This time you feel forced to take the offer.
By any musical standards “Everywhere at the End of Time” is very upsetting. It evokes feeling strong enough to induce tears without leaning into any particular conventional emotion. By the time of the album’s climax (track thirty-nine, the first of the aforementioned “Confusion” tracks) the idea of emotion has been so worn down that there can be no payoff. Kirby shreds the tension of two hours’ buildup, denying the whiplash transition into pure horror its deserved impact. To be so entitled, however, is to lose sight of the album’s purpose. Dementia cannot care about your story, its resolution, or how well it fits into a six act structure. It certainly doesn’t exist for your entertainment. There is only loss, and very immediate frustration. Amidst the cacophony it’s hard to not forget any reason to be annoyed.
At home again you stop by a couple of the virtual communities dedicated to understanding what you can’t. In trying to translate the unknowable Kirby has gotten close enough to engage fiery curiosity on Reddit, Discord, and Youtube. You think about giving the record another full listen, and start the first track “It’s just a burning memory”. The sample this song builds from is Al Bowlly’s “Heartaches”, which reappears in various states of decay across all six stages. Each time it reappears so does a great shame, for there was no appreciation for the barely harmed ambience of the first two stages, or the still-there melodies of “Stage 3", or the activity and liveliness of “Stage 4”. You can’t bring yourself to push past track two. You know what comes next. You wouldn’t if this were real. The record is filling the space in your brain you so carelessly left vacant.
Midway through the fifth act is “Synapse Retrogenesis”, named for the theory which describes dementia as reversal into a child’s mind. It’s the most clinical of all the track titles, but alas the prognosis is wrong. The album heads not for birth from this point out, but to death. In following two viciously atonal noise collages (tracks forty-three and forty-four share the name “Advanced Plaque Entanglements”) “Retrogenesis” ends survival efforts and begins death surrender. The music becomes so far removed from its origin that drones of frozen reverb become the main content. The void is now enforced, all that is left.
“Stage 6” is the one you hate the most but resist the least. Listening to the whole album leaves you with a devastating weakness going into “A confusion so thick you forget forgetting”, but jumping in from a stronger position is useless also. The track is comprised of bulldozing rumbles, the leftovers of nothing, with a spare bump in the noise spitefully reminding you that the future can’t change. You know what comes next. You feel like you don’t. “A brutal bliss beyond this empty defeat” is similarly hollow as The Caretaker, now well into the business of dying, fires off echoes with absolute malice. “Long decline is over” is hopeful only in that this is as bad as it gets. You feel vicariously broken, waiting for the next spare note, grasping feebly at any sound that isn’t just nonsense. “Place in the world fades away”, the finale, approximates death. It is, predictably, ridiculously barren. But as the meaningless, harsh, quiet drones finally buckle under their own weightlessness something rises. A recognisable sound. Voices, a choir, imperfect but just… real. And it feels like you have never been so happy to have something to think about.
But naturally the album doesn’t leave you. Once you step out of The Caretaker’s shoes you’re left with the ennui of having gone through this pain for no tangible payoff. Again, diseases are not entertainment, but there’s now a burning need you didn’t know you had. Turning away from the screen, and into the days and weeks ahead, some of the answers become slightly less obscured. You talk with your grandmother about her favourite movies, and note that she was really into Hitchcock. You take a minute to really look at the garden, at your desk, at your face in the mirror. Blades of grass become gorgeous, as does the smell of a clean bed, as does a walk just outside of town, as does a conversation with a coworker about anything tangible. Your memory expands, and sharpens, and becomes more colourised and generally correct. You decide that should dementia come for your memory, you’ll show it something it really has to fight for.
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Please Donate to Alzheimer’s Society UK: https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/
Everywhere at the End of Time: https://thecaretaker.bandcamp.com/album/everywhere-at-the-end-of-time
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Pitchfork Review of Everywhere at the End of Time: Stage 1: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22470-everywhere-at-the-end-of-time/
RA Review of Everywhere at the End of Time: Stage 6: https://www.residentadvisor.net/reviews/23649#:~:text=It%20seems%20designed%20to%20drive,terms%20with%20what%20Alzheimer's%20entails.
Quietus Interview with Leyland James Kirby: https://thequietus.com/articles/20970-leyland-james-kirby-interview-the-caretaker
“Playing Metal Gear…” — The article that inspired this one: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/06/playing-metal-gear-solid-v-the-phantom-pain
