At this point it's also perhaps worth pointing out the uncannily profound synchronicity between the timelines of Everywhere At The End of Time and Brexit, which both started in 2016 and are due to wrap up in spring 2019. It feels as though one's skull is being scraped out, uncovering hellish layers of accreted sensation and mulched imagery, occasionally recognizing calmer patterns, only for them to fray into the ether before it's possible to parse and dwell on them. In the most classic sense, one becomes witness to an abandonment and dissolution of ego, as the mulch of bygone 78s totally loses itself in a way that connotes misfiring synapses failing to properly relay information at advanced levels of the disease.
EVERYWHERE AT THE END OF TIME VINYL SERIES
Mirroring the endemic deterioration of dementia's latter phases, one is pulled through the most extreme entanglements in the series so far repetition and ruptures, barely maintaining a connection to waking life and a sense of self. Nearing the end, Stage 5 sees our protagonist enter a near-permanent state of confusion and horror. The penultimate release in the series, Stage 5 of The Caretaker's Everywhere At The End of Time charts severe levels of musical/mental deterioration and sensory detachment through four extended, smudged and hallucinatory side-long pieces. When combined with Ivan Seal's bespoke painting for each release from 2011's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World onwards, the project crystallized as a real gesamtkunstwerk for these times, and one arguably defined by a stubborn and intractably chronic drive against the grain of modern popular culture, or even a refusal of it.Ģ019 black vinyl repress. By using fusty samples from an obsolete analog format, and by doing so in the second decade of the second millennium, The Caretaker perfectly and perversely bent ideas of anticipation/expectation with his arrangements, playing with notions of convention and repetition with effect that would lead some listeners to wonder if the same record was being released over and again.
Invoking Jack Nicolson's caretaker character in Stanley Kubrick/ Stephen King's The Shining as metaphor for issues revolving around mental health and a growing dissociation/dissatisfaction with the world, the project really took on new dimensions in 2005 with the 72-track, six-CD boxset Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, which was accompanied by an insightful unpacking of its ideas by cultural critic Mark Fisher, aka K-Punk a stalwart of the project who identified it (alongside music from Burial and Broadcast) among the most vital, emergent works of hauntological art - a form of music often preoccupied with ideas about memory and nostalgia (but one distinct from pastiche), and the way that they possibly overwhelm, occlude, or even define our sense of being ideas that resonate with Fisher's own assertion that capitalism essentially undermines collective thought, distorts the individual, and has tragically lead to a worldwide increase or even ubiquity of mental health-related issues. Mastered by Lupo.Ĭompiling the last three albums in the Everywhere At The End Of Time series - four CDs and almost five hours of material cataloging the ultimate descent into dementia and oblivion, using a patented prism of sound to connote a final, irreversible transition into the haunted ballroom of the mind that he first stepped into with 1999's Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom. Coupled with another deeply enigmatic artwork commission from Ivan Seal, An Empty Bliss Beyond The World, is a highly potent transmission from one of the most singular characters in electronic music. The effect is subtly amplified by the chronic mastering at D&M, allowing each memory to segue seamlessly and unpredictably into the next for an otherworldly and disorienting experience. Sourced from his mysterious collection of 78s, these vague snippets of archaic sonics reflect the ability of Alzheimers patients to recall the songs of their past, and with them recollections of places, people, moods and sensations. James Leyland Kirby conjures a quieter, more introspective spirit, lost in his own mind amidst a low-lit labyrinth of ever-decaying and antediluvian shellac phrases. An Empty Bliss Beyond The World returns our doddering protagonist to the deserted ballroom, wandering its waxed floor and dilapidated grandeur in an attempt to capture an era which has long since disappeared but still haunts the atmosphere.
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