The Caretaker: Everywhere at the End of Time
Ambient music has a habit of all running together, but on 2011’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, James Leyland Kirby devised a series of ways to stand out. He invoked the purgatorial ballroom of The Shining with his project’s name, the Caretaker; layered it with Alzheimer’s studies; and spun it through loopy, languid edits of Jazz Age 78s. The results were soothing to the ear, lucid to the imagination, and rich with historical feeling, all unified in a meditation on degradation, memory, and time. There was also an implied provocation in Kirby’s sweet, almost jaunty treatment of losing one’s mind. Ambient masterpieces like Empty Bliss often cause me to think, “I’d take six more albums of that.” But in the event, I’m not as sure.
Everywhere at the End of Time has been planned as a six-stage release. The first three will come out as downloads and LPs between now and next year, when they will also be compiled in a CD set; the last three follow the same pattern from March 2018 to 2019. The premise is that the Caretaker, one of Kirby’s long-running aliases, has been diagnosed with early onset dementia. The music will chart the patient’s decline, ending in the alter ego’s “death.” Memory, incarnated as resurfacing bits of music from throughout the Caretaker’s oeuvre, will progressively smear and recombine.
In short, it’s an extreme continuation of what Kirby did on Empty Bliss, his most popular release to date: lingering on the precipice where pleasant reverie slips into the abyss. As on that album, pitches laze, overtones huff and puff, lines elongate, surface noise crackles, and scratches slash out a rhythmic rain. But mainly, the loops just play, stuck somewhere between dreamlike and deathly, until suddenly, ominously, they stop. Roaring Twenties horns turn from saucy to sloe-eyed, poky and dopey, as if a heavily opiated combo kept losing its place in a Gershwin tune.
“Here we experience the first signs of memory loss,” Kirby writes in liner notes. “This stage is most like a beautiful daydream. The glory of old age and recollection. The last of the great days.” But we begin to hear more severe signs of breakdown around halfway through it. On “Slightly Bewildered,” the instrumentation becomes an almost toneless mooing, the loop wrapping around with a stagger. “Things That Are Beautiful and Transient” is inside-out, the melody an inner voice, its harmonic field the foreground. A winning gentleness pervades later tracks like “An Autumnal Equinox” and “The Loves of My Entire Life,” but by the end, even gentleness has taken on a desperate tinge, as though if the dancing stops, everyone dies.
