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. It tirelessly haunts me, on an endless rotation, a constant spin cycle, a worn out grayscale scene imprinted on a disintegrating celluloid of my mind, unable to let go, unable to move on, unable to keep still in between my tormented past and imaginary future. There are some things that I wish to remember, but in most cases, I wish to forget.2019 repress Originally issued in 2011. ![]() An image, a sound, and most terribly, a smell, stays intact, undisturbed, and extremely pungent, long after the physical essence has vanished. Memory is a hard thing to drown, even as I pop the cork and tilt an old peaty bottle. Walking around the gardens, the piers, and all of the dark corridors of my consciousness, I no longer wish to recall all those words, that voice, and that smile, which felt so much to be a part of my existence, and now only seems to be a dream from which I can’t wake up. ![]() ![]() But unlike it may be with an unwelcome onset of dementia, mine is a coherent and an active pursuit.
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