For a human being with the average intellect to enter the black waters of stress, the infatuation of modern love affairs, and the peaks and valleys of depression every day, seems like an impossible task, honestly. The scenario sounds stormy. But it happens. It happens to most of us: sometimes as a necessary evil caused by the organism; other times, as a suicidal function of the mind to remove what hurts, and to be able to be born again from the experience.
Undoubtedly, it sounds unrewarding, but it is still, in both cases, an immunological response to the stimulated reality that we share. In this sense, explore memory (and its paradox, forgetting) through music can produce a (surprisingly nice) opposite effect when worries and obsessive thoughts the aforementioned detonate period symptoms.
Going to sound passages while going through valuable parts of memory or, where appropriate, extirpating said memory to reconfigure the mind, is precisely the central theme of the music of James Leyland Kirbyknown in the experimental scene as The Caretaker.
Time, memory and even melancholy are the forces behind the sound of The Caretaker, designed to meet the expectations of those who want to hear nothing more than inner calm. Or who needs to, once and for all, forget.
And speaking of oblivion, The Caretaker has been working on a state of mind based on sound: dementia (forgetting or withdrawing memories).
Everywhere at the end of time (Everywhere at the end of time) is his latest work, a series of four full-length albums that explore dementia, in its progress process and in its entirety. Each album reveals a key stage in the progression, loss and disintegration of memory, gradually falling into the abyss of complete loss and nothingness. The any like a delicious state, where it is possible to blank the mind and perhaps even reconfigure it throughout the process.
Although all of The Caretaker’s music is entirely instrumental – a mix of environmenta bit of jazz and lounge music from the 30s–, the titles of the compositions are not without attention and are very appropriate for a process of dementia (which strangely also seems to fit in with the secular sentiment of these times): one reads, for example, titles such as «Glimpses of hope in trying times», «Surrendering to despair», «Last moments of pure recall» and the well-known title «An empty bliss beyond this World» from 2011.
The series will consist of six stages, of which 3 have been released and you can listen to them for free through his Bandcamp, or support the music of this genius of musical abstraction and buy his album in the same league.
Everywhere at the end of time It is that album that we all want to listen to to bring back lost memories or simply forget others.
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*Illustrations: The Caretaker album covers by Ivan Seal.
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