For a human being with the average intellect to enter day by day into the black waters of stress, the infatuation of modern loves and the peaks and abysses of depression, it seems like a task, honestly, impossible. The scenario sounds stormy. But it happens. It happens to most of us: sometimes as a necessary evil caused by the body; other times, as a suicidal function of the mind to remove what is harmful, and to be able to be born again from the experience.
Without a doubt, it sounds unrewarding, but it is still, in both cases, an immunological response to the stimulated reality that we share. In this sense, exploring memory (and its paradox, forgetting) through music can produce the opposite effect (surprisingly pleasant) when worries and obsessive thoughts trigger the aforementioned period symptoms.
Going to sound passages while going through valuable parts of memory or, where appropriate, removing said memory to reconfigure the mind, is precisely the central theme of the music of James Leyland Kirby, known in the experimental scene as The Caretaker.
Time, memory and even melancholy are the forces that halo the sound of The Caretaker, designed to satisfy the expectations of those who want to hear nothing more than an inner calm. Or who needs, once and for all, to forget.
And speaking of forgetting, The Caretaker has been working on a mental state based on sound: dementia (forgetting or extracting memories).
Everywhere at the end of time is their latest work, a series of four full-length albums that explore dementia, in its progression 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. Nothingness as 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 ambient, a bit of jazz and 1930s lounge music – the titles of the compositions are still striking and 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 already 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 is that album that we all want to listen to to bring back lost memories or simply forget others.
Also in Ecoosphere:
#MusicalRecommendation, a delicious album to navigate the waters of stress
*Illustrations: The Caretaker album covers by Ivan Seal.