Leyland Kirby’s project as the Caretaker wasn’t always about dementia. “Initially it was all about ghosts and memories,” the experimental producer explained in 2012 about what’s now his best-known musical alias. Named after the job title of Jack Nicholson’s doomed protagonist in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Kirby sampled old Jazz Age 78s to make the kind of eerily distorted dance tunes you could imagine haunting the Overlook Hotel. It was a spin on similar techniques Kirby employed on rave and pop music in his main project V/Vm, but he later grew inspired by neurodegenerative diseases and studies on the positive effects of playing patients music from their youth. The Caretaker’s labyrinthine recordings suddenly found a new significance, and audience, with 2011’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, a record instantly hailed as Kirby’s masterpiece and one where music and concept paired so perfectly it felt like they’d always been inseparable.
Kirby must have felt similarly. In 2016, he went so far as “diagnosing” the Caretaker with dementia before announcing an ambitious multi-part finale to retire the project. Titled Everywhere at the End of Time, the project follows worsening stages of dementia through six releases over three years and is scheduled to end in 2019. It’s first three albums—Stage 1, Stage 2, and Stage 3—felt like retreads of sounds and ideas the Caretaker’s earlier masterpiece already perfected. But if Everywhere at the End of Time’s trajectory felt predictable at the halfway point, the dark, disorienting Stage 4 marks a total reconfiguration. It’s the Caretaker’s best record since Empty Bliss while evolving its sound in new and often frightening ways.
The record represents the beginning of the “Post Awareness” stages of dementia, setting up the unreleased Stage 5 and Stage 6 by breaking down foundational qualities present since the project’s inception. Gone are the short, melancholy vignettes with wistful titles like “It’s just a burning memory” or “We don’t have many days.” They’re replaced by four soundscapes, each stretching past the 20-minute mark and all but one clinically dubbed “Post Awareness Confusions.” They capture the darkest, most damaged sounds in the project’s lifespan whether dwelling on one ghostly sample for minutes or violently accelerating through skipping melodies, similar to the ambient experimental touchstone, Oval’s 94 Diskont. Stage 4 is likewise a record that makes you feel surrounded, making you a participant rather than an observer.
This is all by design. Kirby has said that the project is more about the second half than the first. Songs and samples from his earlier records, particularly 1937’s “Goodnight, My Beautiful,” resurface now in a almost unrecognizable blurs. By continually returning to the same samples over the years, Kirby has subtly programmed many of them into our own memories. It pays off amid the recollections and second-guessing of Stage 4, where the simple act of remembering a sample can be filled with this sense of tragedy.
While the three “Post Awareness Confusions” reach unexplored extremes for the Caretaker, the dreamlike “Temporary Bliss State” enters a new world entirely. Kirby leaves no trace whatsoever of the dusty 78 samples that define the project, warping whatever his source material was into pure ethereal abstraction. Twinkling, liquid melodies and gentle waves of noise make “Bliss State” even more disorienting than the harrowing “Confusions,” yet it is so beautiful it barely sounds like the Caretaker at all. While previous releases used cheerful samples to create tension, to suggest, as one carefree song on Stage 2 put it, that “A losing battle is raging,” there’s a genuine sense of peace for once. It’s a welcome respite, but it also signals the loss of control from patients with dementia. Going just long enough to make you forget what came before, the abrupt end and jarring snap into the final “Confusion” only becomes more devastating.
Dementia has seen increasing visibility in the years since Kirby first artistically approached the disease. Julianne Moore won an Oscar for portraying an early onset patient in 2014’s Still Alice, last year it received a rosy Disneyfication in Pixar’s Coco, while “Bojack Horseman” envisioned it through surrealist horror. It’s on all our minds because it’s scary, unknowable, and hurts people we love in ways we can’t imagine. One of our natural responses to things like that has always been to turn them into art, but there’s always a risk of pale romanticization. Stage Four becomes much more empathetic because it offers no such romance as the Caretaker closes in on the end—only confusion, terror, and tragedy. Like the end of The Shining, the “ghosts and memories” are taking over, and it’s as difficult to watch as it is to look away.
