Everywhere at the End of Time is the eleventh recording by the Caretaker, an alias of English electronic musician Leyland Kirby. Released between 2016 and 2019, its six studio albums use degrading loops of sampled ballroom music to portray the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Inspired by the success of An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (2011), Kirby produced Everywhere as his final major work under the alias. The albums were produced in Kraków and released over six-month periods to "give a sense of time passing", with abstract album covers by his friend Ivan Seal. The series drew comparisons to the works of composer William Basinski and electronic musician Burial, while the later stages were influenced by avant-gardist composer John Cage.
The series comprises six hours of music, portraying a range of emotions and characterised by noise throughout. Although the first three stages are similar to An Empty Bliss, the last three depart from Kirby's earlier ambient works. The albums reflect the patient's disorder and death, their feelings, and the phenomenon of terminal lucidity. To promote the series, anonymous visual artist Weirdcore created music videos for the first two stages. At first, concerned about whether the series would seem pretentious, Kirby thought of not creating Everywhere at all, and spent more time producing it than any of his other releases. The album covers received attention from a French art exhibition named after the Caretaker's Everywhere, an Empty Bliss (2019), a compilation of archived songs.
As each stage was released, the series received increasingly positive reviews from critics; its length and dementia-driven concept led many reviewers to feel emotional about the complete edition. Considered to be Kirby's magnum opus, Everywhere was one of the most praised music releases of the 2010s. Caregivers of people with dementia also praised the albums for increasing empathy for patients among younger listeners, although some medics felt the series was too linear. It became an Internet phenomenon in the early 2020s, emerging in TikTok videos as a listening challenge, being transformed into a controversial mod for the video game Friday Night Funkin' (2020), and appearing in internet memes.
Background
In 1999, English electronic musician Leyland Kirby adopted the pseudonym the Caretaker, whose work sampled big band records. Kirby drew influence from the haunted-ballroom scene of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's work The Shining (1980), as heard on the debut release of the alias, Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom (1999). His first records featured the ambient style that would be prominent in his last releases. The project first explored memory loss in Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia (2005), a three-hour-long album portraying the disease of the same name. By 2008, Persistent Repetition of Phrases saw the Caretaker alias gaining critical attention and a larger fanbase.
In 2011, Kirby released An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, attaining acclaim for its exploration of Alzheimer's disease. Although Kirby initially did not want to produce more music as the Caretaker, he felt compelled to continue the project following the success of An Empty Bliss. He then thought the only concept left to explore was the progression of dementia, which he envisioned would gradually unravel through a series of six albums. It would be his final release as the Caretaker; Kirby said, "I just can't see where I can take it after this." Everywhere at the End of Time represents the symbolical "death" of the Caretaker alias itself, with many tracks from the pseudonym's earlier releases being sampled in it.
Music and stages
The albums, which Kirby describes as exploring dementia's "advancement and totality", present poetic track titles and descriptions for each stage, which represent a person with dementia and their feelings. Ideas of deterioration, melancholy, confusion, and abstractness are present throughout, and according to writer Alexandra Weiss, Kirby's work "raises significant questions about Western attitudes toward death." Tiny Mix Tapes suggested that, as the swan song of the Caretaker alias, Everywhere "threatens at every moment to give way to nothing." The albums feature an avant-gardist, experimental concept, with music magazine Fact noting a "hauntological link" between Everywheres style and vaporwave's themes. Author Sarah Nove praised Everywheres lack of a physical form of aura, while Bandcamp Dailys Matt Mitchell wrote that the series ends in "ethereal catharsis".