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Everywhere at the end of time vinyl1/5/2024 ![]() Where An Empty Bliss… evoked abstract notions of past and memory by keeping its subjects at arms-length, Everywhere… suffers in its reliance on our morbid fascination at human mortality, without any of its underlying humanity. Writing for Pitchfork in his review of 2016’s Stage 1, Brian Howe incisively begged the question of “why should we want to experience dementia by proxy, aesthetically, or even think that we can?”. The self-examination of this voyeurism is something that as a listener, one would hope the series’ is conscious of, though accusations of Kirby romanticizing a terminal illness prove hard to knock when his liner notes liken the early onset of dementia to a “beautiful daydream”. Well, not quite forgotten their re-animated form casts us in the uncomfortable role of time-travelling voyeur, as if taking a peek inside someone else’s long-lost memory.Įverywhere… suffers in its reliance on our morbid fascination at human mortality, without any of its underlying humanity. These aren’t the recordings of Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday, these are songs that the passage of time has rendered discarded, forgotten. Neither, however, does Kirby ever allow us to be situated in an era familiar to us. This self-imposed stylistic debt is no cynical jab for nostalgia akin to Postmodern Jukebox’s vintage-reworked pop. All the tracks in stages 1-3 stay recognisable forms of their original samples and it’s only as we start to push the two-hour mark that the vinyl crackles begin to show. This structure, writ large, is the format of Everywhere At The End Of Time. Whilst the former maintains its jaunty, optimistic tone despite its cloud of muddying distortion, this optimism is rendered obsolete by the haunting despondency of the latter, whose pained string section is barely able to bat away the persistent drone of an amplifier and the crackle of vinyl. The opening of his breakthrough album, 2011’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, displays the unease characteristic of Kirby’s work in the transition between ‘Libet’s Delay’ and ‘I Feel As If I Might Be Vanishing’. ![]() Yet where vaporwave prides itself on nostalgia, on conjuring sounds and visuals that long for a time enveloping our younger selves, Kirby’s appropriation of aged aesthetics tends to have a far more unnerving agenda. At a glance, you could label Kirby’s music as having the same ‘post-modern’ sensibilities of vaporwave there’s no denying that Kirby foregrounds his relation to the musical past just as fervently as his purple-hazed, Kana-clad counterparts. Like all the work released under ‘The Caretaker’ moniker, Kirby utilises samples from pre-war ballroom jazz records, embedding it in a retrospective outlook that sits at odds with the icy futurist roboticism that so many contemporary ambient artists strive for in the quest for a ‘modern’ sound. Mastered and cut by Lupo.In March this year, James Kirby released the sixth and final installment of his album series Everywhere At The End Of Time. On Stage 3, the haunted ballroom's repertoire becomes increasingly muddled, peeling off in recursive contrails from the gestures of "Back There Benjamin", to snag on the stylus in starkly reverberant knots on "Hidden Seas Buried Deep", or worn down to calloused nubs such as "To The Minimal Great Hidden", and "Sublime Beyond Loss", all leading up to some of the project's most uncanny detachments in "Libet Delay" and the coruscating brass shimmer of "Mournful Cameraderie", which beautifully suggest the mercurial nature of memory and its recollection. These are the last stages of awareness before you enter the post awareness stages, where those memories become completely detached from comprehension. ![]() ![]() Singular memories, and all their connotations, begin to atrophy and calcify, crumbling away with each rotation of the record - sometimes in curt scene cuts, others in quietly breathtaking reverbed fizzles like tea lights extinguished, never to flicker again. Continuing to mirror the progression of dementia, using nostalgia for ballroom as an allegory of the disease, The Caretaker's musical flow in places becomes more disturbed, isolated, broken, and distant. In this crepuscular, autumnal phase, recollections phosphoresce, and wilt in advancing stages of entropic decay, steadily approaching a winter of no return. The third of a six album cycle cataloguing The Caretaker's fictional first person account of life with early onset dementia, presenting some of the last coherent memories before confusion fully rolls in and the grey mists fade away.
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