The Caretaker - (2016) Everywhere at the End of Time

 

 History Always Favours The Winners ‎– HAFTW025  Part One / Two

EVERYWHERE AT THE END OF TIME (COMPLETE EDITION)

When work began on this series it was difficult to predict how the music would unravel itself. Dementia is an emotive subject for many and always a subject I have treated with maximum respect.

Stages have all been artistic reflections of specific symptoms which can be common with the progression and advancement of the
different forms of Alzheimer's.

Thanks always for your support of this series of works
remembered by The Caretaker.

Physical editions of all stages on both vinyl and compact-disc
are available now and are being distributed by Boomkat.
 
May the ballroom remain eternal.

C'est fini.

--

STAGE 1 - (A+B)
Here we experience the first signs of memory loss.
This stage is most like a beautiful daydream.
The glory of old age and recollection.
The last of the great days.

STAGE 2 - (C+D)
The second stage is the self realisation and awareness that something is wrong with a refusal to accept that. More effort is made to remember so memories can be more long form with a little more deterioration in quality. The overall personal mood is generally lower than the first stage and at a point before confusion starts setting in.

STAGE 3 - (E+F)
Here we are presented with some of the last coherent memories before confusion fully rolls in and the grey mists form and fade away. Finest moments have been remembered, the musical flow in places is more confused and tangled. As we progress some singular memories become more disturbed, isolated, broken and distant. These are the last embers of awareness before we enter the post awareness stages.

STAGE 4 - (G+H+I+J)
Post-Awareness Stage 4 is where serenity and the ability to recall singular memories gives way to confusions and horror. It's the beginning of an eventual process where all memories begin to become more fluid through entanglements, repetition and rupture.

STAGE 5 - (K+L+M+N)
Post-Awareness Stage 5 confusions and horror.
More extreme entanglements, repetition and rupture can give way to
calmer moments. The unfamiliar may sound and feel familiar.
Time is often spent only in the moment leading to isolation.

STAGE 6 - (O+P+Q+R)
Post-Awareness Stage 6 Is without description.

--

All stages featuring cover art imagined and painted by Ivan Seal.
All stages mastered by Lupo at Calyx in Berlin.
All stages were released on Vinyl and Compact Disc via
'History Always Favours The Winners'.  

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First in a series of Six albums by The Caretaker to be released over the next 3 years, slowly cataloguing the stages of early onset dementia. Each album will reveal new points of progression, loss and disintegration, progressively falling further and further towards the abyss of complete memory loss and nothingness...

Embarking on the Caretaker’s final journey with his first release in four years, Everywhere At The End of Time sets off with the familiar vernacular of abraded shellac 78s and their ghostly waltzes to emulate the entropic effect of a mind becoming detached from everyone else’s sense of reality and coming to terms with their own, altered, and ever more elusive sense of ontology. 

The series aims to enlighten our understanding of dementia by breaking it down into a series of stages that provide a haunting guide to its progression, deterioration and disintegration and the way that people experience it according to a range of impending factors. In other words, Everywhere At The End of Time probes some of the most important questions about modern music’s place in a world that’s increasingly haunted or even choked by the tightening noose of feedback loops of influence; perceptibly questioning the value of old memories as opposed to the creation of new ones, and, likewise the fidelity of those musical memories which remain, and whether we can properly recollect them from the mire of our faulty memory banks without the luxury of choice

As the first in the series, and despite its typically frayed loop construction, this volume is the most lucid, as subsequent instalments will continue to move into faded obscurity and material erosion. We’ve only ingested this first volume so far, so we cannot predict whether the ensuing journey and results will be lush, tortuous or, perhaps more likely, an ambiguous weaving and unpicking of the two and all interstices between.

We encourage you to join The Caretaker on this, his final journey thru the endless haunted ballrooms and mazy corridors of his wasting mind...