Caretaker - Everywhere At The End Of Time LP

Label: History Always Favours The Winners

Our Review:

The Caretaker (aka Leyland Kirby) continues to vamp as the ghost-bartender in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining through his eerie appropriation of maudlin waltzes bathed in reverb. All of The Caretaker LPs maintain a consistent aestheticized hauntology of an unremembered past and forgotten memories through his effective simplicity of playing scratchy shellac 78s through some effects. But with the release of Everywhere At The End Of Time, Kirby may be signaling the termination of his work as The Caretaker. This album marks the first of a six album series of ambient impressions on the multiple stages of early onset dementia. In his painterly taxonomy of mental / psychic / physical disintegration, Kirby intends to rotate through his collection of 78s, further blurring their edges and erasing chunks of sound throughout this three year song-cycle. On Everywhere At The End Of Time, the sounds from those 78s are wholly entact, occasionally looped and always soaked in his reverb pedals / VST patches. Kirby has already demonstrated the efficacy of these aesthetic practices; but like Basinski interweaving The Disintegration Loops with the horrors of 9/11, Kirby's contextualization shifts the material beyond the sentimental and into the tragic.