Everywhere at the End of Time is a series of albums by English electronic musician James Leyland Kirby under the alias the Caretaker. Released between 2016 and 2019, its six albums use degraded samples of old ballroom music, largely from the 1920s and 1930s, to portray the stages of Alzheimer's disease. Inspired by the success of An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (2011), Kirby produced the project in Kraków out of his fascination with the topic, and made it his final release under the alias. He released each record after a six-month period for listeners to feel the passage of time, and used abstract art pieces by his friend Ivan Seal as album covers. The series drew comparisons to the works of musicians William Basinski and Burial, while production of the later albums was influenced by the aleatoric music of avant-gardist composer John Cage.
Everywhere comprises over six hours and 30 minutes of music and portrays a range of events in a patient's life, including joy, despair, confusion, nostalgia, anxiety, horror, isolation and death. The album mostly samples big band music throughout. are the most similar to An Empty Bliss, while depart from the Caretaker's older melodic ambient works to form chaotic noise soundscapes. Anonymous visual artist Weirdcore created music videos for the first two stages, which accompanied Kirby's performances. Initially concerned about the project being seen as pretentious, Kirby thought of not creating the album at all, although he spent more time producing it than any of his other releases. Seal's paintings were covered by a French art exhibition named after the Caretaker's Everywhere, an Empty Bliss (2019), a compilation album of scrapped tracks.
As each stage of Everywhere was released, critics felt increasingly positive towards the series, highlighting its length, unusual concept and perceived emotional power. Considered to be Kirby's magnum opus, the project was one of the most praised music releases of the 2010s. During the early 2020s, it became a YouTube and TikTok phenomenon in the form of a listening challenge and recommendation, after which caregivers of people with dementia praised the albums for increasing empathy among younger listeners. The series has since retained status either as a "dark" project or as a meme in Internet culture, inspiring several similar projects by the Caretaker fanbase and influencing other forms of media such as video games. It emerged in aesthetic styles such as the analog horror genre, liminal spaces and the Backrooms, including its 2026 film.
Background
In 1999, English electronic musician James Leyland Kirby adopted the pseudonym the Caretaker, under which he released several albums sampling big band records to convey a ghostly ambience. He was inspired by a scene of the haunted ballroom from filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's work The Shining (1980), as heard on the debut release of the alias, Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom (1999). These first records introduced the ambient style that would become more prominent in his last releases. The project first explored memory in general with 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 a wider 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, the album's success compelled him to continue the project. Patience (After Sebald) (2012), his next release, was a soundtrack album which did not feature themes of memory loss nor the same musical style of his other releases. For him, the only concept related to memory left to explore was the full progression of Alzheimer's, which he envisioned would gradually unravel through the six albums of Everywhere at the End of Time. The project is his final release as the Caretaker and also represents the symbolical death of the alias, as according to Kirby, "I just can't see where I can take it after this."
Music and concept
The concept of Everywhere at the End of Time, which has been described as avant-gardist, experimental and plunderphonic in nature, explores dementia's "advancement and totality". Although Alzheimer's has seven stages, the first stage presents no symptoms and is not portrayed in the series, as it would merely present the sourced samples, which Kirby called "Stage 0". The six albums feature expressive track titles and descriptions by Kirby for each stage, which highlight the ideas of deterioration, melancholy, confusion, and mortality that are present throughout. On the work's characterisation of mortality, writer Alexandra Weiss described the series as challenging to Western notions of death. Its portrayal of confusion, according to music website Tiny Mix Tapes, "threatens at every moment to give way to nothing" and renders it the definitive swan song of the Caretaker alias. Big Think's Tim Brinkhof categorised the project as a piece of high culture and called its deterioration "terrifying", due to its manipulation of Roaring Twenties and Jazz Age samples into incoherent white noise, while French researchers Christine Esclapez and Luis Velasco-Plufeau highlighted how the sampling "takes place in time even as the music itself depicts the passage of time".
Everywheres exploration of decay drew comparisons to The Disintegration Loops (2002–2003) by musician William Basinski, which, unlike Kirby's software-induced decay representative of a neurological disease, focuses on physical tape decay in coincidence with the September 11 attacks. Although complimentary of Basinski's works, Kirby said his own "aren't just loops breaking down. They're about why they're breaking down, and how." Author Matt Colquhoun of The Quietus compared the sound of the series to the style of electronic musician Burial, as both artists "highlight the 'broken time of the twenty-first century, while Daniel Bromfield of 48 Hills likened the project's aesthetic qualities to the fictional VHS tapes found throughout the plot of Canadian film Skinamarink (2022). While reviewing the first stage, writers Adrian Mark Lore and Andrea Savage recommended the record for enjoyers of Basinski, Stars of the Lid, and Brian Eno. Music magazine Fact noted a "hauntological link" between the ballroom records sampled in each stage and the Muzak songs modified in vaporwave albums, which is present in a more explicit manner than other electronic acts such as Boards of Canada. The project also drew comparisons to the works of French musician Éliane Radigue and of American sound artist Alvin Lucier, specifically his tape I Am Sitting in a Room (1969). The digital aura of the series, illustrated by the complete edition's six-hour runtime and minimalist thumbnail on YouTube, was also highlighted for "challeng[ing] how listeners engage with the music itself", according to MSN's Polyphonic.
The songs of Everywhere, which span over six and a half hours, get more distorted with each stage to reflect the patient's memory and its deterioration, and were described by writer Frank Falisi as "fundamentally sentimental cultural object[s]". The jazz style of the first three stages is reminiscent of An Empty Bliss, using loops from vinyl records and wax cylinders. Besides representing the progression of Alzheimer's, the repetition of these stages, according to researchers from the Università per Stranieri di Siena, also plays the role of metaphorising how unrecognisable the surrounding world seems to the Caretaker. On Stage 3, the songs are shorter—some lasting for only one minute—and typically avoid fade-outs. The Post-Awareness stages reflect Kirby's desire to "explore complete confusion, where everything starts breaking down". The two penultimate stages represent the patient's altered perception of reality through more chaotic soundscapes, while the final stage portrays the emptiness of the afflicted person's mind through drones. Stages 4–6 are often highlighted as the focus of the series: Miles Bowe of Pitchfork wrote about the contrast of the later stages to Kirby's other ambient works as "evolving its sound in new and often frightening ways", while Kirby described the series to be "more about the last three [stages] than the first three". In their Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound, Bloomsbury Academic describes the later stages as "a disorienting cut-up of slurred reminiscences bathing in a reverberant fog", relating them to amusia and its effects on musical memory.
Stages Stages 1–3
Stage 1 represents the initial signs of memory deterioration and is the closest album in the series to what Kirby calls a "a beautiful daydream". On its vinyl release, it features inscripted text reading "Memories That Last a Lifetime". Like An Empty Bliss, Stage 1s samples are looped and altered with pitch changes, reverberation, overtones, and vinyl crackle. The album features a mostly positive emotional tone, demonstrated by the notions its song titles evoke. Names such as "Into Each Other's Eyes" may be interpreted as a romantic memory, while more ominous titles, such as "We Don't Have Many Days", point to the patient's recognition of their own mortality. Despite being an upbeat release by the Caretaker, some of its big band compositions are more distorted and melancholic than others, such as "Slightly Bewildered". Michele Palozzo of Italian music publication Ondarock likened the record's "elegance" to Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and its dramatic "avidity" to the works of filmmaker Woody Allen. The album's joyful sound is contrasted by one of the sentences in its description, where Kirby clarifies these are "the last of the great days".
Stage 2, to Kirby, is the "self-realization that something is wrong and a refusal to accept that". In Kirby's description, a person in this stage usually makes more attempts to recall than normal. In contrast with the first stage's joyful sound, he noted the second stage as featuring "a massive difference between the moods". "A Losing Battle Is Raging" represents a transition between the two. Compared with Stage 1, the album features an emotionally charged tone, with more melancholic, degraded and droning samples. Its source material presents significantly more static than the first stage, exploring a hauntological ambience. Track titles, such as "Surrendering to Despair", represent the patient's awareness of their disorder and the accompanying sorrow, while "The Way Ahead Feels Lonely" is directly lifted from a book on dementia by Sally Magnusson. The songs play for longer times and feature fewer loops, but are more deteriorated in quality, to symbolise the person's realisation of their faulty memory. The album's description also states the "mood is generally lower", but still not to a level where "confusion starts setting in".