History Music / LeylandKirby

** The CD releases comprising sets of Stages 1-3 and Stages 4-6 feature none of the main artworks for the albums, instead featuring one new painting for the one-disc set of Stages 1-3, and one per disc for the 4-disc set of Stages 4-6 (which is divided up that way due to space limitations on the UsefulNotes/CompactDisc format).

** After the extremely noisy Stages 4 and 5, this stage is largely comprised of dense walls of static noise, like the sonic embodiment of an empty mind.
** With each stage, Kirby wrote short descriptions of the mental degradation the album was made to represent. For Stages 1-5, the descriptions got bleaker and darker, with increasingly disturbing imagery. The description for Stage 6? "''[[WhamLine Post-Awareness Stage 6 is without description.]]''"

* ** The titles on ''Everywhere, an Empty Bliss'' are also presented like this, though, being an album of outtakes, it doesn't have the same context.

* WordSaladTitle: The names of most of the tracks on ''EATEOT'' Stage 3 are mishmashes of song names from the first two stages and ''An Empty Bliss'', representing the Caretaker's memories becoming more confused and scrambled, and implicitly their language abilities taking a noticeable toll.

* FateWorseThanDeath: The main running theme of ''EATEOT'' is how inevitably inescapable and isolating dementia and mental illness are. No matter what a person does, they slowly lose more and more of themselves and their cognition until everything is just a meaningless haze of noise with perhaps a few minutes of lucidity before they finally die.

* {{Deconstruction}}: Throughout the Caretaker project Leyland Kirby shows us how nostalgia can be corrupted through the loss of memory. ''Everywhere at the End of Time'' can be seen as the culmination of this idea.

** Some of the songs sampled in ''EATEOT'' have titles corresponding to their usage in the albums. "To Be Forgotten" is one of the songs incorporated, generally reflecting the concept of dementia, and during the first moment of musical lucidity in Stage 5, the song used is titled "Was It a Dream?", reflecting the reaction of the demented person to the clarity. With that title used as the sample, it invokes the affected person wondering either "was the disease and loss and horror all a dream I woke up from?" or "was that brief respite and return to clarity all just a dream?"

* ''Patience (After Sebald)'' (film score; 2012)

* ''Recollected Memories from the Museum of Garden History'' (2008; audio mix released for a special event)

* ''Additional Amnesiac Memories'' (2006)

* ''Recollected Memories from the Museum of Garden History'' (2008)

** With each stage, Kirby wrote short descriptions of the mental degradation the album was made to represent. For Stages 1-5, the descriptions got bleaker and darker, with increasingly disturbing imagery. The description for Stage 6? "Post-Awareness Stage 6 is without description."

V/Vm wholeheartedly encourage the playing of this record and the consequences which may arise if you do so.

Leyland James Kirby (born May 9, 1974) is an English musician known for his noise and ambient compositions. While Kirby has an [[ArchiveBinge extensive back catalogue]] [[OlderThanTheyThink dating back to the late 1990s]] of recordings [[IHaveManyNames under almost a dozen stage names as well as his own name]], he is without a doubt best known for his releases under a project titled The Caretaker. [[LongRunner The project ran for 20 years]], beginning in [[TheNineties 1999]], first gaining widespread attention online in [[TheNewTens the early 2010s]], and concluding at the tail end of that decade with the release of the final installment of the album series ''Everywhere at the end of time''.

In its infancy, The Caretaker dealt primarily with ideas of ghosts and memory as inspired by ''Film/TheShining'' (what with its name being a direct ShoutOut), solidifying a trademark sound of [[{{Sampling}} sampled]] ballroom jazz recordings from [[TheRoaringTwenties the 1920s]] and [[TheThirties '30s]] being altered to create dreary, atmospheric {{ambient}} music. The [[BreakthroughHit breakthrough acclaim]] of 2011's LighterAndSofter ''An empty bliss beyond this World'' brought unprecedented levels of attention to the project, which also led to [[GrowingTheBeard the initiation of a new era of sorts]], as Kirby initially had no plans to continue the project beyond that album, and had a new audience with which he could expand upon the themes he wanted to cover.

** The era in which Kirby focused more on looped samples coincides with the rise of {{Vaporwave}} as a genre, especially with the 2011 release of ''An Empty Bliss Beyond this World''. While vaporwave is already a DeconstructiveParody of 80s nostalgia, the Caretaker's music plays the dementia and faded recollections of TheRoaringTwenties and TheThirties completely straight, but to create a sense of the uncanny instead of nostalgia. The latter stages of ''Everywhere at the End of Time'' are such a radical departure from even the most experimental of "sampledelia" that it feels like the entire concept of nostalgia is being shredded from existence.

** Meta example: as areas like [=RateYourMusic=] comment boxes have proven records of, being a follower of the Caretaker during the ''Everywhere'' rollout meant that you had no idea what sound the next stage would capture as the dementia progressed. As the project devolved into harsher territories, many feared Stage 6 being, among other things, nothing but harsh noise. Do take note that there were 5-7 months in between stages to let all those fears ruminate...

* WordSaladTitle: The names of the tracks on ''EATEOT'' Stage 3 are a mishmash of song names from the first two stages and ''An Empty Bliss'', representing the Caretaker's memories becoming more confused and scrambled.

* LonelyPianoPiece: ''Persistent Repetition of Phrases'', ''Patience (After Sebald)'', ''Empty Bliss'', and the awareness stages of ''Everywhere'' have several between them.

** ''An Empty Bliss Beyond This World'' is this compared to the other Caretaker releases, as it eases off on the harsh drones and effects and focuses a lot more on the samples.

* EpicRocking: It may stretch the definition of "rocking", but every track on ''Deleted Scenes / Forgotten Dreams'' and Stages 4-6 of ''Everywhere at the End of Time'' is over 20 minutes long. There's also the single track of ''Take Care. It's a Desert Out There...'', which reaches a length of 48 minutes.