Nightmare Fuel / Leyland Kirby

Per site policy, Spoilers Off applies to all Nightmare Fuel pages, so all spoilers here are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

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A losing battle is raging.

Leyland Kirby is a master of creating unsettling atmospheres through the power of music. The Caretaker especially is one of the most terrifying musical projects in recent memory due to its depiction of the deterioration of the human mind by dementia (including Alzheimer's disease).

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The Caretaker:

Pre-Everywhere at the End of Time

Early albums

• "September 1939" from Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom consists of pure noise that sounds like high-pitched screaming. Considering this was the month that World War II began in Europe, it's genuinely a terrifying display of a world being destroyed.
• Much of A Stairway to the Stars is quite creepy, but few tracks so much as "Home" with an absolutely demonic voice that you would very much not want to hear coming from the woods at night. Ironically, the title track is the exact opposite of much of the rest of the album, becoming quite peaceful by the end.
  • The opening track, "We cannot escape the past", deserves a special mention. Take a sample of an abridged English version of Bach's rendition of "Ich will daraus studieren" and then turn it into a cold, desolate Drone of Dread that sounds like After the End in music form.

• All of Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia is incredibly unsettling, consisting mainly of electronic dark ambient.
• The cover art of Deleted Scenes / Forgotten Dreams is absolutely disturbing compared to the rest of the early albums, which only depicted plain backgrounds or artworks. It depicts a human face with blackened eyes, which, although nowhere as distorted as the cover arts of later albums, retains the same unnerving feeling. Adding to that is what seems to be a few faint blood streaks on the face and around its neck area.
  • Also to note about the album is that it established an early version of the format that Stages 4-6 of Everywhere at the End of Time and the track of Take care. It's a desert out there... would later follow upon. It's nowhere as incoherent as the later albums, though, since it involves abrupt cuts between sections instead of overlapping with each other, with the first two tracks featuring full songs.
• From Persistent Repetition of Phrases you have the ungodly choir of "Poor Enunciation" and the spooky, distant piercing trumpet of "Long Term (Remote)" on what is otherwise a Lighter and Softer album (well, as light and soft as you can get with the Caretaker; it's not exactly Top 40 pop).

An Empty Bliss Beyond this World

• The title track is an Ominous Music Box Tune with a creepy voice that bounces from speaker to speaker. As with "Mental Caverns Without Sunshine", the track is reprised later on the record, only in a slightly more detuned form.
• The piano tracks all have some very deep, ominous vinyl crackling sounds on them. The fact that they're generally short loops that don't go anywhere doesn't help, as it feels as if there's something terrifying just waiting to be uncovered. Considering where the Caretaker went next, it's really not surprising.
• "Mental Caverns Without Sunshine" has no melody except a looping string drone. And it goes away for one track before coming back again. The track was used to great effect in the last video on the mysterious YouTube channel Deeper.
• The cover art (titled "Happy in spite") isn't that scary, but the boulder depicted in it could be interpreted as a failed attempt by the Caretaker to recognize and memorize a face, or at least a person in general if the matchstick is put into count.

Patience (After Sebald) & Extra Patience (After Sebald)

• The entirety of the main soundtrack album to the 2011 film has a thick layer of hiss as opposed to the slightly more friendly vinyl crackle of other projects. On some tracks, it sounds like the music is plunged in the middle of a rainstorm.
• The track "When the dog days were drawing to an end" has a genuinely gorgeous piano loop that is intercut with a deep voice (which, as it turns out, is actually a woman singing, but heavily slowed down).
• Two tracks on the album feature heavy use of vocals, and both are absolutely terrifying. "No one knows what shadowy memories haunt them to this day" has a very fitting title for its ghostly atmosphere and booming voice, and "Now the night is over and the dawn is about to break", ironically, sounds as if the night will never end.
• If the main Patience (After Sebald) had some unsettling moments on an otherwise normally melancholic album, the EP Extra Patience (After Sebald) is a frightening listen throughout. It utilizes extensive Backmasking and pitched down vocals that are absolutely demonic.

Everywhere at the End of Time

Stage 1

• Stage 1 is mostly made up of pleasant-sounding snippets of ballroom music, but repeated ad nauseam. It just goes on, and on, and on, with seemingly no end to the repetition of only a few sections of a song. In addition to this, the music is subtly distorted, sounding echoed and far away with a grainy sound, as if it's decayed. It alternates between being nice and light and being creepy.
• The opening track, "It's Just a Burning Memory", is a slowed down sample of the series' Leitmotif, Al Bowlly's version of "Heartaches". Even if you know what lies ahead, the sound and mood of the track can be extremely unsettling for any listener.
• The track "Slightly Bewildered" is pitched down significantly more than the rest on the album, giving it an ominous quality. The loop ends with a deep, distorted voice of Layton or Johnstone which might make you jump the first time you hear it.
• The titles of some of the tracks can be rather unnerving. "We Don't Have Many Days", "It's Just a Burning Memory"... they all seem to point towards acknowledging the oncoming terror.

Stage 2

• Stage 2 opens with a cheery, if slightly distorted track, similar in tone to the end of Stage 1. But, what's the title? "A Losing Battle Is Raging".
  • Not to mention, the track itself also features a prominent mechanical noise throughout.^note As the original sample was taken from an Edison Cylinder, the noise is likely the cylinder rotating, though that does little to lessen the unease it brings. The distortions and damage are no longer negligible by this point of the disease, and this opener makes it clear that there's evidence of a problem. The resonant drones that signify the oblivion of memory by the end of the album series make their first subtle appearance in the background of this track as well — terrifyingly early in the project for the ultimate emptiness to show itself.
• The tracks here are more distorted than in Stage 1, even if it isn't quite as chaotic as the later stages. Compared to Stages 1 and 3, most of them don't loop — they just stop. They come to an uncanny, reverberating pause, until it's silent. The sampled songs also sound older and less rich or full, lending a more discomforting tone to the album as it invokes denial and fear.
• The Leitmotif of "Heartaches" takes a darker turn in Stage 2 with "What Does It Matter How My Heart Breaks". Clearly using Seger Ellis' version of the song this time, it's presented with less instruments, more slowed down and has a sadder, more despair-laden tone, making it even more unnerving than the sample used in "It's Just a Burning Memory". The use of a different rendition suggests that it may represent Bowlly's version being poorly remembered. As if that wasn't enough, the track is also noticeably shorter than the earlier one, being another subtle but eerie signifier that dementia is taking its toll on the Caretaker's recollection of the tune.
• "Glimpses of Hope in Trying Times" is the creepiest track so far, directly sampled from the second movement of the Grand Canyon Suite, "The Painted Desert", but lowered in pitch and echoing to the point that it sounds extremely unnerving and ominous, particularly as it crescendoes with the tone of panic. Commenters on the YouTube upload for this particular track stated that this could be where the patient begins to understand that their memory loss isn't something natural, but rather the result of a disease, and also that the track does an excellent job in "personifying" dementia into something for the audience to both fear and hate.
  Rae Enriquez: "What I hear: An elderly person finally knowing the name of their potential enemy — "Alzheimer's". And spiraling into unmatched dread.
  "Alzheimer's". Not a normal part of aging, but some kind of disease that destroys your memories? It's too early to tell if they even have it. But the idea is nonetheless planted into their head, swelling into a nightmarish orchestra as their minds catastrophize the future with terrifying clarity. At the peak of their rising fear, their younger loved ones enter the room to console them.
  "No no no, you probably don't even have it! And plus medicine is always getting better. It's okay...you're okay. Everything's going to be okay."
  Bit by bit, as their loved ones hold them... they calm down. They hug back — but don't smile.
  The idea is firmly latched into their brain. So all they have now is the faintest glimpse of hope in trying times. It won't get better.
  So they can only hope it doesn't get worse."
• "Denial Unraveling" starts out surprisingly calm and serene, before slowly getting more and more overwhelmed with chaotically-mixed together instruments mixed in a way that sounds anything but calm, slowly escalating to a peak before going back to the initial calm state. This process repeats constantly until the track's end, with every loop making the calm parts even more eerie than the last time.
• There's a subtle detail about the cover art (titled "Pittor Pickgown in Khatheinstersper") that gives it a frightening feel. The flower vase's handles appear to be shaped like two dancing humanoid figures, but their faces are blurred out. Even at this early stage, has the Caretaker lost the ability to recognize human faces? This is especially supported by the fact that Kirby claimed An Empty Bliss would lie somewhere between Stages 2 and 3.

Stage 3

• This stage's album cover (titled "Hag") is the first one in the series to be outright disturbing. The ones of the first two stages may have been a little bizarre, but could still be readily identified. Here... What is this thing? While some have suggested that it's a kelp plant, it just looks like a winding mess of entangled, dark strands.
  • A number of people have argued that the stage's cover is supposed to be a call-back to Stage 2's, given that the bottom part of the figure is notably similar to the flower vase of Stage 2. Stage 3 would depict the vase exploding into chaos, as with how the aforementioned "Back there Benjamin" opens the stage.
  • Some have also claimed that the depicted pattern in the figure is supposed to represent the beginning of synapse deterioration in the Caretaker. This is especially noticeable when the cover is edited to a photo negative color scheme, as it resembles the microscopic imagery of synapses.
  • Reality Subtext makes it even darker - the painting is seemingly based on a still life painting by Vincent van Gogh made shortly before he was Driven to Suicide. Tragically, it actually depicts his optimism about his future, while much of the first half of Stage 3 is similarly more cheerful than Stage 2 on tracks like "Long Term Dusk Glimpses".
• The titles of most of the tracks in Stage 3 are jumbled rearrangements of the ones from Stages 1 and 2, as well as An Empty Bliss Beyond this World, reflecting how the memories are becoming entangled and confused, and likely the Caretaker's language faculties with them.
• Following the last track of Stage 2, the melancholic, contemplative and at times eerily beautiful "The Way Ahead Feels Lonely", Stage 3's opener, "Back There Benjamin" practically hits listeners like a truck with its cacophonic brass section that seemingly echoes on forever, becoming more distorted as the distant noise fades away. This track becomes a second leitmotif for Everywhere over the course of the rest of the project, having been sampled from "Goodnight, My Beautiful"—the same track that was sampled on "Libet's Delay" in An Empty Bliss Beyond this World.
  • Nearly 10 seconds in, it loops two notes a few times, sounding vaguely like "Psycho" Strings. The stutters and echoing is all over the place, symbolizing the increasing slippage of coherency and the Caretaker's growing despair over gradually losing their mind.
• "And Heart Breaks" is another sample of "Heartaches", using a different portion of the song, mixed to sound more confusing, muffled, and haunting than both previous renditions of the tune, sounding more desperate, angry and panicked, rather than calm and nostalgic like the original Stage 1 version or depressing like the Stage 2 version. And to make matters worse, the vinyl crackling right after the song ends sound less like actual vinyl crackles and more like the record is actually burning.
  • Even more agonizing is that this isn't just from anywhere in the song; it's the last few measures before the end. Considering that "Heartaches" forms somewhat of a leitmotif for the project, it's easy to see this as the last coherence of a beloved memory starting to fade, all while the Caretaker begins to grow increasingly terrified of its loss...
• "Hidden Sea Buried Deep" is most likely the audiological representation of a memory that's been gutted. It begins, runs through the intro to "Piano Medley of Layton & Johnstone Successes", and then it just ends, echoing away into an empty void with just the crackle of the record accompanying the silence. And then, it starts again. Over, and over again, the track plays, never progressing past the point where it first ended. There's nothing left of the memory beyond there, and no matter how hard the patient tries to recall it in full, they simply can't - there's nothing there to remember.
• "Drifting Time Misplaced" is a softer, muffled rendition of "Lullaby of the Leaves", previously heard in "Misplaced in time". If the hollower, muted rendition conveying a weakened recollection wasn't bad enough, the track later becomes overtaken by resonant drones, being drowned out by the emptiness until the song cuts out and the track ends with loud crackling static. This was the very last time the Caretaker recalled that memory, and we were privy to its erasure.
• "Libet's All Joyful Camaraderie", while playing in a far more grandiose and coherent tone compared to "Back There Benjamin", is equally unnerving; an eerie echo subtly follows the piece from its beginning to its conclusion, and it sounds like the orchestra is becoming increasingly desperate, as if the piece is an audiological representation of the brain throwing up one more line of defense in an attempt to stave off the inevitable.
• "Bewildered in Other Eyes" is creepy on its own, sounding like an off-putting, almost-deranged music box tune. What really sells its creepiness factor however, is the title. In a stark contrast to Stage 1's "Into Each Other's Eyes", which implies they are looking into the eyes of a loved one, in "Bewildered in Other Eyes" that recognition is gone. All that is left is confusion and bewilderment.
• Much of the back half of the album is made up of increasingly creepy short tracks with very little of the original sample recognizable:
  • The most unsettling one might be "Internal Bewildered World", in which a sample from the Giuseppe Verdi opera Il Trovatore is slowed down to sound like a disembodied ghost.
  • "Burning Despair Does Ache" is the last coherent version of "Heartaches" that we hear, and it's extremely chilling. A rendition of the Stage 2 version, it starts off sounding normal, until the first key note gets hit, and the song glitches, lingering on said note for several seconds as you can hear it struggling to find the next note to hit, but only hitting random key notes across the song, with every other note floating together in a chaotic mess, as if there's a precious memory there that one just barely can't reach.
  • "Aching Cavern Without Lucidity" is a short "song" with a nearly unrecognizable sample turned into a Drone of Dread (which was previously used for "We cannot escape the past" from A Stairway to the Stars). It's like a dissociative episode in the patient that foreshadows the post-awareness that will soon take over later stages.
  • "Mournful Camaraderie", Stage 3's final track, is a droned rendition of "Burning Despair Does Ache" and a gateway to Stage 4. It sounds like if the Caretaker's remaining coherence and consciousness are trying to retrieve as many memories as possible during the calm before the storm but to no avail. After the track ends, the post-awareness begins...

Stage 4

• The tracks of Stages 1-3 were gradually more disturbing as they went on, yes, but they were still music. They had melodies, repeating structures, and mostly made sense. Come Stage 4, as the first post-awareness stage^note The "post-awareness stages" is the joint term given by Kirby to Stages 4-6., and it's just... noise. Relentless, glitchy, chaotic noise. There are snippets of music you can make out (both Al Bowlly and Seger Ellis' versions of "Heartaches"^note These are included alongside Guy Lombardo's version, which is new to this stage. being among the easiest to pick up), but not much.
• Stages 1-3 had the tracks titled like actual songs. Stage 4 suddenly drops the traditional naming of tracks and instead titles them after medical terms. "Post Awareness Confusions" just sounds... Cold, detached, medical. It seems to signal that the Caretaker has been institutionalized and is now in the care of complete strangers.
• The cover art of Stage 4 (titled "Giltsholder", pictured above) is uncanny and unnerving like Stage 3's, but you can make something out this time. A human head, facing away from your view. Are they sad? Who are they? Why are they looking away?
  • According to Sam Goldner of Tiny Mix Tapes, the person might actually be a bust, and would look like it's smiling if viewed from a distance.
• The section 14 and a half minutes into "H1—Post Awareness Confusions" is called "Hell Sirens"^note The sirens themselves begin sounding at the timestamp 15:40 by the fans for a reason. In terms of sheer terror, it's probably the peak of the series. To commence the segment, the glitchy chaos that we've experienced for about the album's first half-hour is completely interrupted by an imposing, booming string ensemble accompanied by screeching static; about a minute later, the air raid-esque sirens that the nickname refers to arrive, bellowing at a volume so loud it completely drowns out everything else, not to mention that they sound less like an actual air raid siren and more like the petrifying call of some eldritch beast. According to a YouTube comment, the noises sampled within the background are reminiscent of "the horrors of war". And to twist the knife, you may realize that Al Bowlly was killed by a Luftwaffe parachute mine in April 16th, 1941 during World War II. Yikes!
  • Many commentators claimed that the "Hell Sirens" represent a battle of World War II in which the Caretaker participated, based on how the majority of the samples used in the albums come from 1920s and 1930s songs. However, considering that the song sampled for this section is the Latin classic "Granada" (specifically the 1960 recording by Mantovani and His Orchestra), it's more likely that it represents the Spanish Civil War, potentially depicting one of the bombing raids like Pablo Picasso's Guernica. If the Caretaker character is British, it's possible that they served in a volunteer brigade like George Orwell, and the sirens are their memories of being in the war.
  • What makes the "Hell Sirens" segment especially effective is the fact that other than the initial shock factor, it doesn't feel much like a Jump Scare but rather a horror that slowly, almost beautifully, unfolds. By the time you get to the actual sirens, you stop feeling fear and just feel horrific sadness brought on by this sonic hellscape. Cosmic Horror, par excellence.
• "I1—Temporary Bliss State" is a far more calming, relaxed track compared to the other ones. It still manages to be unnerving with its constant repetition, to the point where the return to noise in the next track almost comes as a relief.

Stage 5

• Stage 5 is where all of the remaining coherence is thrown out the window. Nothing makes sense. Nothing is familiar. It's just chaos.
• The cover this time around (titled "Eptitranxisticemestionscers Desending") is abstract to the point of being unrecognizable, though some have suggested that the figure on the cover is a ballerina walking up a staircase. Whatever it is, its extended arm, tightly gripping a cane-like shape, as well as what appears to be flowing fabric behind it indicate it at least was human... originally.
  • There's also the fact that the figure itself upon the stairs is vaguely shaped like a brain, which appears to be in a state of heavy decay and deterioration, complete with the "legs" of the figure connecting just where the brain stem does.
  • If taken as a ballerina, the figure appears inappropriately grandiose and light, with splashes of color on the "face" area resembling gaudy makeup. It can look rather clownish, which could imply that the memories of the ballroom music have become a painful mockery of their former selves and are driving the affected person into madness.
• The "Hell Sirens" return, but even they sound distant and decayed, which brings its own sort of existential dread. Not even the horrors of the previous stage are distinct anymore, being replaced by new sounds even more horrifying than them.
• The sudden jump between J1 from Stage 4 and K1 in this album can be an effective Jump Scare. J1 ends on almost peaceful droning, slowly becoming quieter... suddenly, wham. You're met with cacophonies of screaming, broken horns mixed up with snippets of deep voices, and the freakish noise of what sounds like a faulty needle repeatedly scratching a burning record.
• "K1—Advanced Plaque Entanglements" occasionally brings back pleasant ballroom music samples overlaying a pipe organ. It doesn't last for long before the chaos suddenly cuts back in. The first time this happens can be a potent Jump Scare.
  • Of particular mention is a short, 30-second segment in the track sampling Dick Powell's "Was It A Dream?" that, while surprisingly calm and clear compared to the rest of the stage, still manages to be absolutely horrifying by the sheer fact that by this point, you instinctively know that this brief blissful moment will disappear as quickly as it came, and give way to the same horrors we've been enduring for around 2 hours by that point. In any of the early stages, it would come off as calming, but here, it sounds like a Hope Spot at best, and absolutely heartrendingly eerie at worst.
  • Worse is, these blissful segments could very well be false memories that the character never actually had in the first place. As evidenced by one part of the album's description, "The unfamiliar may sound and feel familiar", these moments of clarity just might as well be more signs of deterioration. The person is fading out quickly, and there's already so few glimmers of them left in there.
  • There's a theory that the short snippets mirror that when Alzheimer's patients for just a moment have full clarity, they will just suddenly make an appropriate comment about what they are doing, or recognize a loved one calling out to them by name. This is usually heart-wrenching because as quick as the patient blurts something out, it's just as quickly gone, and they likely don't even remember having said anything.
  • The end of the track features a disembodied voice saying words that sound completely unintelligible followed by a heavily distorted mandolin. It becomes less so when you realize that it's just the introduction to the mandolin sample, said by John Philip Sousa: "This selection will be a mandolin solo by Mister James Fitzgerald".
• "Synapse Retrogenesis" starts out as an oddly calm piece of ambient, being a short break from the chaos within Stage 5. While it doesn't sound very creepy (as one might expect), it still manages to be disturbing especially due to the static returning 8 minutes later, tainting the atmosphere for the rest of the track. Meaning that the calm before the storm is about to end as tumult approaches while things start going downhill even further. And then, in the middle of the track, a wall of sound bursts out suddenly, containing almost the entirety of Stage 4, with at least 30 samples playing at once in the beginning. Predictably, it quickly gets disorienting, and while the segment itself is short, the impact of it leaves a mark on the Caretaker, who, judging from the music, is rather upset and sad.
• "Sudden Time Regression Into Isolation" is (by far) the bleakest track in Stage 5. It's full of heavily distorted samples layered on top of each other before being followed by what sounds like reversed, mangled circus music. At the 13:35 mark, it gets consumed by walls of cold, static noise during the last 9 minutes before Stage 6 takes over. "The unfamiliar may sound and feel familiar", indeed.
  • According to a YouTube comment, this really summarizes the implication of the Caretaker becoming an empty shell of their former self, due to their dementia worsening during the last three stages.
    Memories haunt and haunt, chilling the tortured soul.
    There's is no past of future. All is futile, all they can do is suffer.
    They're drowning, and drifting off into a sleep...
    A moment of clarity arrives, but good things can only last for so long.
    Face expressionless, eyes empty, happiness gone.
    They were a person, and now all is left is ashes of a person, scattered.
    There's no hope.
    Heart, it aches.
    My care for you, only bounds me towards this world.
    Your kiss, I don't remember.
    I wish it was, just a burning memory.
• Probably most horrifying of all is that scattered throughout Stage 5, you can hear brief snippets of heavily distorted voices sampled from the various songs used, all of which sound like the desperate attempts of a broken person to make sense of the world around them. These snippets include things like "what", "where", "was it-", "who are you" and "help", and they're absolutely horrifying to consider the significance of within the context of the album.

Stage 6

• Stage 6 is the definition of Nothing Is Scarier. Just Kirby's description of it is enough to make your stomach drop.
  Post-Awareness Stage 6 is without description.
• The cover art (titled "Necrotomigaud") is the empty back side of a canvas with four crossed pieces of painter's tape. The implications are horrific—as if the Caretaker can no longer recognize anything like an image.
  • This can also be interpreted as the Caretaker being reduced to a completely blank slate, and the fact that the other side is invisible to the viewer shows how all of their past experiences are no longer accessible to them, due to the most severe phase of dementia having completely destroyed their ability to think and remember.
• The song titles are back! Let's see, we've got "A Confusion So Thick You Forget Forgetting", followed by "A Brutal Bliss Beyond This Empty Defeat", then "Long Decline Is Over"... and finally, "Place in the World Fades Away". Oh crap, the song titles are back.
  • If the titles in Stages 4 and 5 represented the Caretaker being treated by medical professionals, then the titles here seem to indicate that those professionals have given up on treatment and are now simply providing palliative care.
• Each track, with the exception of the last six minutes of the final one, is a Drone of Dread with very few snippets of music. It sounds more empty than space. The only "recognizable" instruments are touches of piano here and there and horns slowed down to sound like the moans of the dead and dying. Many samples from the previous stages, including "Heartaches" and the "Hell Sirens", return here, but with a heavily dampened sound that makes them almost unrecognizable. The overall atmosphere is purely bleak and lifeless, which is why it's often described by critics as the most horrifying dark ambient piece ever put to music.
• "A Brutal Bliss Beyond This Empty Defeat" starts out with a harsh drone consisting of brief piano notes and slowed down choir music. However, as the music progresses, more and more parts get introduced, before we are eventually left with horrifying call-backs to Stage 5, including disorienting static that jumps from left to right, "Gradations at arms length" slowed down to the point of sounding like a ghost screeching, and even the Hell Sirens come back. At the end of it all, we are left with a sad horn mockingly echoing throughout the mind, as the Caretaker once again slips into nothingness. This is accompanied by a rapidly fluctuating static drone that can be best described as an aggressive void, like the last vestiges of the Caretaker's mind are desperately fighting against succumbing to oblivion despite the futility, running on the bare bones of survival instinct. The worst part about all of this is that Stage 6 is about the patient being bedridden and unable to respond to or do anything, so this gives off the impression of the patient being trapped in their own mind.
• The abrupt cut during the final track that ends the organ drone - the abrupt cessation of all noise, followed by a needle hitting a new record, accompanied by the final sample's intro, which is what sounds like a door being flung open - is practically a Jump Scare in itself compared to the long stretch of audio preceding it. It's just so... instant.
• The last six minutes featuring ''St Luke Passion, BWV 246's aria "Laßt mich ihn nur noch einmal küssen" aren't scary in the same way as the rest of the album, but they should be here because of the sheer existential dread they cause. Especially the last minute of silence, representing the Caretaker's death.
  • There's discussion on what the last moments mean, although it could be a phenomenon referred to as Terminal Lucidity, in that when the brain is dying it just suddenly regains the clarity seen back in the first album, we as an audience are experiencing the last six minutes of the Caretaker's lucidity before they pass.
  • There's also the note that although the final minutes are lacking much of the confusion and distortion of the last several hours, the song that is playing is nothing we've heard before, and it most certainly is not "Heartaches". While the Caretaker may have regained a semblance of their lucidity in their final moments, it's still nothing they recognize ... although that being said, even if they don't recognize or understand the world around them, it still comforts them. (The Caretaker may have been at the minimum comfortable when they passed, perhaps surrounded by loved ones who although they don't recognize them, clearly understands they love the Caretaker).

Other albums

Take care. It's a desert out there...

• While Take care. It's a desert out there... is somewhat lighter than the rest of the Caretaker albums overall, since its single track aims to a more naturalized ambient music, it's just as dreadful as the end of Stage 6 of Everywhere at the End of Time. The nature of its sound can make you an idea that it's a continuation of Stage 6 after the Caretaker's death, since it has such a feeling of afterlife. Not helped by the fact that some parts of the post-awareness stages of Everywhere (even though it was released before all of them) can be heard in the background.

Everywhere, an Empty Bliss

• While it doesn't reach the same Hell Is That Noise factor as Stage 5 of Everywhere at the End of Time, Everywhere, an Empty Bliss features a number of B-Sides from the series that are pretty unnerving in their own. Also, the tracks (and their titles) can give you the impression that they're the Caretaker's missing memories after Stage 3, but horribly entangled and disoriented right before everything goes downhill upon reaching Stage 4.
  • The evidence that it's a transtition between Stages 3 and 4 is made stronger with the full cover art from the album's altered edition (titled "Pm, why bees are very silent"), since it has the same floor as Stage 3 (only blue instead of green), and the painting is of a similar style to Stage 4. There are dead bees on the floor, which can interpreted as the last coherent memories from Stage 3 being destroyed at this point, thus starting the post-awareness phase in EATEOT.
• "Glimpses of life denial" is a distorted sample of what seems to be a child talking before a deep, garbled voice starts chanting while accompained by a loud, buzzing noise until what appears to be a gunshot is heard at the very end of the track, which also doubles as a Jump Scare for any unprepared listeners. What probably makes the track even scarier, however, is the near complete lack of any actual song sampling, and besides the very eerie whistling, itself being rather bone-chilling from the way it's mixed, is completely devoid of any melody at all. Nightmare Retardant ensues when you listen closer; it’s actually a badly damaged recording of a rather jaunty spoken poem entitled "Santa Claus in Holland", told by a woman with a rather pronounced accent.
• "I might be vanishing" is similar to "Hidden sea buried deep", but arguably even more unsettling. It starts playing a jaunty tune... until it just stops after ten seconds. No loop or silence. It simply ends, the memory disappearing as soon as it came.

Other projects:

Albums as V/Vm

Sick-Love

• This album mangles several hit love songs into things far more ominous. While there's a bit of humor behind the project, it's mostly buried under multiple layers of pure unease—his reworks range from deliberately invoking the Uncanny Valley effect on beloved singles to running songs through so many effects they turn into bleak passages of dark ambient. It's a standout even among his work in the moniker.

Pig

• Pig is an album that for its relatively short 13-minute timespan features mostly the the chaotic recording of many pigs feeding, squealing and screeching as they feed^note Widely misunderstood by critics to actually be the sounds of the pigs getting killed in a slaughterhouse, though definitely not without reason., in a chaotic mess. Around halfway through the album, it briefly switches to a calmer tone as the pig noises fade out, and you instead get to hear Kirby calmly talking with the owner of the pigs for several minutes... Before cutting back the chaotic pig noises, which is then later mixed with several tracks layered on top of each other to create 2 minutes of pure pig noise hell before the album finally ends.
• And then there's the Latin written on the album cover; while it's mostly quite a surreal passage about being "plump and well cared for when you want to smile" and other vague statements that tie into the farming theme, it opens with this statement, which could easily be read in a rather ominous way:
  Believe me, it all dawns on you, your last day. A welcome hour will come which will not be expected.

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Heartaches, heartaches...
My loving you meant only heartaches...
Your kiss was such a sacred thing to me...
I can't believe it's just a burning memory...

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