Trivia / Leyland Kirby

aka: The Caretaker

• Alternate Reality Game: The hunt for each and every sample that the Caretaker has ever used has become one of these. This includes those on stages 5 and 6 of Everywhere at the End of Time, where it's impossible to even tell what instrument is even playing since there is so much distortion. Fans are absolutely fixated on this, and have even managed to piece together every sample on several Caretaker albums. At times, it becomes the audio equivalent of a Pixel Hunt, in which fans match up the crackling in the background to figure out the exact speed at which it was played and then calculate the number of semitones the sample needs to be altered by. There is also sleuthing work to find out the exact compilations that Leyland Kirby sourced his songs from, and even trying to find out where he bought them. It's joked that by the end of the search, fans will be able to recreate every Caretaker album completely.
• Approval of God: Kirby himself has actually shown to be happy that Everywhere at the End of Time has led to fans wanting to reinterpret dementia in their own way. That said, however, he has told fans to not use any of Ivan Seal's artwork, arguably to avoid any copyright issues and to not let non-fans become confused with fan works and the official Caretaker works.
• Colbert Bump: Everywhere at the End of Time brought renewed levels of public attention to interwar British singer Al Bowlly and the song "Heartaches", largely due to his performance of said song being a leitmotif throughout the six-part album series (so much so that it's possible to condense EatEoT to just the various versions of "Heartaches" and still get the point across, as shown in this video).
• He Also Did: Kirby has been active since the mid-'90s, in many projects under many names, from one-off conceptual projects to long-runner names that predate the Caretaker by years. These include his nom de plume Leyland Kirby, sporadic side-project The Stranger, and foremost among them V/Vm, a notorious grab-bag of a project best known for plunderphonics, noise, running a huge indie label, and gigabytes upon gigabytes of free audio.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Usually needs to be done in the Caretaker fandom, since so much material was never officially released in digital formats. Much of it is either limited-edition material from back when Leyland Kirby was a very obscure artist or live performances (which often feature samples from his studio work, but often more recognizable—an absolute must for sample finders). In fact, the fandom is still finding new releases to this day, owing to Kirby's incredible work ethic and release schedule.
  • Often, this has to be done to discovered samples as well. Many of them are recordings of highly obscure bands which have scarcely been re-released since their heyday, or in the case of some of the oldest recordings, were made over 100 years ago and need to be digitized from often highly damaged sources.
• Meme Acknowledgement: Kirby has gone on record discussing the massive following his music has online, and more specifically touched on the "Caretaker Challenge" on TikTok that has people seeing how much of Everywhere they can get through. While this challenge has become controversial among fans due to it being seen as trivializing and disrespectful to the music, he himself takes no issue with it, and in fact is happy that younger audiences are engaging with the work and its intense themes.
  "Viewing figures on YouTube have been increasing exponentially since the beginning of the year. I think the fact it's found its way onto TikTok is due to an increased visibility and awareness of the work actually existing. The hardest thing for any independent work to attain is its visibility. The fact it's a challenge on TikTok is endemic of modern social media tropes among younger people for many of whom shared experience is everything. [...] I think you will always have people who defend the work and are passionate about how it's perceived so it's natural they will be upset with it being seen as a challenge. Dementia is not a trivial subject matter. From what I see from messages I receive it's also given younger people an understanding into the symptoms a person with dementia may face. Ultimately if younger people see that music can be an experience and goes deeper beyond what is being manufactured and bombarded at them, then independent musicians benefit."
• Multi-Disc Work: Each tracklist of Stages 4 to 6 of Everywhere at the End of Time consists of four tracks spanning entire sides between what would comprise two vinyl discs, which is the format under which the entire album series was made in mind.
• Mythology Gag: There is a mysterious record which Leyland Kirby has used extensively, beginning with the very first Caretaker album in 1999 and ending with Stage 6 of Everywhere. It is a (yet undetermined) recording of Bach's St. Luke's Passion sung in English, and it is everywhere, appearing throughout the project in some way, shape or form. Fans have theorized that it represents death.
  • It was first heard as an incomplete version of "Friends Past Reunited" on Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom. However, on A Stairway to the Stars and We'll All Go Riding on a Rainbow, it is far more extensively sampled, and you can hear it on tracks such as "We Cannot Escape the Past", "Emptiness", and the completed "Friends Past Reunited". The difference now is that instead of being fairly obvious, a lot of the time it is pitched down to sound like Dark Ambient.
  • The album Deleted Scenes, Forgotten Dreams uses the entire record, but reversed, pitched down, and reverberated to an extreme degree.
  • "Mental Caverns Without Sunshine", from An Empty Bliss Beyond this World, uses it as well, and consequently it sounds nothing like anything else on the album, which mostly consists of ballroom jazz and Layton and Johnstone piano records.
  • The final version of "Friends Past Reunited", as found on Stage 6 of Everywhere at the End of Time, is perhaps the clearest of all, and uses the melody of "Laßt mich ihn nur noch einmal küssen"^note Specifically, it uses an English version of the melody known as "O Jesu Christ", as was determined by sample finders.
  • The record was used again in the now unlisted YouTube-exclusive song "We are in the shadow of a distant fire", being the same rendition of "To Save our Souls" used in "We cannot escape the past". This version is much more cleaner than the latter, and is the cleanest rendition of the segment used there. Considering the time of its release, which coincided with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, its lyrics become all the more apt:
    To save our souls from bitter, shame, and mourning,
    Thou bearest, Lord, base treachery and scorning.
    From lure of gain or gold, save us, we pray thee,
    Lest we betray thee.
• The Pete Best: It's not well known among his younger fans that his first project, V/Vm, actually began as a two-piece with Andrew "Jansky Noise" MacGregor. The two continued to work closely even after splitting up, with Jansky making further appearances on V/Vm Test Records and even The Stranger's debut album.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: Believe it or not, at least a few people have attempted to claim that Everywhere is capable of actually causing the listener to have dementia, though details range from this being temporary to it being permanent. This—obviously—is complete nonsense (not only is it impossible for music to give you dementia, but there isn't such a thing as "temporary dementia", at least in the context that people claim it is^note "Temporary dementia" in the actual, scientific sense is generally codified as specific cases of memory loss or other cognitive failure stemming from nutritional deficiencies and other similar illnesses—in essence, it's more of a side effect than true dementia, and most certainly can't be acquired by listening to an album.), and fans of the Caretaker are very upset at people who try to claim these.
• Production Posse: Kirby and cover artist Ivan Seal, who first showed up with the artwork of Persistent Repetition of Phrases. It helps that they have been longtime friends in real life.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The track "Faith in time" in "We'll all go riding on a rainbow" was originally going to be called "In all the bars in all the world".
  • Everywhere at the End of Time was originally going to be much more simple, with it just being the exact same songs being broken down further and further from Stage 1 to Stage 6. Kirby quickly scrapped this concept, instead coming up with the idea to sample everything related to the project, released and unreleased, breaking all of it down.
  • Aside from the B-Sides featured in Everywhere, an Empty Bliss, there are hundreds of hours of tracks that were intended for Everywhere at the End of Time before being unused, a majority of them being for the post-awareness albums (Stages 4-6). By analyzing the post-awareness albums' spectrograms and checking aliases that had been left when Kirby slowed down the tracks, many of these tracks were discovered, such as an alternate version of "Elusive sunshine" slowed down by 6 semitones instead of 4.
• Word of God: On The Caretaker releases outside of Everywhere at the End of Time, Kirby has stated that An Empty Bliss Beyond this World would lie sonically between stages 2 and 3.

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