Exploring Memory Loss through Music: Everywhere at the End of Time

Written by Meenakshi Nirmalan

Everything is built on memory, an unreliable, fallible thing. We all have a collective, universal understanding of ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’, even if both concepts purely exist in the mind, ultimately intangible. Memory dictates what we do and who we are. Our ability to recall our past experiences shape our likes and dislikes, our society and culture, even something as fundamental as language. The English language has different tenses to distinguish between past, present and future, with simple, perfect, or continuous modes, compartmentalising moments in time even further. Where are we left when we begin to lose our memory? 

Perhaps the most famous explorations of memory loss in art are the paintings of the American artist William Utermohlen. Upon his diagnosis with dementia in 1995, he began a series of self-portraits. With each one, his style grows sparser, more abstract, less colourful; his facial features gradually become unrecognisable, and his form becomes skeletal. In literature, Sylvia Molloy’s Desarticulaciones tackles the same theme. It’s a non-fiction memoir told in a series of vignettes: Molloy visits a friend who suffers from Alzheimer's and watches her memory slowly decline. The novella's jolty form lends itself well to exploring a scattered psyche, and the vague names of characters - Molloy’s friend is referred to only as M.L. - contribute to the book’s hazy feel. This is, however, a music publication. It’s easy to disrupt the canvas. It’s easy to disrupt the page. It’s harder to convey memory loss in audio form. A lot of distorted, experimental music exists, but I had never come across music that reflects the loss of memory via its form and structure until a friend recommended me Everywhere at the End of Time.

I was first introduced to this project in December 2020; it was a cold London winter, during lockdown. I listened to it at night with headphones in, but accidentally fell asleep. The full experience is 6 and a half hours long. I woke up at around the 3 hour mark. The album was still playing but I had missed out on quite a few stages. Hearing only distorted noise, I was disoriented and confused. Haunting, eerie sounds seeped through my headphones. I forgot that I had been listening to Everywhere at the End of Time. As soon as I remembered what I was listening to, I felt incredibly sad.

Everywhere at the End of Time is a project by The Caretaker, aka Leyland Kirby, consisting of six albums. Kirby produced other music exploring the loss of memory, prior to Everywhere at the End of Time; his earlier project An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, explores the same theme. However, Everywhere at the End of Time is considered his magnum opus.  Kirby did not release all the albums together; rather, he released each album separately, leaving a few months in between the release dates. He samples 1930s/40s ballroom music and many of the sampled tracks have a liminal feel. They are doleful, capturing the ambience of the inter-war period. The samples are both hopeful and gloomy, with the lyrics of the original tracks often handling love and heartbreak, all hallmarks of a life well-lived. Essentially, the project is divided up into six stages, mirroring the progression of Alzheimer's. The samples are initially coherent, but they become gradually distorted. At first, you question whether the distortion is simply the crackle of the gramophone. By the end you hear only a faint trace of a melody amid the distortion. You wonder if you recognise it from Everywhere at the End of Time or from elsewhere in your life. Eventually, the music stops sounding like music: it’s just white noise. You’re faced with an empty void and it’s frightening.

I re-listened to Everywhere at the End of Time properly prior to writing this essay. It was a tough listen. It’s not only physically demanding, to be able to sit still for that long, but also emotionally difficult. I don’t know much about Alzheimer’s and of course, this is not a simulator. However, it certainly helps in developing empathy for people suffering. The samples are great; Kirby utilises Tommy Dorsey, Al Bowly and a lot of Turner Layton, amongst others. The first track of Stage One, titled It’s Just a Burning Memory, samples Heartaches by Al Bowly – one of my favourite tracks sampled. It’s a haunting tune in itself, yet Kirby slows it down, amplifying these effects. You don’t hear any lyrics in Everywhere at the End of Time, however in the original song Bowly sings: ‘Your kiss was such a sacred thing to me / I can’t believe it’s just a burning memory.’ It has always reminded me of Sylvia Plath’s villanelle, Mad Girl’s Love Song. Plath writes, ‘I think I made you up inside my head,’ demonstrating how the speaker doubts the reality of her own memories. Music is intrinsically tied to memory, more intimately than other art forms. Music is a physical, temporally grounded experience, more than reading or looking. A key reason I started writing about music in the first place was because I wanted to catalogue my listening experiences and the life experiences they accompany. In an age where most of the media we consume is forgotten, I didn’t want music to play a passive role in my life and wanted to remember where I was, both physically and emotionally, when listening to certain albums. 

Every time you bring up a memory, you alter it. It’s weathered down, made more palatable for your listeners and for yourself, too. When you speak about a memory, you omit some details, embellishing others. Done enough times, your recollection of your memory becomes vastly different; there’s no specific turning point where it suddenly becomes noticeable, but the familiar is inevitably distorted. The slow slipping of our grip on our own memories - our own identities - is frightening. This experience is not exclusive to Alzheimer's, but this is why Everywhere at the End of Time is so powerful: it poses Alzheimer's as a symbol, a medical condition, amplifying a fear that is fundamentally primal and intangible. The fear of becoming something that is not you, and does not belong to you. When you initially notice the problem, you’re in denial. The forgetting seems trivial, until the problem starts compounding exponentially, and by then it’s too late. Both times I’ve listened to Everywhere at the End of the Time, I’ve used the platform Soundcloud, where the album is presented as one long stream of noise. On Soundcloud, you have no way of telling which track you’re listening to - and by extension, which stage you are at. I find this added layer of disorientation effective. However on Spotify, Everywhere at the End of the Time is broken up track by track so you can see the specific titles. The earlier stages of the album have pretty titles, romanticising ageing with the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia: Late Afternoon Drifting, Childishly Fresh Eyes. They reflect the blissful unawareness that there’s anything wrong. In later stages, the titles become increasingly bleak and impersonal: Synapse Retrogenesis. 

The sound is fascinating too. I know that, throughout the essay, I’ve used the term ‘white noise’ without actually unpacking it. Take Advanced Plaque Entanglements for instance. The soundscape is simultaneously futuristic and primal. We hear traces of things we heard in Stage One, repackaged into beeps, static, fuzz, crackle, brass instruments, voices all scrambled up. It sounds transmission-like, evoking feelings of fear and confusion. Moreover, the last track of Stage Six, Place in the World Fades Away, is an outlier. We hear droning sustained notes, played on what sounds like an organ. The sound isn’t quite melodic, but is not completely discordant either. It has a clear momentum, unlike many of the tracks before; I can distinguish different, uniform shapes within the noise. At around 15 minutes, this abruptly stops. It’s replaced by the crackle of the record, clearing the way for the album’s end. The last 5 minutes of the album are harrowing. We hear actual music for the first time in hours; a lucid piano melody, accompanied by strings. It’s slow, simple and melodically compact. This signifies the end of the struggle, alluding to death. 

Other than its unique subject matter, one of the most striking aspects of Everywhere at the End of Time is its length. We live during a time where songs on the radio average around 3 minutes. Within the last few years, our attention spans have become increasingly fractured. As a result, the content we consume often lasts only seconds. In comparison to these new directions, 6 hours and 30 minutes is colossal. Everywhere at the End of Time is demanding. If you don’t listen to it in one sitting, you don’t experience the full spectrum of emotion. When I re-listened to the album, I started at around 9 in the morning. By the time I finished, it was verging on 3 or 4 o’clock. I found myself questioning whether it was actually necessary for Everywhere at the End of Time to be so long. The soundscape from about the 3 hour mark onwards is more or less the same: pure noise. However, in retrospect, the length makes the experience all-engulfing. I’d spent a substantial chunk of my day immersed in this album and it felt bizarre that I was able to go about my life after. I could see friends in the evening and continue like nothing had happened. The reality is very different for people who actually suffer from Alzheimer’s; it’s not something that you can just switch off. Ultimately, the hours of white noise highlight the absence of anything other than the present. There’s nothing else out there.