Everywhere at the End of Time is the final work of The Caretaker, the alias of Leyland Kirby, released in six stages on History Always Favours the Winners between September 2016 and March 2019 and lasting about six and a half hours. Each stage was conceived as an artistic reflection of a phase of dementia, tracing the deterioration of memory through the project’s signature material, looped fragments of old ballroom recordings.
The early stages sound like faded but recognisable dance music; as the series advances the loops stutter, blur and fall apart into hiss, distortion and long passages of formless drone. Stages four and five are labelled post-awareness, and the sixth comes without description. Paintings by Ivan Seal appear on the covers throughout. In 2020 the complete cycle spread on TikTok, where users dared one another to hear it in a single sitting, carrying an austere experimental work far beyond its usual audience.