YMMV / Leyland Kirby

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is the Caretaker itself a person and is the otherwise nameless sufferer in Everywhere at the End of Time? Was Kirby being literal when he said he "gave The Caretaker dementia" and was personifying it, or was he merely describing the music itself?
  • The "Hell Sirens" in "H1—Post Awareness Confusions" from Stage 4. Was the Caretaker a war veteran or a civilian who lived through a war? Otherwise, why else are they in their memories? It also might represent Sundown Syndrome since it occurs in Stage 4 (or in the 7-staged dementia process, Stage 5)
• Archive Panic:
  • There aren't too many main Caretaker releases, right? Well, considering one of them is a 6-hour album series, another is 4 hours, and there are plenty of lost tracks, EPs, and live performances that have yet to see the light of day (mostly unofficially), you can expect to spend a long time absorbing it all, adding up to 21 releases total.
  • That's just the Caretaker moniker. If you want to hear everything Leyland Kirby has put together, you will have to look through many one-off projects, including Butcher Claus, Billy Ray Cyrix, and his collaborations under Alien Porno Midgets.
  • Then you have his other three main projects—V/Vm, which mainly consists of experimental troll music released over the course of many years with 20 releases, including the 10-hour aural Doorstopper that is The Death of Rave and the "VVMT365", a series of 365 tracks released daily over the course of 2006 which have not yet surfaced. Then there are his three albums under "The Stranger" (technically four, but one is a remaster) and his albums under his own name...which include the epic 4-hour Sadly, the future is no longer what it was, 3-hour We drink to forget the coming storm, the four-EP epic "Intrigue & Stuff" and the 2-hour album We, so tired of the darkness in our lives. Mind you, his first release was in 1996, so all of this has been in the past 25 years.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: The last few minutes before the minute of silence at the end of Everywhere At The End Of Time, while utterly heartwrenching to everybody listening to it, also seem to make listeners theorize over just what it's supposed to represent, with some thinking it's the Caretaker (the character) himself experiencing terminal lucidity, mourning all that he's lost in the last few moments of his life before passing away, while others are more under the impression that the Caretaker died the moment the droning noise just before said segment stopped, instead interpreting the choir as their soul moving on to the afterlife as angels mourn their demise, turning the otherwise very bleak Downer Ending into something of a Bittersweet Ending knowing that they finally found peace in death.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The foghorn that appears in the second track of Everywhere Stage 4 has been dubbed the "Hell Sirens."
  • The final album uploaded by Kirby, Everywhere, an Empty Bliss, has been labelled as "Stage 3.5" by fans due to the samples used in it sounding audibly more distorted than in Stage 3 of Everywhere at the End of Time, yet still less distorted than in Stage 4. Basically, they consider it as the missing transition between those two stages.
• First Installment Wins:
  • Inverted; in its two-decade run, it's actually the albums released towards the end of the project's duration that would end up accruing the highest level of acclaim — peaking with the Grand Finale Everywhere.
  • It's played straight within Everywhere, though. The very first track in the album series, "It's Just a Burning Memory", is generally the one people will pick when it comes to creating parodies of and references to it.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Friday Night Funkin', surprisingly enough, thanks to one of the mods made for the game being a crossover with Everywhere at the End of Time.
  • With Boards of Canada, who were frequent collaborators of Kirby long before his success with The Caretaker.
• Growing the Beard:
  • Leyland Kirby's earliest projects were known for essentially being massive Troll albums, featuring everything from the sounds of pigs feeding to glitchy distortions of popular songs from The '90s. His work as the Caretaker, however, has sparked a large amount of critical acclaim with releases such as Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia and An Empty Bliss Beyond this World, both of which landed him a cult following and buzz in the music press.
  • The first album under the Caretaker moniker was Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom, which was very much a one-off project at the time and features some harsh V/Vm-style noise on tracks like "September 1939". However, its follow-up would be A Stairway to the Stars, which consisted exclusively of dark ambient and became his first classic.
  • The response to Everywhere at the End of Time has moved from initially skeptical to almost universal acclaim. When the series was announced and initial installments released, they typically got reviews of being decent, but too similar to his previous work. Pitchfork's review of Stage 1 was skeptical of the idea of a Concept Album representing dementia, with the reviewer thinking that his vision was too similar to "a beautiful daydream" and not truly representative of the disease. However, by the time that Stage 4 came out, detractors had been swayed by the far more unique and terrifying sounds on display, and by the release of Stage 6, the whole series was incredibly acclaimed, so far as it being RateYourMusic's #1 ambient release of all time and #21 on the list of all-time compilations as of June 2020.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Surprisingly in a work as bleak as Everywhere, and especially for Stage 6, there exists one: one of the alternate cover arts for the stage (feature among the inner covers of the album's vinyl release) appears to be a bouquet of flowers resting on a table. While open to interpretation, it seems to suggest a more peaceful passing on in the company of a loved one.
  • Take care. It's a desert out there... is heartwarming for a number of reasons, many of them revolving around the album being composed and released in memory of writer Mark Fisher, a long-time enthusiast of Kirby through his music as the Caretaker, following his death by suicide.
    • The album gets its name from the final line of a message written by Fisher for the liner notes of the 2005 Caretaker album Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia. While it was originally the concluding note of a thematic analysis of the album, its reuse following his death can be interpreted as a farewell message to Fisher from the Caretaker.
    • To further commemorate Fisher, proceeds from the album's sales were donated to the mental health charity Mind.
    • While many Caretaker albums' descriptions contain the line "Remembered, disfigured, and forgotten by the Caretaker", this album's description includes a simple, poignant modification: "Remembered by the Caretaker."
    • Given the album's relatively serene ambient drone sound compared to Everywhere, it's often interpreted as a sonic representation of the afterlife that functions as an epilogue for the series. Whether you see it as a depiction of the final resting place of the Caretaker character or Fisher, it's quite sweet to think that the pure hell that the series evolves into has finally given way to peace.
• Hype Backlash: The extreme acclaim of Everywhere has led to a lot of this among people who don't see it (and the Caretaker's music as a whole) as nearly as profound as it's propped up to be. This was not helped by the project's length and the excessive amount of memes surrounding it (especially when TikTok attempted to make a trend of it). Case and point: while music site RateYourMusic had praised Everywhere more and more with each album, even giving it a rare score of above 4/5, the eventual popularity and constant talk of it led to petty downvoting, heated discussions, snarky remarks, and overall denouncing of the series as never being good, leading to its score dropping.
• Mainstream Obscurity: Everywhere at the End of Time received acclaim in the late 2010s and early 2020s for being a musical representation of how dementia feels and how heartbreaking it is to experience. Most who are interested in it will have heard "It's Just a Burning Memory", too. However, the utter despair of the series' theme, the way that the music quickly degenerates into little more than discordant, loud droning sounds after the first hour or so, and the sheer length of it (six and a half hours) make it very mentally taxing and time-consuming to get through. No wonder most people haven't listened to it past the first few tracks.
• Memetic Mutation: An Empty Bliss and Everywhere have become extremely ripe for memes among the music community.
  • Kirby's summary of Stage 6.
    Post-Awareness Stage 6 is without description.
  • Boulder smoking a ciggie. ^Explanation An inside joke related to the cover art of An Empty Bliss Beyond This World featuring a boulder with a matchstick attached to it (which is jokingly mistaken for a cigarette due to its appearance).
  • Everywhere in particular has gained an infamous reputation as "the dementia album". See Misaimed Fandom below.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Everywhere has been treated by some online circles as something of a creepypasta or "cursed album", with a TikTok endurance challenge being made out of it based on people seeing how far through the entire album they can get. This earned quite a bit of backlash among Caretaker fans, who saw it as irresponsible if not outright disrespectful handling of what was composed as a very serious piece of art. This came to the point where Leyland Kirby himself acknowledged this, stating that while he understands why fans are upset with the challenges and memes, he is otherwise satisfied that this in turn gives more attention to the music and spreads knowledge of dementia itself to a wider audience.
  • The overlap of Everywhere with Friday Night Funkin' is mostly Friendly Fandoms, with the latter fully understanding the album series' overall meaning. But due to the sudden popularity of the mod that created the link, a distinct subsection of fans seemingly romanticizing the condition and memory loss, and even attempting to invoke Rule of Fun to give the album's narrative a true happy ending^note Which, unfortunately, is impossible given the nature of dementia through Friday Night Funkin' has emerged. Naturally, this has resulted in a lot of friction between said group and the greater communities of both works, who are accusing the former of trivializing the condition and insinuating that it is reversible or has a cure (it does not).
• Nightmare Fuel: Now has its own page. And for a good reason.
• Nightmare Retardant: Knowledge of where some of the samples used in Everywhere have come from might at least partially dull the effect they have when listening to the album itself. Case in point, the "Hell Sirens" from Stage 4 actually are a severely slowed down and distorted section from the beginning of "Granada" as performed by Mantovani and His Orchestra, which is a pleasant Latin track. Perhaps instead of flashing back to memories of war, The Caretaker is taken back to an incident of playing a Mantovani record on a turntable with serious wow & flutter problems.
• Paranoia Fuel: Some listeners have claimed that Everywhere got them worried over them or their loved ones getting dementia.
• Realism-Induced Horror: While the music and visuals behind Everywhere are surreal, they collectively serve as an allegory for dementia, which is a frightening and plausible reality for seniors and their loved ones.
• Signature Song:
  • "It's just a burning memory", the first track off of Everywhere, has become considerably synonymous with the project as a whole.
  • "R1 - Stage 6: Place in the World fades away" for being the heartbreaking finale to Everywhere.
  • "All you are going to want to do is get back there" and "Libet's delay" from An Empty Bliss Beyond this World have also become instantly recognizable.
  • From his work outside the project, there's V/Vm's "The Lady In Red (Is Dancing With Meat)" a rework of Chris DeBurgh's "Lady In Red" that did well enough to get radioplay in and of itself. Supposedly, even DeBurgh himself owns a copy.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The choir that ends the entirety of Everywhere at the End of Time sounds a lot like the old hymn "Lord, Let Me Know Mine End". Although some fans erroneously attribute it as such, it isn't. It also strongly resembles the Quam olim Abrahae promisisti et semini eius fugue from the Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the tail end of 2020, the song was finally revealed by sample finders to be a German hymn commonly attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach named Lasst mich ihn nur noch einmal küssen, although the specific choir sample Kirby used is still unknown. The choir sample is used in various tracks, including "Friends past reunited" in "Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom", "A stairway to the stars", Segment 2 in "Deleted scenes / forgotten dreams (part 4)", and various live shows. By January 2021, another video was uploaded of the sample closest to the one used thus far.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: Surprisingly, the samples featured on An Empty Bliss Beyond This World and the first two stages of Everywhere often get this reaction, despite the harrowing concept behind them. Among the samples often mentioned include "Heartaches", "Goodnight, My Beautiful" (the original sample for "Libet's Delay" and "Back There Benjamin"), "Lullaby of the Leaves" (the original sample for "Misplaced In Time" and "Drifting Time Misplaced") and "Sunset" from the Grand Canyon Suite (the original sample for "The Way Ahead Feels Lonely").
• Tear Jerker: Now has its own page.
• Technology Marches On: Much of the latter parts of Everywhere at the End of Time are only possible because of complex algorithms which generate glitchy musical material, something which would likely have been impossible with the technology Kirby had available only years prior.
  • Even within the progression of the albums, the sounds that Kirby creates become more textured and complex.

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