The Caretaker

2019 Small Repress. The third of a six album cycle cataloguing The Caretaker's fictional first person account of life with early onset dementia, presenting some of the last coherent memories before confusion fully rolls in and the grey mists fade away. In this crepuscular, autumnal phase, recollections phosphoresce, and wilt in advancing stages of entropic decay, steadily approaching a winter of no return. Continuing to mirror the progression of dementia, using nostalgia for ballroom as an allegory of the disease, The Caretaker's musical flow in places becomes more disturbed, isolated, broken, and distant. Singular memories, and all their connotations, begin to atrophy and calcify, crumbling away with each rotation of the record -- sometimes in curt scene cuts, others in quietly breathtaking reverbed fizzles; like tea lights extinguished, never to flicker again. These are the last stages of awareness before you enter the post awareness stages, where those memories become completely detached from comprehension. On Stage 3, the haunted ballroom's repertoire becomes increasingly muddled, peeling off in recursive contrails from the gestures of "Back There Benjamin", to snag on the stylus in starkly reverberant knots on "Hidden Seas Buried Deep", or worn down to calloused nubs such as "To The Minimal Great Hidden", and "Sublime Beyond Loss", all leading up to some of the project's most uncanny detachments in "Libet Delay" and the coruscating brass shimmer of "Mournful Cameraderie", which beautifully suggest the mercurial nature of memory and its recollection. Artwork by Ivan Seal. Mastered and cut by Lupo.