'The Caretaker' Iceberg, Explained

[Music] [Music] we know what they say there are three things in life that are certain death taxes and seeing the caretaker in your youtube recommended there's a couple reasons for this it got ridiculously popular a while back i think it got featured on bandcamp daily a bunch of people started making youtube videos on it everywhere at the end of time is one of the most groundbreaking records of the past decade possibly maybe and then the videos just went insanely popular out of nowhere and the reaction to the caretaker has been mixed uh i've been into the caretakers music for a couple years now and i remember that i actually started a documentary of my own i started just a full-on documentary going through the entire caretaker alias all the old discography and i just started working on it one day and i got about halfway finished with it and i just i did i do a lot of projects i just got bored and i just stopped working on it and then i just let it sit on as a private video for about a year and only a year later i just started realizing other people doing videos and i thought ah this is popular now people listening to this this is a thing to do a video on and so um i will never finish that video because i've just lost most of the original footage for it but i am here doing another caretaker while i say another character giveaway this is the first one you guys have seen i'm kind of in two minds about the caretaking popular because on one hand you've got people listening to it enjoying it and appreciating it and on the other hand yeah that the recently i've seen something called an iceberg meme appear which is where people seem to take an image of an iceberg put loads of different labels at different levels of the iceberg i guess to represent different levels of if you know this you're a true fan kind of thing um a lot of the iceberg memes seem to go from like um normal to like cursed things like the further down you go the worse it gets but i've kind of used it in a sense of uh how much of a true fan are you you know if you know the things that are down at the bottom consider yourself a dementia ridden now there's actually one video already existing actually there's a couple of videos one of them is a um an everywhere at the end of time iceberg video another one is just everywhere at the end of time um as it was exposed to the internet both videos are brilliant you should go and check them out and i will try and link them in the description if i can remember but the thing that happened when i first saw that original ever at the end of time iceberg video was i thought there's quite a few things missing on here i'm not to say that video is bad it does actually demonstrate quite a lot of the good points to do with ever at the end of time but the problem is the further that it got down the iceberg i noticed there were things that could potentially just be random theories and stuff that had absolutely no explanation behind it things that you couldn't really say had actually been hinted at within the series itself and so my idea was to create an iceberg meme where i knew i could back up at least 99.9 of the things on there i mean there's a couple things on there that are just theories that i've heard which i'll have a go at explaining but for the most part this is my caretaker iceberg let's dig in all right so let's kick it off with everywhere at the end of time it's about dementia now if you don't know this i mean to be fair you'll be forgiven because a lot of people just listened to it they saw the creepy artwork they heard the creepy music they clicked off of it they didn't know what was going on and you're forgiven for that but everywhere at the end of time is in fact a project about dementia not just dementia but the degradation of music through the mind of someone who has dementia each album was released a year apart so the caretaker decided that he was going to create um six albums and he announced this uh when he announced ever at the end of time he said i'm gonna do six albums and at the end of the sixth album the caretaker is gonna be finished i'm not gonna do any more caretaking music which was a pretty big thing and it was people at the time were like this is going to be crazy leyland james kirby creates music as the caretaker so leyland james kirby is a british musician and he created a lot of different types of music um kind of in the mid 90s he created music under the name vvm which is why the youtube channel for the i guess official upload of ever at the end of time is called vvm test because that's the record label that he created as well as our history always favors the winners and he created these very kind of experimental types of music a lot of these kind of ironic types of music as well if you go on uh the caretaker on discogs you'll see that there's like um like a hundred different aliases that he used to use because you just used to create so many aliases but the caretaker definitely stuck as you can see by the fact that it ended up lasting for about 20 years as an alias the caretaker samples 1920s and 1930s ballroom music so again this is a fact that most people can pick up just by listening to the um just the different albums in the different stages they can hear that it's a lot of kind of slowed down 1920s and 30s kind of ballroom jazz music there are seven stages of dementia but only six albums so yeah so when people have kind of mapped out the uh the root that dementia usually takes they've mapped out seven different stages and there's only six caretaker albums now this was just because he only managed to find enough i guess content or run time to kind of fit about six albums worth or maybe this was completely intentional and we just don't even get the seventh album alternatively people have said that one album earlier is the actually the first stage so for example an empty blitz beyond this world is technically the first stage and stage six is actually the seventh stage but there's no real theory supporting that evan seal is the artist for the painted artworks so very early on in the caretaker discography um he kind of did a lot of the artwork himself and it was just kind of screenshots or images of 1920s and 30s kind of just parties and bands playing and things and kind of like clip art type things um and then sometimes it was also um record sleeves that he'd found and then just kind of edited out the text off and put his own name over as well which is quite cool um but very very quickly it became this series of painted artworks and that is by a british artist called evan seal who the caretaker is very closely friends with [Music] okay so now onto the main iceberg itself heartache is the main theme of everywhere at the end of time it's quite true to say that heartache appears multiple times as a sample during this final series of albums um it's the first track it's sampling the first track and it's sampled multiple times in later tracks in fact the whole kind of uh garbled distorted mess of stages four five and six also does still contain elements of heartache as it goes on which shows that either this was the caretaker's favorite song which would explain why it's being remembered so much or it just kind of serves as a motif musically that you can still kind of pick up as it goes later on samples reappearing so to expand on the previous point there's a lot of samples that reappear multiple times during every at the end of time in fact during stages four five and six some samples appear in almost every single track at various points in various forms stage six artwork is the back of a canvas now this is more of a i'd say it's more of a theory because no one's actually come out evan steele hasn't actually come out and said this is what the stage six artwork means but you can see the hinges on the side of it you can see that it's just the back of some kind of cardboard and there's just some tape as though it was kind of just some draft artwork that was put on the back of it and the actual artwork which we just can't see is on the other side of it now there's lots of theories as to what this means but the idea is that someone in this stage of dementia wouldn't even be able to comprehend the artwork that's on the other side of that so we're not allowed to either the caretaker wasn't always about memory it was a fan project for the shining so i touched on this in that documentary that i talked about that i ended up never finishing and it was actually my first kind of big point about the caretaker was that the caretaker was never about memory to begin with what happened was kirby was a massive fan of the shining and he decided to create a fan project where he would try and imitate the music that's heard in the background of a couple of the scenes in the film and that's where the name the caretaker comes from as well it's a quote from the film what happened was i think around 2005 fire2506 um he began exploring the theme of alzheimer's and that was with an album called deleted scenes and forgotten dreams and very quickly started working with that theme and became very interested in that theme and we said in different interviews he has had family members who have suffered from issues such as alzheimer's and dementia and he said he got fascinated with it as tragic as it was he said he collected uh studies and papers and interviews with people who were suffering from it or people who worked with people who were suffering it from it and he just became obsessed with it and that explains why this became such a detailed and in-depth project for him ever at the end of time is the caretaker project itself being given dementia that's one of those things where it's quite difficult to explain but i will try my best so at the beginning of the every end of time series the caretaker went into an interview and said i am going to give the caretaker dementia now what he meant by that is up until then the caretaker was just a name that he was producing music under but now it was a character the caretaker was now a representation of all of the previous releases under that name it was just a an entity that existed who had created all of those pieces of music and he was saying what if that project itself was given and diagnosed with dementia how would the caretakers own memories of his own music decay over time and that's how we ended up with everywhere at the end of time now there's lots of theories that also continue to support this for example why does heartaches appear so many times well it's the caretaker's favorite song and if the caretaker is james kirby then i guess heartache is his favorite sample later stages play multiple samples at the same time now it doesn't take a genius to notice that the jump from stage 3 to stage 4 is a pretty jarring one at the beginning of stage 4 you're instantly assaulted with an extreme barrage of distorted weird garbled samples but the thing that's actually happening here is there's pretty much two different tracks being played multiple tracks at the same time on the left and right channel in fact people have actually separated the left and right channel to try and work out what different samples are being played and they've found that they're completely different samples so there's not only one sample being played on the left there's an entirely different sample from an entirely different section being played on the right channel and then essentially when you combine these two together that's why you just get that confusing mess because you're trying to listen to one side and the other side is getting louder then you've tried to focus on the right side the left side gets more distorted and that's kind of the idea and i guess that was meant to done to artistically represent what was going on in the project itself the last six minutes represent dying or potentially going to heaven so this is a theory that most people come to the conclusion of when they finish listening to ever at the end of time they think that last sample was the caretaker dying and going to heaven because it's an angelic piece it's a it's a quiet piece it's kind of a song of praise and you would be forgiven for thinking that i mean that is the the leading theme really but there's a couple of the theories about that that i will go into a bit later on [Music] so welcome to the third stage of the iceberg this is the point now where we're going to start going into a bit more depth with a couple of the caretaker theories and uh hopefully you might learn something new so we'll kick it off with the final song is a sample of one of the earliest caretaker songs so running off the back of the fact that ever at the end of time is the caretaker itself being given dementia it would make sense that the caretakers memories would regress all the way back to its technical infancy which means that the very final sample that you're hearing at the very very end of that album is actually a sample from the first caretaker album that came out in 1999 called selected memories from the haunted ballroom and the song that is being sampled is called friends past reunited a lot of people think that that is done completely on purpose the fact that that song title means that the caretaker upon dying in the final stage is now reunited with his past friends the caretaker dies at the end of everywhere at the end of time so again just expanding on the previous point most people do come to that conclusion but most people don't realize it's the caretaker itself it's not just an album where something dies at the end the caretaker himself dies at the end of it and as a result no more caretaker music is ever going to be made the way ahead feels lonely suggests caretaker is aware of what is to come now if you look at the track listing of empty bliss beyond this world some of them are really interesting and in fact a lot of those song titles actually reappear in more garbled formats in not only later albums but in this series as well and the theory basically suggests that the song titles are almost a representation of what the caretaker is thinking at that moment for example some of the song titles are from first-person perspectives such as we don't have many days and i feel as if i may be vanishing so this suggests that the way ahead feels lonely suggests that the caretaker understands what is now going to come weird core dot tv videos the stage one on stage two there were videos uploaded to youtube by weirdcore tv which is a visual effects team that create music videos and they created these series of videos which were um the best way i can describe it was kind of very strange almost like titanic looking um kind of decor and rooms um and there was some projections being played onto them digitally and whilst that was happening you would have music from stage one and stage two being played over the top of it the last six minutes represent terminal lucidity so the last six minutes everyone knows it by now um but what they don't know is that terminal lucidity may be linked to it so terminal lucidity is a phenomenon that is quite often experienced by people suffering from alzheimer's and dementia etc when they suddenly just before dying instantly regain clarity they just become completely lucid they consider they can talk they can look at people and then they die and people have no idea what causes this and it's theory that that is what the caretaker was trying to show with this sudden actual coherent piece of music that was just appearing at the end it may be completely distorted it may sound completely just mangled but it's music compared to the previous how many hours of music you've just been listening to of just complete distortion minutes of silence after final sample plays again most people think about this but if you just listen to the album and you click off of it when it's finished you may not notice there is an exact one minute gap after the very final part of the very final sample plays which usually represents someone dying garbled song titles so i touched on this before but you can see if you look at some of the track titles um especially in an empty bliss beyond this world a lot of the song titles end up just becoming mangled now this could very easily represent the caretaker failing to remember the titles of his own songs but it's also kind of a reference to the older albums for example let's look at an empty bliss beyond this world's track titles so we have the track's camaraderie at arm's length and the sublime is disappointingly elusive now if we look at every end of time we have sublime beyond loss gradation of arm's length mournful camaraderie livets all joyful camaraderie which is actually a master of about three or four different song titles and also it fits the theme because those are the because those are the stage three sections because of the stage three song titles which means at that point the caretaker is failing to remember music that was created in the past and as a result mangles a lot of the old song titles together compilation albums so most people don't know this for some reason but um stages one to three and then four to six are actually compiled onto their own individual cds and those are available on boomcat i still believe now and they feature alternative artwork or just different artwork and from the rest of the series and nothing else is different there's no different track titles or anything but there you go alternate color physical editions i just have to kind of throw this one on there um for some reason um all of the different pressings have a normal variant and then a blue variant um there's no explanation as to why that's really there there's no symbolic meaning it doesn't really play into the laurel but um they just for some reason have a blue variant and a black variant of every single album the album's being a year apart in release schedule was to represent going to visit the caretaker like an old relative suffering from dementia so this is more of a realization that i had when i was listening to the albums and thinking if you already had the whole thing made or at least had all things mapped out why didn't they come out sooner or why didn't the whole thing just come out once and i realized the reason that he purposely released them a year apart was so that you would listen to the caretaker then you would go away you might even forget about it ironically go and live your life for a year and then you would suddenly get a notification that the new album had come out and you'd go and just listen how bad things had gotten almost in the meantime so you were kind of being exposed to whilst you've been away going do whatever you've been doing for the previous year the caretaker has still been sat here decaying mentally and you're now hearing how bad it's gone since the last time you saw him okay so now we're almost fully into the murky waters of the iceberg here and let's have a look at some of the more obscure facts about the caretaker mournful camaraderie is the last coherent memory this is more just an observation really a mournful camaraderie is the name of the last track of stage three as we know stage four is a completely just it begins as a it begins and ends as a complete garbled mess so the last time we hear an actual um coherent piece of music i guess is mournful camaraderie so you may notice that as the album goes on the track titles become almost clinical they go from things such as libbets all joyful camaraderie hidden sea bury deep last moments of pure recall to stage four post awareness confusions stage five synapse retrogenesis stage five sudden time regression into isolation they're just kind of extreme blanket statements really just about how the caretaker is and it also shows that instead of the caretaker almost misremembering his own song titles it's as though someone else is now naming the title someone who is looking after the caretaker everywhere an empty bliss is not by the caretaker as he died canonically but by kirby now this is actually one of my own theories and i actually managed to prove it um to a discord group that i was in uh which is actually a great discord group and they do look for a lot of the samples they're very close to finding a lot of the most kind of sought after samples but i kind of posed this theory that everyone empty bliss is not by the caretaker it's actually by james kirby you know james kirby kind of is now no longer the caretaker and he released the final album and that is proven if you look at the liner notes on bandcamp for the release of everywhere in empty bliss you can see it says that it was compiled from unreleased archival works the hell sirens are memories of war so the hell sirens are a section in stage four where just almost out of nowhere you get this blaring horn that sounds like an air raid siren it terrified me many other people and a lot of theories suggest that this is actually memories of war [Music] so [Music] so this is someone remembering like as i say an air raid siren at the beginning it sounds like there was a plane flying overhead which makes sense because this is someone who would have lived through the second world war so it could have potentially been in combat friends past reunited sample is a vinyl only kirby and a few others own so this is kind of the holy grail sample of every end of time a lot of the samples for this have been found and people have been trying to find where does the last six minutes sample come from and they have gone to extreme lengths to try and find it uh the discord server that i used to be a part of they never stopped talking about it and very recently in fact they've actually made a big breakthrough they've not only found the the actual track that was um the actual original choir piece that was being performed but they found um i believe the not only the choir that performed it in the 60s but they found the actual church it was recorded in and they've sent emails out but i think as of now they haven't actually got a reply because i mean if you were just working as a person at a church and you got an email saying uh someone who sampled your your music to create a project about dementia wants to want the vinyl give us the vinyl you might think they're a bit insane enough on that video um kirby actually replied and said this is not the exact vinyl but it is extremely close and he's actually offered that once he flies back to the uk to visit his parents he will actually have a look for the vinyl and take a photograph of it maybe not upload it to archive.org just to keep us on our toes a bit but i think he will at least give us that final piece of the puzzle that we will need to get our hands on the elusive stage six final song titled sampling heartache are lyrics from the original so this is something that you can see if you look at the names for example a1 it's just a burning memory and we also have and heartbreaks and what does it matter how my heart breaks various lyrics scattered throughout every at the end of time those are actual direct lyrics from the original song which has been sampled which is called heartaches samples in later stages are of caretaker songs themselves so as i said before kind of going off of this concept that every at the end of time is not just someone being given dementia but the caretaker himself um much later stages actually sample earlier caretaker songs themselves so songs from much much earlier albums some songs from deleted scenes forgotten dreams he just kind of threw the entire discography into this project and you can hear various points of it throughout the later stages old london town a museum of garden history exclusive versions so the recollections from old london town the museum of garden history these were two different um live kind of uh events that the caretaker did where it was just one about i think like an hour long track where he mixed a bunch of uh music together but the thing is the tracks that he used within those mixes were edits or unreleased versions or exclusive different versions of existing caretaker songs same song different samples i.e heartaches covers and you'll notice that a lot of the same melodies or kind of musical motifs do appear within the album but they sound completely different now this is because kirby did go and find bands performing the same songs that he was sampling but just under different obviously different sounds um or different styles and you'll find that a lot if you go on archive.org and search for heartache you can find that exact song under so many different styles you can find like bossa nova jazz i've been seeing like a jug and spoon band that did it at one point there's like acapella versions big band versions they've got everything on there and that's exactly what he did there's an interviewer he said that he found a version of heartaches where it sounded very miserable and kind of almost very mournful he said it sounded like the band hadn't had their morning coffee yet and so that's the one that he used to kind of represent a lower mood in the album [Music] [Music] so we're now pretty much at the bottom of the iceberg here this is the point where we're getting into some pretty broad theories but things that can still be backed up and i will do my best to back them up the caretakers sung heartaches on stage i put this one here this is something you can find just by googling for about three minutes but i just thought it was funny to put it so far down as though it was like this terrifying cursed thing but there is a video that exists of um the caretaker himself allegedly it is kirby but you know it's the caretaker performing um he's like channeling the caretakers though he's like he's on like ghost hunters or something and he's singing heartaches he's just singing the original sample slowed down and it's a pretty interesting video unfortunately the audio quality is terrible on it but it's all we've got the only evidence we have that that performance even existed there are two versions of the final album with different endings so this is something that i was very very lucky to be a part of in a way so when the caretaker created everywhere in empty bliss he also held an art exhibition in france with evan seal to demonstrate a lot of the painted artworks that have been created for that series and previous albums as well but on top of that they also played the caretakers music over the uh the audio system in the art exhibition itself as well as that the actual art exhibition book like the guide that went to the exhibition came with a cd now the main thing to understand about this is that the version of everywhere an empty bliss that was on that cd is an alternate version which people who were only technically at that art exhibition will ever hear and the thing is the people who ran the art exhibition did make the exhibition guide available to buy online which i did before it sold out which means i was very very lucky to own this alternate timeline edition of the final album and the reason i call it the alternate timeline version is because the album has a different closing track and this has into this other point here is that elusive sunshine is the final caretaker piece elusive sunshine is the final track on the alternate timeline version of everywhere in empty bliss so whilst the main album finishes with and bliss everywhere bliss this version is almost kind of more upbeat and it suggests that there is a different ending to the story in a way that if you went out and you went to this exhibition you kind of got the true ending secret performances so this is again tying into that point about the caretaker singing heartaches on stage there's a lot of these performances which people have tried to film or we have very shaky footage of where it's the caretaker performing music from his albums where he kind of sings and mimes along to them and i just wish there was more um widely available footage of it so i'm never going to attempt to pronounce that because it's french and i will butcher it but that is the uh our exhibition company they are the people who set up the art exhibition that the caretaker and evan seal did that exhibition with the alternate version of the final album and in that book there is explanations and interviews with evan steele and the caretaker and also just an explanation of what happens in the the album kind of just to the general public explaining what the caretaker's music is half of it is in english half of it's in french also contains a lot of other artworks which evan seal kind of did and it's an extremely interesting read stage 3 artwork is an attempt to recall stage 2 artwork if you look at stage 3 and stage two's artwork you can see that they're very similar it's kind of this plant pot that's just almost exploded all of a sudden and it's very reminiscent of those images where they've told people who suffer from um including like dementia and alzheimer's but usually like schizophrenia they say to can you draw something and they show it kind of degrading over time as they fail to draw the same thing over different years ever at the end of time is a direct audio feed of the memories of one character so this is kind of more of a observational thing if you think about it what are you actually hearing you've been told that ever at the end of time is the caretaker himself being given dementia and then you're listening to an album where the caretakers and music is being distorted in the background so this means what are you actually hearing are you hearing the actual direct memories as though we've somehow plugged the caretaker into some system and we're hearing what he's thinking or is it just a representation of it who knows the caretaker project is designed to give you false memory syndrome so false memory syndrome apart from being one of the titles of one of the caretakers earlier songs um this is a theory where essentially you go and you listen to the caretaker and you feel a sense of nostalgia but you never were alive at the time that those songs were out these like 20s and 30s boring music and you're alive in the 21st century you were never alive during that time but people report feeling a sense of nostalgia a sense of familiarity with that music especially after getting into the project going back and listening to the albums and really enjoying listening to those albums and then thinking that they have fond memories attached to the earlier caretaker albums in the sense that they have created a memory of someone that doesn't even exist ever at the end of time is cyclical so this is again a very very far out theory but the idea being that you get to the very end of stage six and you're so distraught from hearing the end of it that you go back to the beginning to almost be comforted by hearing everything be back to normal again ultimately hearing the whole thing happen again then you go back to the beginning and the idea being that it's a cycle every end of time was planned from the start i don't really buy into this one too much but the idea is that the character planned this from the beginning is that when i said it wasn't about memory from the beginning he knew he was going to do it from the beginning because if this is a project about the shining there's going to be a lot of easter eggs in there because if you're going to take inspiration from a kubrick film you better put your own easter eggs in there the idea being that the fact that friends past reunited is on the first album means that the caretaker knew he was going to sample it as a final piece later on down the line but judging by the way that he's spoken in interviews about the caretaker it seemed as though he just kind of almost kind of fell into doing this stuff about the memory through just his own interest and it sounds as though that was an ending which he came up with which he thought just fit the theme brilliantly instead of it being somehow planned from the start and the final point pmybs are very silent alternate timeline dead bees so that may sound just about as incoherent as some of the track titles on every at the end of time but the artwork for everyone empty bliss on bandcamp is this kind of blue yellow green artwork and if you got the cd from the french art exhibition you get an extended version of that artwork which is almost further down the painting and you can actually see the bottom of the painting in this version and you can see if you zoom in at the very bottom there's a bunch of dead bees on the floor now i didn't know what this meant i looked at it and first of all just amazed that there was like an extra section to the artwork that we were able to now see but when you look inside the book for the art exhibition on the front page it just says pmybs are very silent and then on the other side of the page it says everywhere in empty bliss and that was enough of a hint for me to try and uh piece something together and it turns out it's an anagram and it also turns out that um even still painted that piece specifically for everywhere in empty blitz and he came up with that anagram from the name everyone empty blitz and then painted the what's known as the dead bees artwork as a response to that so that's absolutely everything that i could think of to do with everywhere at the end of time as well as just the caretaker itself hopefully this has been an interesting video and hopefully i will do more videos in the future on other bands that i enjoy because it's quite fun to make but until then i've been ooks and i'll see you later

Channel: ookiiani

Views: 260,893

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Id: tUa-Q77OqkY

Length: 32min 10sec (1930 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021