An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

This is wild… not something I ever imagined even existed. I am completely fascinated by this. I started listening to this before I knew what it was and after a couple of songs I started to feel eerily like I was sitting in the bar in The Shining. So it was a real surprise when I had a chance to look at the Wikipedia entry and read that The Caretaker Project took inspiration from a number of sources including The Shining. As for the album, what an incredible concept! I loved listening to this. Sure, it isn’t the normal thing one would listen to by any stretch, and I have no idea if it is something I’ll revisit, but I love that this exists.

As a survivor of listening to everywhere at the end of time, this was light work. 45 minutes of music that's easy to listen to on the surface but sad conceptually instead of 6 hours of noises that make me want to kill myself. While this is more accessible, though, I do think that the long form version is far more clear in its intent. Like by the end of that I really felt like I had gone through 6 stages of memory loss and could tease out the metaphor much easier than this. However, just as a proof of concept this was pretty good. Also didn't know that Libet's delay was what the tik tok sound came from.

What a dreamy album. Thank you for sending it in.

This one floored me a little – on the outset, I was wondering how I was going to make it through a full 45 minutes of old-timey piano, but as I let this one seep into my consciousness it began to grow on me. It's been a while since an LP has conjured a whole new set of emotions while listening, but this album made me feel an enjoyable sense of dread, like my fate had been decided and I was calmly awaiting my doom with a peaceful sense of acceptance. I can see people here absolutely hating this album, but to me, this is what the project is about, finding completely new musical experiences that I wouldn't have made myself listen to otherwise – purgatory's waiting room music wasn't on my bingo card (or something I would have even thought I'd enjoy), but I'm glad you added this to the list and made me listen to it!

A ambient take on decay and entropy that's adjacent and yet also topically different from the ones of William Basinski, of "Disintegration Loops" fame. It's awesome that projects like this can see the light of day -- if I can use such a phrase for something so dark as an album inspired by Alzheimer's disease. On that note, the 6 album series "Everywhere at the End of Time" -- also using "plunderphonics" jazzy loops at first, then gradually turning into something far more sinister -- sounds like the longer, more ambitious and more harrowing, *hardcore" version of this particular record (broken down into the six stages of the disease for this later mammoth release). Browsing through it, you really get the feeling that it's a daunting task to sit through the whole project from start to end. Yet it might also be a task that conveys some incredibly eerie or even transcendantal moments. I have already haphazardly found some of those moments in parts of the project, actually, but it felt a little like cheating to use chance to hear them. Anyway... Much like *An Empty Bliss Beyond This World*, what we have here is a meditation of the frailty of human existence for sure, and I hope I can find the time to listen to it all one day. Of course, my last sentence also implies that the journey is here as intellectual as it is sensorial. Which raises the following question: are we really dealing with "music albums" here? Or are we dealing with full-blown contemporary art that happens to use music as a medium? Guess the jury's still out on this one. 3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4. 8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5) Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ---- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 11 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 16 (including this one) Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 24

Intriguing ambient album consisting of samples and loops of early ballroom music. The abudant presence of cracks and hiss is sometimes somwhat over the top.

Impression based on nothing more than the title + album cover: whatever this is, it wants everyone to know it is ARTSY. Whenever I see stuff like this I just assume it's that brand of drawn out post-rock a la Mono, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Boris, etc etc. This picture just looks like something droning. Might be droning post-rock, might be some kind of "ambient soundscape" affair too. But I'm guessing post-rock. I wouldn't be surprised if I load spotify and the songs are called "I", "II", "III" etc. Ok so it has real song titles. Hifalutin', artsy nonsense, but at least they're not given roman numerals or Latin song titles. Ok, it's.... lo-fi, fake phonograph crackle, oldies "classical" type music? Minimalist approach, the songs just kinda abruptly end. It feels like the audio equivalent of a found-footage movie. Maybe it was authentically recorded using gear from the 1920s, maybe the crackle was added later on, I dunno. Overall I'm not really feeling it. I think I know what it's trying to do, but it needs more context, or further immersion. It'd work as the soundtrack to a survival horror video game or something? But as a standalone listen, eh. 3/5 just because I have no clue how to rate it. update: on now reading the wiki article, I'm actually pretty happy with how much of this I guessed, including the intent behind the project. I WAS way off on the post-rock idea, but also... maybe kinda not? I feel like there's probably overlap in the fandoms here. Either way, I'm happy with my ability to judge. The wiki makes a few interesting notes on listening that makes me think I might need to listen again tonight with my headphones in. It's probably the sort of thing I could go deep on if I hit the medicinal cannabis this evening, but I promised myself I wouldn't this week. update UPDATE: I'm now about halfway through the album and the crackle has mostly faded, and even without being stoned (it IS 4:06am after all) I have been kinda swept up in this. I dunno what to say. On paper, this is the sort of shit I sneer at. But here we are. Will definitely save for the weekend and give it a "real" listen.

Now this is definitely not something I expected to see on here! I imagine this pick was sort of an "Everywhere at the End of Time" surrogate, since siccing a 7-hour long, incredibly depressing album about Alzheimer's on unsuspecting strangers might be a bit too evil. Solid ambient music with an interesting concept. 3/5 from a musical enjoyment perspective, but you're a legend for submitting this. Waiter, more weird shit please.

Soothing, yet jarring, wistful and hazy, this benefits very much from understanding the vision it was made with, and how very well it executed it. Awesome

Something like this is exactly why this list exists, why this website exists, and why I am so happy we are continuing to manually add to it. Like yeah, fuck, whatever, another Bruce Springsteen or TOOL album is fun... but *this* is why we are here, isn't it?

Ahahahaha yesss hadnt thought about putting this on here 5 The ultimate power move would be putting "Everywhere at the End of Time" on here instead

This caught me by surprise. I knew about the work previously, but failed to spot it as I absent-mindedly clicked through to set it away. It took me about four minutes of the first track to get irritated by the repetitiveness. About forty seconds after that, it clicked what it was and I promptly stopped listening to it. Not because I don't like it - it's an extraordinary piece and a statement of art -but because I really needed to listen to something that probably wouldn't make me cry as I was walking down to the pub. You have to approach it for what it is. Something to experience, rather than something to listen to. It's good. Someone should be doing this kind of thing. It isn't really "music" though.

"The Caretaker conjures a quieter, more introspective spirit, lost in his own mind amidst a low-lit labyrinth of ever-decaying and antediluvian shellac phrases. Sourced from a mysterious collection of 78s, these vague snippets of archaic sonics reflect the ability of Alzheimers patients to recall the songs of their past, and with them recollections of places, people, moods and sensations." - from Bandcamp "If this music was a food it would taste like a single hard-boiled egg that’s really dry"- Dylan in the YouTube comment section Hi, it's me, the one who brought the spooky ghost jazz. First off, compared to 'A stairway to the stars' and 'Everywhere at the End of Time', it doesn't evoke horror in the same way. Despite the alienating treatment on big band fragments like "Libet's delay" and "Tiny gradiations", I find the overall effect to be less despair and more saudade ("Longing, melancholy, nostalgia"- Oxford dictionary) My fascination with repurposed samples in music probably goes back to my Beatles obsession as a teen, with tracks like "Revolution 9" and "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" making use of tape loops from old recordings. However, it wasn't until COVID lockdown, when I discovered both the Caretaker and this generator, that I became aware of the word "plunderphonics". The Avalanches, DJ Shadow, Beastie Boys & the Bomb Squad are all examples of plunderphonics at its best, and I credit this website for exposing me to them. I’ve never known that technique used to such great emotional effect as the Caretaker does. Ironically, I didn’t have much of an emotional reaction to hearing it tonight, as I was trying to examine it more critically. After all, I could have put Future Islands on this list, or Japanese Breakfast, or the Guess Who. Did we need another electronic artist from the UK? But then the warped orchestra of “The sublime” kicks in, that one heartstring gets pulled and I remember why I keep coming back to this before so many of the albums I’ve heard. (And also I don’t feel like absolute garbage like I did after EATEOT) HL: "All you are going to want to do is get back there", "Moments of sufficient lucidity", "Libet's delay", "Mental caverns without Sunshine", "Tiny gradiations of loss", "Camaraderie at arms length", "The sublime is disappointingly elusive", "Their story is lost" (bonus track)

Loved this. Fragments of sweetness made all the more hauntingly sad and beautiful by the ways in which Leyland Kirby obscures, distorts and repeats them. It's a brilliant concept, one of the more creative and powerful uses of music that I have ever heard. Thank you for sharing it. Fave Songs: All you are going to want to do is get back there, Libet's delay, Camaraderie at arms length, I feel as if I might be vanishing

The concept for this album is fascinating. What I'm really not sure what I think about is the execution of the concept. I've never heard an album before where I was less sure of what the artist was actually doing. In general, it sounds like he's just put a microphone up at some distance from a speaker playing music on vinyl. About halfway through the album, he has some shorter loops and has things moving between the left and right channels, which makes what he is doing a bit more obvious, but for the most part his role is very mysterious. In some ways, it's this question about what the artist is doing that makes this work. We are transported through unknown means into a hazy past that may never have existed for us. We experience the work of the artist's hand, but the hand itself is never visible. In some ways, I think this is meant to mimic the unstuck timelessness of Alzheimer's, since AD patients and their connection to music from their pasts were the inspiration for this album. It works. I don't know how or why, or even what works, but it works 4/5

Very interesting concept of this 'odd-one-out' album. It was very calming, but also oddly terrifying in some way Tip: listen it on stereo

This was a really strangely charming record. The old big band sound with an ambient twist made for something strangely warm and moving.

A very original recommendation. Thanks.

Like hearing music from another room, but in a good way

Rating: 7/10 Best songs: All you are going to want to do is to get back there

I'd really like this without the crackling white noise.

Intrigued by the description of this but strongly tempted to call utter BS on the actual product. It's really pretty much just the music, innit? Modified mostly by a lot of scratch and hiss, some reverb and delay, and repetition. At its best generating a vague and maudlin ambiance, reminiscent perhaps of what is playing at dwindling volume in the back of Jack Torrance's mind as he freezes to death in the hedge labyrinth. The more starkly modified I found less tolerable. Narrowly scrapes better than two stars by virtue of sheer barefaced audacity and because his Wikipedia bio sounds like a fictional artist from a William Gibson novel.

Good warm up for the real thing

This is a very cool concept but is mostly just record hiss

Sounds cool but it's all too similar.

Totally unexpected! A modern album with retro melodies and that vinyl-on-a-turntable feel! A great concept, bringing retro vibes with modern artifices, and also relaxing and easy to get through. The sad thing is that it's just music without lyrics, so I can't give it a higher rating.

Used to see this discussed a lot before Everywhere At The End Of Time took over all The Caretaker dicussions. So it’s nice to see this album again (also nice to not have to dedicate 6 hours to one album). This album is enjoyable, but the effect is somewhat lost if you don’t find lounge jazz to be creepy. I find it to be rather pleasant

I found this pretty boring to be honest. In general I'm just not a fan of ambient. 2 stars.

An interesting concept that has more weight in theory than the music lets on. Not sure if I would’ve determined the concept without reading the Wikipedia which makes me think it’s a bit half baked. Overall it’s just ambient music in a more classical and big band style. Musically it’s nothing special but as a concept it’s cool I suppose. 4.5/10

Ambient, dance band, easy listening, plunderphonics, conceptual art, tone poem. Lamentable la imitación de grabación antigua. No me ha gustado nada. Un 1.

Oof. Don't get it. Even after reading up on Wikipedia. Just not something I ever want to listen to again.