old worlds / caretaker

Currently listening to: this

have you heard of a project by The Caretaker called “everywhere at the end of time”?

it’s a music project that tries to express the idea of, and feelings associated with, disorders such as dementia. it’s 6 hours and 30 minutes long, and is split into 6 stages. it opens with nostalgic ballroom music from the 20s, dreamy piano solos, reverbed samples from an era passed. all coated with vinyl crackle, littered with sudden ends and droning loops. as the stages progress, the samples become more and more distorted, unfamiliar, unrecognisable. further and further, darker and darker, sounding more and more lost and despairing. then, at the end - a moment of clarity in its final stages, a beautifully degraded sample of an old choral. a depiction of “terminal lucidity”, a term describing a supposed moment of completely lucidity before the passing of a sufferer of a serious psychiatric disorder.

then, a minute of silence, to mark the passing of the patient.

such a powerful and expressive project. i got reminded of it stumbling across the link i’m currently listening to. it’s a similar concept, inspired by the caretaker, but using the minecraft OST instead (which itself is an incredibly beautiful piece of work). as someone who has a lot of memories associated with the game - friends, virtual spaces, building projects - as well as having the OST burned into my memory, will this be part of the sound of my own aging?

weird thing is i have memories of old worlds on terraria, minecraft, rust… etc. worlds that at some point really did exist in my mind. i knew them inside out, in some ways better than the city i really live in. i remember the way we built the houses, the quickest routes to the sea, the way the monuments peeked over the landscape, the mental map of the mazes we bored into the ground. worlds that will never be seen by anyone, ever again, existing only in our memories. somewhere in the depths of my unsconscious mind lives hundreds of the ghosts of these worlds, some probably dormant and impossible to recall, but there all the same.

who knows, maybe one day i’ll recall them all, with complete clarity or terminal lucidity, and i’ll get to get lost in those tunnels, see those sunsets, admire our creativity, again.