The Horror of Fading Away
I listen to a lot of experimental ambient music, usually in genres such as vaporwave and mallsoft. A lot of it is nostalgic, like mallsoft that sounds like what might play in a mall in the 80s and 90s, or odd, like an album written to accompany Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales1, but some of it is transformative or unique in the experience. One such piece of experimental ambient music is a series of albums called Everywhere at the End of Time by The Caretaker, and I've known about this collection for several years now, but haven't had the opportunity to really listen to the whole thing before (it's 6 and a half hours). Today felt like the day, so I put it on in the background for while I was at work.
The collection is a musical representation of the mental deterioration of dementia patients, through the 6 stages of the disease (which is why it is so long). In the first few stages, there is mostly recognizable music, including some church hymns, with most of the music sounding like big band music from the 20s and 30s. But as time goes on, the music becomes more distorted, more infrequent, and dominated by disconcerting static, and sometimes cuts out abruptly. The deeper in you get, toward the end of stage 4 and into stage 5, the distortions sound somewhat ominous. Then, the final stage becomes the barest hint of music only occasionally audible, hidden beneath a dark emptiness with the occasional static pop of a vinyl record. It's a lonely, scary deterioration.
My great grandmother had dementia at the end of her life, and listening to this made me think of her. I only really remember her briefly from when I was eleven spending a month with my grandparents, who were her caretakers. Thinking about how she must have experienced the end of her life, losing her memories and her connection to the world around her, is heartbreaking. So many of our elderly face this disease, too. This musical experiment allows us to experience that deterioration, even if it's for a moment. Through it we can understand and have empathy. And who knows? Maybe this will inspire more people to volunteer in memory care facilities, or work towards finding a cure.
If you ever have some time, I recommend listening to Everything at the End of Time. It's a thought-provoking experience, and worth the very long runtime.
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucerian Myth, if you're interested. It sounds like what you'd think medieval music sounds like.↩