Everywhere at the End of Time

The project begins in a ballroom. The sound is warm and slightly crackled, the way old 78rpm shellac records sound when you play them on period equipment — a dance band from the late 1920s or early 1930s, strings and horns and a rhythm section, music made for bodies moving in formal patterns across a polished floor. There is pleasure in it, nostalgia even, though the nostalgia is complicated because this is not your memory and you know it. Leyland Kirby spent three years releasing this six-stage, six-and-a-half-hour project in installments, each stage representing the progression of Alzheimer's disease from early awareness through total dissolution. The first stage is the most accessible, the ballroom music intact and lovely, just slightly too perfect in its evocation of a past that feels borrowed. By the second and third stages, the music has begun to soften at the edges — melodies that were clear become slightly smeared, familiar phrases return in slightly altered forms as if the memory retrieval system is running imperfectly. Stage four is where the horror emerges: the music now sounds like it is playing in another room, or under water, or through a wall of gauze, and the pleasant surface has begun to show gaps and interruptions, stretches of confused texture that bear no resemblance to the original recordings. Stages five and six are almost unbearable — not in an aggressive or abrasive way but with the particular desolation of witnessing cognitive dissolution in real time, the music now reduced to smears and drones and long silences punctuated by fragments that feel like the ghost of the person who once danced to these songs, still moving, still trying to remember. No other piece of music has described dementia from the inside with this specificity or this compassion.