The Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World.
I listened to this album for the first time ever last night and at first I found it strangely comforting, but in the end it just left me feeling so upset. To put it simply, it's just a very upsetting ambient music album. It's a really powerful album, exploring the decay of memory, inspired by a study on Alzheimer's - some Alzheimer's patients can remember snippets of music, where they heard them and how they felt when they heard them.
The Caretaker basically takes old, little-known 30s ballroom songs/melodies and re-arranges them, edits them and distorts them so they're reflective of this experience. Music crackles, it disintegrates, is breaks up, it loops as if the music is a fleeting memory that'll soon be lost. Some of the tracks actually re-appear more than once in the album, but in a different form: the loops are shorter, it sounds more distant, it's no longer what it once was.
If you're wanting something a bit experimental, gentle on the ears but also incredibly sombre, please check out this album.
