But he has never had a conceptual vessel as clear, compelling, or timely as Endling, a record that not only contemplates a potential inflection point for humans but whose framework also allows us to consider this fraught moment, where the future is not yet fate. Opener “Fires,” for instance, is at first menacing, shards of noise peeling from an industrial-strength drone like solar storms leap from the sun. The melody Naqvi slowly builds, though, curls like a question mark, as much suggesting a warm embrace as sounding a warning.
During “Power Down the Heart,” Moor Mother, playing the role of an expiring AI entity that our hero encounters there at the end of the world, musters a sort of underwater Laurie Anderson, stoically reciting a poem about the miracles and catastrophes she has observed—babies being born, children teaching parents to change, evolution. “I have witnessed the trials, the tribulations,” she intones near the end, inside a hum that whistles like a gale. “Been a witness of empires crumbling/I’ve seen financial institutions crumble/Laws crumble.” In one regard, it is the clinical confession of all that this being has seen. But there’s an insistence to Moor Mother’s voice, too, as if her warning were a suggestion for a way out of where we seem to be heading, a prompt to split open the system now and start again before the plot of Endling plays out for real.
Before Naqvi began composing Endling, he wrote the track titles, verbally outlining the end of a species before backfilling the story with sound. There is something perversely funny, then, about the luminous but tragic finale, “The Great Reward.” That phrase, of course, is a concept borrowed from multiple religions, describing the salvation promised through a lifetime of devotion. After the record’s harrowing back half, where the protagonist is tossed about by their efforts to stay alive like a broken raft on stormy seas, they seem to close their eyes to begin “The Great Reward,” as if drifting off to dream of everything that has been lost. It feels like the boat settling to the bottom of the ocean floor after Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic or a long exhalation after Sigur Rós’ () expires. And then, without warning, it ends, sound replaced by silence. The great reward for devotion to god rather than service to whatever we have left, Naqvi suggests, is only a little more than nothing—a planet spinning on without us, participants and witnesses who have banished ourselves.
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