QASIM NAQVI

'Endling' takes the listener on a 43-minute odyssey through an intense and beautiful landscape, set hundreds of years into the future.

On the album’s centrepiece, “Power Down the Heart,” featuring Moor Mother, our character stumbles upon an A.I. being that is in the final moments of its life. As a kind of last rites, this ancient artificial consciousness describes the beauty, sadness and horror it has observed for hundreds of years. I wanted the music to feel like the inside of this being’s mind. I shared the music and this narrative with Camae and asked if she would be the voice of this A.I., and she came back with the perfect contribution.

All of the music on 'Endling' was made with an ARP Odyssey, Minimoog and modular synthesizer. For me, one of the many challenging and satisfying aspects of modular synthesizers involves the development of complex timbrel ideas from the ground up, which can rarely ever be repeated perfectly. The device can be organically unstable and fallible. It can feel like an organism and as the performer, you’re in control of the flow of its energy, or voltage. This machine approach to 'Endling' was the perfect compliment to its orchestral predecessor, it felt like a different kind of orchestra from this album’s future – with the organic consuming and transmuting the artificial.