The existential rupture caused by facing death is at the core of living at the end of the world. The signifier of the apocalypse holds a mirror to the subject demanding a reassessment of the current order of life. Extinction in its varied manifestations has fuelled paranoid and paniced discourse. But as such ideas of ‘the end’ emerge, what is most curiously ignited is the exploration of identity. What was once at the center of our lives now seems distant and faulty as ecocide shifts our understanding of our humanness or loss of humanity itself amid crises. This episode probes
the question of what has been, what will be, and what could have been throughout the unfolding of the present and the immanent death this eventually calls forth, with a selection of music that explores events or material things that have brought about a new zeitgeist, or some that speak of the end one. Such as Richard Skelton's 'Front Variations' translating Arctic ice melt into sine-wave tones, Tanya Tagaqs 'Nacreous' – a track about a rare meteorological phenomenon over the planet’s polar regions – or Lemont’s composition touching on our relationship to AI and the dubious origins of neural network research.
[Image: video still Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness, 1992]