For the longest time, I couldn’t quite understand what kept pulling me back to Endling, the fifth synthesizer album by Dawn of Midi drummer Qasim Naqvi. Still, for weeks, I would press play whenever the day’s other listening seemed to be done, or when I was just too tired of the moment’s miasmic news to make another decision. Maybe, I thought, it was the references and echoes—how the title track wobbles like some vertiginous Alvin Lucier experiment, how “Plastic Glacier” flutters like a Brian Eno outtake from Conny Plank’s studio in the late ’70s, how “In the Distance” bridges deep bass and noise filigrees like the Haxan Cloak a dozen years ago. Or maybe, I reckoned, it was Naqvi’s impeccable timing, the way he moves among ideas with absolute surety, neither too rushed nor indulgent. How else could “Beautification Technologies” shift from haunted drone to heavenly synth arpeggios to some disorienting interzone in under five minutes? Maybe my attraction was purely technical.
But I recently happened to listen to Endling during a tense debate with an old friend about the day’s headlines. I finally understood why it felt so apt, beyond Naqvi’s textural and temporal capabilities: With society pushing against an existential brink, the album suggests a sanctuary, or any kind of third place—a coffee shop, a bar, a park bench—that holds space for conversational horror and hope, for an honest admission of how we feel and what we still want to be. This epiphany, turns out, shouldn’t have taken me so long. Naqvi built Endling as a kind of solo prequel to God Docks at Death Harbor, which the BBC Concert Orchestra premiered in 2023. With its title and concept inspired by a phrase his wife remembered from a dream, God Docks at Death Harbor imagines the Earth’s landscape long after humans have slipped off the planet. Endling documents the tragic hero’s journey as the last of a species tries to hang on to humanity a bit longer. It is at once draining and uplifting, a terribly beautiful and beautifully terrible vision of self-made extinction.
For more than a decade, Naqvi has made grand tones feel subtle and suggestive. Inspired by his explorations of the ARP Odyssey, the voices on his 2014 choral album, Fjoloy, quiver so heavily that they seem to defy concepts of key and consonance, as if they are being pitch-shifted by the world’s very rotation. On 2016’s Chronology, he exploited the faults of a failing Moog to move steadily upward through static skips and broken tones, like an angel rising through a rainstorm. And on his breakthrough album as a synthesist, 2019’s Teenages, he proved capable of conjuring dark and light, confidence and equivocation, as if documenting the process of defining oneself through six absorbing pieces.
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.
