QASIM NAQVI - Endling - LP - Translucent Vinyl [MAY 30]

LP - Limited Edition Translucent Vinyl. 

An endling is the final member of a species.
When an endling dies, the species is extinct.

Pakistani-American composer Qasim Naqvi returns with Endling, set for release 30th May 2025. Written as a modular synth prequel to his 2023 BBC Concert Orchestral work, God Docks at Death Harbor, Endling takes the listener on a 43-minute odyssey through an intense and beautiful landscape, set hundreds of years into the future.

In Naqvi’s own words, the album tells the story of the last human being on the planet – the endling – across its eight compositions.

One morning my wife woke up from a dream with a phrase in her mind — “God Docks at Death Harbor.” I was just starting to write a new work for the BBC Concert Orchestra, and when she told me about this dream of words, it very quickly seeped into the fabric of the music. Her words were a poem to me, evoking very specific imagery. I imagined our planet hundreds of years into the future, where the human race no longer exists. I imagined a world peacefully restoring itself in the absence of us, because we’re no longer around to destroy it and ourselves. This became the tenet of the work. It was like a scenic mural that I could look at for inspiration, as I was writing this tone poem. After God Docks at Death Harbor premiered in the spring of 2023 in London, the feeling stayed with me, and when it came time to think about a new record I felt compelled to continue this narrative. I imagined a prequel, about the last human on the planet — an endling, traversing a world centuries into the future. A world decayed and mutated into a strange amalgam of the natural and artificial. I envisioned the music as chapters, following this human through the crumbling landscape of the future, that was now being overtaken and absorbed by the natural world. In keeping with the tone poem tradition of God Docks, I created the track titles first, and their meanings became more defined as the music began to take shape. These titles were also imbued with the feeling of the present. Endling was mostly made during 2024, which was a time of great anguish and pain for a lot of people. Time then felt and continues to feel dystopic in its own right, like a course that may catch up with the fiction of this record.

On the album’s centerpiece “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.

To bring the sound of Camae’s voice into the world of this record, I processed her vocals through an old machine design known as the Buchla 296t Spectral Processor. With this idiosyncratic analog equalizer, I was able to create subtle vocoding effects and in more extreme ways, highlight and dampen certain resonances in her voice. The end result was a kind of synthetic voice, shedding its programmed humanness as it powers down forever.

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. Growing up, my creative life has grappled with two extremes. I love improvised music and the power of creating things in a purely spontaneous way. This type of musical communication can lead to ideas of such complexity and intuition that can never be recreated again. And on the other end, there is my love of composing for orchestras and chamber groups, which at times is a maximal scripting and concretization of ideas in written form. It’s like a detailed blueprint of my thinking slowed down. I’ve found that the modular synthesizer bridges these two worlds beautifully. I can treat this voltage controlled machine like an ensemble, comprised of very unusual “instruments” or modules, that I compose for. I can present music to this machine organism and through the attenuation of voltage, orchestrate the material live, like an improviser. And like an ensemble, the modular synthesizer’s interpretation is always different, generating very rich sonorities and patterns that exceed how I envision the material. 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. 

Tracklist: 

1. Fires
2. Beautification Technologies
3. The Glow
4. Power Down the Heart
5. Plastic Glacier 
6. Endling
7. In the Distance
8. The Great Reward