[Cover photo credit to Smriti Keshari]

Pakistani-American composer Qasim Naqvi has revealed the details of Endling, his newest album for Erased Tapes, set for release on May 30th, 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 journey “through an intense and beautiful landscape, set hundreds of years into the future.”

According to Naqvi, the album tells the story of the last human being on the planet, known as the endling, across its eight compositions. The track “Plastic Glacier” is out now.

Naqvi explains:

“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 took 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.”

Album Tracks:

01 Fires — an eternal fire created from a bomb, that can never be extinguished

02 Beautification Technologies — retouching and modifying your virtual appearance

03 The Glow — the integration of photosynthetic processes and forever chemicals

04 Power Down the Heart (feat. Moor Mother) — the heart of artificial intelligence, powering down forever after a 500 year life cycle

05 Plastic Glacier — a glacier the size of Mount Everest, created over centuries from the plastic in the oceans. It circles the earth like a monument

06 Endling — the character of our story facing their definition

07 In the Distance — the seas rising into the clouds

08 The Great Reward — the end