The Internet is quite a thing. Thanks to the magic of Google, I am easily able to impersonate someone who knows the Bible from the phone book, and inform you that the title for this haunting piece of minimalism from Drekka is taken from 1 Corinthians 13:8 (I don’t even really know what that means! Where is Jon Rooney when I need him?), specifically the King James version, which reads in full:
Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
Weighty words to interpret in light of our current moment. Despite the reassurance that charity never fails, the concept of knowledge vanishing away is fairly bleak to consider – but likely inevitable given humanity’s insistence on sending itself toward extinction (oh wait, was that a prophecy?).
The piece itself has a bleakness to it, an emptiness that seems to reflect that. It starts and ends with the sounds of a cassette tape being played and stopped, as if someone sent us this recording from the end of the world. We hear a combination of analog noises, drones, and odd sounds with more traditionally musical elements such as piano, what sounds like a stringed instrument, and whistling. The whistling comes toward the end, feeling to me like someone walking down an empty hall or a spooky street, trying to comfort themselves with a tune, but instead making the whole thing that much more unsettling, before, well, vanishing away. A quiet journey through the dark with our friend Drekka to mark this strange moment in history.