I, for one, have always imagined Armageddon to be a noisy affair —
fires belching out of cracks in the earth, meteorites of supra-heated
gas and molten metals falling from the sky, dogs and cats living
together, a tangle of confused religious monsters breaking free of
their eternal prisons — the usual assortment of cataclysmic events.
Terminal Sound System, on the other hand, finds the end of the world
to be an intimate, deeply personal affair, a sonic rapture that takes
place on the microscopic level. Their latest release, Last Night I
Dreamed of Armageddon, is an ambient landscape filled with tiny sparks
that may be fragments of unrealized dream or the last aborted
electronic signals of civilization.
“The Structure of Tasks” rumbles with seismic tremors, persistent
vibrations that will rattle crockery on the shelves and eventually
churn butter to cream. Tiny melodic efforts fall like a sparse shower
of fading cinders and the buildup of this ash becomes the crackling
interference of “Before the Snow Comes Ash” and the grey dust piles
high enough that it gets into all the electrical equipment. Each
machine goes dark, sparking out of existence, as the world — its
fires exhausted — begins to cool. Tiny machinery pluck and scratch
at the lid of your isolation tank while you float in the endless
echoes of the briny solution with “When We Are Robots, There Will Be
Peace” floating in your headphones. Suspended in space, the melody
rotates on an invisible axis, a spit of abandoned notes slowly turned
by the microscopic breeze of solar particles.
Last Night I Dreamed of Armageddon isn’t fast or hard — in many ways,
it is nothing more than a series of expanding ripples on a very placid
body of water — as the envisioned Armageddon has already come and
gone. The dreamer witnesses a world that has vanished and there is
nothing left by the endless turn of geological cycles while the
universe rebuilds itself. As such, the music is the slow motion
evolution of micro-melodies, long-term drones, and the cyclical
percussion of tiny particles oxidizing. Terminal Sound System lives
up to their name, crafting an ambient soundtrack for the last hour of
infinity. Every landmark — every city, every culture, every voice —
is gone and all that remains is the subtle decay of the heat death of
the universe. Remarkable.
Last Night I Dreamed of Armageddon is out now on Hive Records.
