Black Swan
From the End of Time
From the End of Time
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PITP48 |
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ARTIST:
Black Swan ALBUM NAME: From the End of Time CATALOGUE NUMBER: PITP48 RELEASE DATE: 05 MARCH 2025 |
FORMAT:
DISTRIBUTION: Past Inside the Present D2C (US), Norman Records (UK), Juno Records (UK), Phonica (UK), HHV (DE), Soundohm (IT), Tobira Records (JP), Linus Records (JP), Redeye (UK), and others PUBLISHING: © 2025 Past Inside the Present ℗ 2025 Past Inside the Present Publishing (BMI) CREDITS: Written, recorded, produced, and mixed by Black Swan. Mastered at Ambient Mountain House by James Bernard. Design and layout by Black Swan. Marketed, distributed, and phonograph copyright: Past Inside the Present. Pressed, manufactured, and assembled in Warsaw, Poland. |
about
Black Swan - From the End of Time (Past Inside The Present, 2025)
Across the entirety of From the End of Time, the new album by Black Swan, an eerily desolate wind forms the base layer for swells of disembodied choirs, haunting piano, mangled tapes, and scores of other unplaceable, vividly textured sounds. According to the artist, its environment “is meant to evoke the aftermath of a collapsed society,” but does so while pulling every possible vestige of beauty from the ruins, with the reverent melancholy of a classical requiem.
Like previous album Ghost (2024), there is a distinct narrative arc to this hour-long experience, but its wayposts appear unhurriedly, as mesmerizing stretches of rippling hum give way to the sudden, plaintive quivers of old cassettes, or the rumble of industrial growls far in the distance. In contrast to that album and its purgatory aura, though, From the End of Time has a slowly beating heart, giving the vague sense of an indifferent sun that still shines, albeit through a deep, crimson haze.
“Overture” places the listener in this terrain with crescendoing, choral grandeur that reaches a cinematic peak, before quietly vanishing, cloaked in an uncertain mist. On “Back to Dust”, a lonesome organ motif curls and dimly shimmers across the debris field, breaking the narcotic tone but only opening the eye halfway. Throughout this first section of the album, there is a torch-lit search for resolution through blinding fog, while the sense of some aftershock seems always to be waiting at the edges.
“Pseudotruth” embodies this uncertainty, as a mechanical loop comes to life, accompanied by the remnants of a pealing voice trapped in static, calling out from nowhere, to no one in particular. “New Gods” offers a tonal shift, as a sprightly, automated piano flickers across the backdrop, and the entire scene evaporates into the muted twinkle of rust-ravaged windchimes, eliciting the uncanny echoes of bustling humanity.
These pieces emerged from the artist’s preoccupation with man’s loss of logic, ethics, and independent thought on a broad scale, as well as the effects of those things when exchanged through commercial means. Despite the grim reality of such trends, though, he finds room to sculpt his mournful textures into something blissed out, as on “Endless Infinite”, where a pair of alternating chords creates a whirl of pure, angelic ambience above a glowing bass drone, marking out the fraught moments of a new reality.
Similarly, “Wings of Oblivion” and “A Broken Hope” are shot through with a tenuous sweetness – in the context, the cautious mind wonders whether it might be salvation, or only a phantom. Untethered harmonic arrangements waft through waves of tape hiss and analog decay, making for one of the record’s most heartfelt passages of sheer beauty. Across the final stretch of From the End of Time, redemption grows ever further out of reach – the dark winds take over, the gears are clogged with grease, and the sky is choked with soot.
“Nightlands” combines gas mask breathing and a lonely cycle of heartsick harmony, reaching out from a cavernous depth, while “Lost Futures” closes the album with ambiguity, nevertheless serving as a spiritual bookend to its beginning. What remains in its wake is the complicated question of how to feel while witnessing the consumption of something once loved, and the loss of its promises. There may be cold comfort in the abstraction of memory, but by forecasting this bleak outcome, Black Swan allows us an aural meditation on death by a thousand cuts, with a cascade of affecting grace.
Across the entirety of From the End of Time, the new album by Black Swan, an eerily desolate wind forms the base layer for swells of disembodied choirs, haunting piano, mangled tapes, and scores of other unplaceable, vividly textured sounds. According to the artist, its environment “is meant to evoke the aftermath of a collapsed society,” but does so while pulling every possible vestige of beauty from the ruins, with the reverent melancholy of a classical requiem.
Like previous album Ghost (2024), there is a distinct narrative arc to this hour-long experience, but its wayposts appear unhurriedly, as mesmerizing stretches of rippling hum give way to the sudden, plaintive quivers of old cassettes, or the rumble of industrial growls far in the distance. In contrast to that album and its purgatory aura, though, From the End of Time has a slowly beating heart, giving the vague sense of an indifferent sun that still shines, albeit through a deep, crimson haze.
“Overture” places the listener in this terrain with crescendoing, choral grandeur that reaches a cinematic peak, before quietly vanishing, cloaked in an uncertain mist. On “Back to Dust”, a lonesome organ motif curls and dimly shimmers across the debris field, breaking the narcotic tone but only opening the eye halfway. Throughout this first section of the album, there is a torch-lit search for resolution through blinding fog, while the sense of some aftershock seems always to be waiting at the edges.
“Pseudotruth” embodies this uncertainty, as a mechanical loop comes to life, accompanied by the remnants of a pealing voice trapped in static, calling out from nowhere, to no one in particular. “New Gods” offers a tonal shift, as a sprightly, automated piano flickers across the backdrop, and the entire scene evaporates into the muted twinkle of rust-ravaged windchimes, eliciting the uncanny echoes of bustling humanity.
These pieces emerged from the artist’s preoccupation with man’s loss of logic, ethics, and independent thought on a broad scale, as well as the effects of those things when exchanged through commercial means. Despite the grim reality of such trends, though, he finds room to sculpt his mournful textures into something blissed out, as on “Endless Infinite”, where a pair of alternating chords creates a whirl of pure, angelic ambience above a glowing bass drone, marking out the fraught moments of a new reality.
Similarly, “Wings of Oblivion” and “A Broken Hope” are shot through with a tenuous sweetness – in the context, the cautious mind wonders whether it might be salvation, or only a phantom. Untethered harmonic arrangements waft through waves of tape hiss and analog decay, making for one of the record’s most heartfelt passages of sheer beauty. Across the final stretch of From the End of Time, redemption grows ever further out of reach – the dark winds take over, the gears are clogged with grease, and the sky is choked with soot.
“Nightlands” combines gas mask breathing and a lonely cycle of heartsick harmony, reaching out from a cavernous depth, while “Lost Futures” closes the album with ambiguity, nevertheless serving as a spiritual bookend to its beginning. What remains in its wake is the complicated question of how to feel while witnessing the consumption of something once loved, and the loss of its promises. There may be cold comfort in the abstraction of memory, but by forecasting this bleak outcome, Black Swan allows us an aural meditation on death by a thousand cuts, with a cascade of affecting grace.
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