This is it. The end of the line. The last chapter. The End is coming to an end.
After The Beginning of the End, The End of Music and The End of Art, we are here. Actually, where is “here?” What has changed in almost a year since The End began? Where are we now? The financial crisis is still raging, so we are buying 3D Smart TVs in bulk. The record labels are out of business, so 30 Seconds to Mars and Depeche Mode are filling our fighting-for-independents shelves. The cinema industry needs to hear our protest, so we are flocking to the third remake of the last year’s commercial success. Western society as we know it is about to collapse, so we are tweeting from our tents waiting for a trending hashtag to free us from the Wall Street oppression.
So, what seems to have been a year full of turmoil is coming to an end and the radical changes we were hoping it would bring are nowhere to be found. Perhaps next year. Perhaps in 2012. Perhaps the Mayan end of the world will change the world we have grown so displeased of. At least, we hope.
While we wait for the next revolution around the Sun to change our lives, passive-aggressively accusing everyone we can in everything that feels wrong, silently mumbling insults and bobbing our heads to the fellow plaintiff’s confidences with the world through social media, the revolution follows its orbit. The well televised revolution that cares not for us, the one that has been there unfathomably long before we came about, this revolution will continue just as long after we are perished leaving no trace of our seven billion souls. Do we care? Do we take every end-of-the-world warning as a chance to ponder on what we might be doing wrong? What may be twisted with our priorities? What is truly important? What do we want our lives to be about?
We are firmly certain that we do. Yet, we are willing to kick and punch anyone to get the tickets to the world première of the latest flick about people being kind to each-another. If not, we are sending a message to the film studios by getting it in a Torrent. They surely get the message. We are in control. Yet, we can’t suppress the burning desire to acquire the latest iteration of a tablet PC with unbelievable capabilities and 4G-3D-WiFi-gyroscopic-GPS support taking Angry Birds to a whole new level. We are tired of our kids and let VoD babysit – all the education they need is there, nobody cancelled Discovery Channel and Tom & Jerry taught our parents well enough. That is if we are willing to subdue to the dreadful society pressure to have kids. We can think for ourselves, we don’t want kids, we are looking for a real meaning of life, which just can’t be the life itself – we are a superior living being, we are no animals. We think for ourselves, all the same thing, but all independently. We feel religion is just a story, yet we can’t shake its millennia stigma burnt into our minds. Or we don’t. We love it, for it gives us comfort of convenient explanations of the things that trouble and scare us the most. We know how we came to be, we know why and we know what happens after the end. We still can’t stand anyone calling for our god using a different name, let alone not calling for him/her/it at all. For unity we call, but only as long as it is unity among ours. Unity for who? For what? Perhaps, unity against?
So, more connected than ever, as divided as always, we follow our thought leaders, whether known by their name or hidden behind a fashionable Guy Fawkes mask. We are doing it out of free will, for we are not that other country. We have our unique view on things, which we just might share on an Internet forum where anyone is free to disagree and be insulted for doing so. We have expert opinions on everything, for we are all connected to the Wire that never lies, since it belongs to the people, and people is us, unless it is someone else.
Thus, we keep spinning around the sun, with the pop culture dancing like it’s the last night of its life, while the dear dark alternative is stomping off faces, melting ears and blasting everything insulting politicians and consumerism. All to help us relax from the mindless job of working for the man we detest and do merely to survive (get a new 3D Smart TV). But, perhaps, after spending a day performing mind-numbing monotonous tasks it would be better to actually have our heads do some thinking for a change? That, rather than beating it down into a continuous coma-like state. Tired and depressed, we drift away into something that does not require our full attention, since we are multitasking. We watch the telly, while complaining on the loathed data-mining social networks with something blasting into the headphones to cheer up the spirit that “just can’t live without music.”
We need to relax. We need a rest from thinking the second-hand nonsense that floods the airwaves and the brainwaves. We are too tired to be bothered by a neighbour in need of a loan, we have done our share by giving those who are really in need. Who is to decide which one of our peers qualifies for help is of no concern to us, let them decide, we are too darn tired. Moreover, helping a neighbour does not come with a pretty bumper sticker. We are tired. We need books that read themselves and, please, oh please, entertain us. We need something new, we have seen it all — death, gore, sex, suffering, mutilation, ridicule, disgrace, repulsion, everything, and we have seen it in 3D. We need to be tickled. Our brains are too big, we are too smart, we have completed Brain Age 2 in one day. 
Our IQ is off the scale. No matter if we can’t figure out how to end bot the male and female sexism, we are scientifically brilliant. We are on a roll, a few more years and we shall vanquish poverty, elect the government that will be transparent without leaking and will save the planet. Yes, save the planet, no less. We are so superior to everything that we are actually saving a planet from an all-powerful menace that is us, humans. More powerful than asteroids, comets, gamma rays, red giants, neutron stars and black holes. We shall save our planet, then we shall save the universe. Then we will have to relax.
What if we were to stop relaxing? What if we were to stop being so passive? What if we were to stop being passengers in our life? What if we were to start thinking, really thinking for ourselves? What if we were to question everything and not only what we were told to question? What if we were to start standing up for our true convictions? What if we were to make up our own convictions? I guess, if we were to do all that, we would not be us any longer and it would truly be the end of the world…
“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct,” reads the famous quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune.
Yet, the time passes, the novelty cyclone goes by, the first album with its counterparts are out there, in the open, slowly spreading their wake around the globe, on their own, leaving the author contemplating the effects. The calm after the storm may turn out to be a trial to some, the one not everybody can overcome; but the real trial comes with the next creation. The novelty is wearing off, the initial shock wave is out of reach, the tone is set, the eyes on you are knowing, the early adopters have become the severe judges with a certain set of expectations, the adopters-to-be have quite a few comparison points, the pressure is high.
All I know so far is that I can’t hide my penchant for down-tempo this time either, just as I can’t help throwing in something evil here and there. I know that I am a ninetiess person and that the nineties drew their inspiration in the seventies. I know that I don’t want this album to be an attempt to outsmart the music, just as I don’t want to be shamelessly dumbed-down — an uneasy task I am willing to take on. I know that I want it to feature vocals, I am not yet sure whose. I know I want it to be mostly dark, but I don’t want it to wallow in the ridicule of infinite obscurity. I know that I don’t want it depressing, but I know that I can’t avoid a certain melancholy in my work. I know that I want it to be entertaining, but I also know that I want my music to make the listener think, even if for a short while. I know that I want it to stand out like Offscreen, but I know that I don’t want it to have a gimmick. I know that I want to make this album for myself as much as I want to make it for my public, for you. I know that by my very nature I need to keep making music, just as I feel exactly how high is the pressure.
