Voices by IB13

The year is 3113.
But he does not know it.
He was born and raised in a jungle of dead concrete, cut wires, the empty arteries of a world long dead. A cold carcass of asphalt, metal and broken glass slowly eaten away by thick roots reclaiming their once lost soil. Not much was left of the hinted past. Only the mutated whispers he inherited through tale. Each elder had carried a different story of the hegemon’s fall with little in common between them. Except for one thing. It had been slain by its own hand.

Now he could no longer hear such stories. The little he remembered swirled in his memory, combining in ways never spoken, accumulating new mutations, churning impatient to spread to new hosts. It would die with him. As all else. He was alone.

In his thoughts, he wandered away from the familiar maze and found himself in the absence of light. A place he hadn’t seen or been to before. Treading the broken glass, he announces his arrival. Soon he finds the item he was meant to find. “Cassette - Entrevista a Félix Rodríguez 1977”.

A treasure he knew how to open. In a not so distant past, he had consumed such relics in ritual among his kind. Today, though alone, he’d honor their memory. Under the rewinding song of the tape, he folded herbs into the living broth. When the tape clicked ready, he poured his fill and sat expectant of the gift awaiting him.
A familiar sense of death and destruction hovered over the words spoken. A warm nostalgia overtook him. As the tape trailed to its end he closes his eyes and loses himself.

He saw his hands crushing the breath of another, rocks thrown, chests cut open. The thread that connected him to the past held strong. Past its death, the rot of the beast lived on. In him as in all those who’d roamed with or against him. It was the rot that kept them living. And as with the beast itself, it was the rot that culled them in the end.

He knew it now: he was the last.

The realisation lifted him and he could see the mirage of his home as it had been before the fall, grey giants challenging the sky, glittering under the Sun. He saw it as it was before they were born, rolling hills, vast meadows guarded by birds of prey. And he saw beyond. The shoulders of the world dressed in white, barren and teeming with hidden life. Endless bubbling bogs edged in crowded jungle, light weaving through deep canopy. The vast sea, calm and raging, clear and frothing.

He knew it now: it was all for nothing. And he felt peace.

The waves of the sea were sand dunes breathing waving heat into the heavens. That shimmer, the soul of humanity, struggling to bend the world to its image. Failing beautifully. Nothing else stirred in that desert.

As the desert breathed its last sigh under the falling night, he grieved the fate of his kind, celebrating its long awaited end. He wondered what creature would take on the mantle of destruction now left unworn.
Life tumbled once more into the abyss of death. The circle of life.

He opened his eyes.

IB13 is the artistic alter ego of Gabriel Rafael (1997, Portugal), from Vale do Sousa, a region in the North of Portugal marked by rapid industrial growth.

The Dark aesthetics that define his sound symbolizes the predicament of the Iberian Wolf, always threatened by humans. Yet, a lurking light hides in his soundscape, suggesting there is still hope.

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