A thin fog descended as I was emerging out of the station at Dahlem, adding a veil to a day that had already attained a darker tenor from Trump’s reelection, a topic which later too coloured most of my conversation with my doctoral supervisor, who was coincidentally, supervising my project about boring apocalypses. What would the world look like when it ends? In fire and brimstone? Or a mundane descent into darkness? These scenarios clouded my head on my way back to the station as I dug my hands deep into my jacket pockets to brace myself against a sudden gale of air that portended an extra cold and gloomy winter.

Later in the evening, on the hallowed ground where the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stood, it was perhaps fitting then that Kali Malone’s concert prolonged my considerations of doomsday’s advent. There were to be no revelations from her extended organ chords, no angel heralds or Christ-like saviours. The music droned on mournfully, almost endlessly, one long note leading to the next, between silence, hushed murmurs, a cough or two. For an instance, I couldn’t tell if these were the voices from the church or from her music, the hypnotic collapse of dichotomies, between the sacred and the profane, between the apocalyptic and the ordinary, a mere constant of the human condition. In the cycle of repetitions, I was suddenly reminded of Beckett’s plays and his adage that there is “better hope deferred, than none.”

Heat and humidity conspired to wake me up at 3am, where lying on my sweat-soaked sheets as a thunderstorm lurked outside made me feel like I was lying on my bed not in Berlin but in Singapore. The maudlin meteorological conditions, coupled with the recent passing of the summer solstice, gave me a sudden urge to cocoon myself under my duvet with a book and some tea while music played softly in the backdrop and the room smelt faintly of burned sandalwood.

At Fete de la Musique, I was lucky to hear @lisaakuah perform songs from her debut album, Outgrowing Nymph. I met the psychedelic folk singer about 2 years ago at Space Meduza, where I was immediately entranced by her voice which seemed to expand endlessly into the neon-lit interior of the bar. Though Alex offered more of an industrial setting, the effect remained the same, her voice reverberating through bricks walls and steel beams to project an acoustic center into an abstract, cosmic space: “worlds endlessly wide,” as she would sing in “Dancing Trees.”

On a night where the past echoed into the present, and the wind outside stirred storms in my heart, I found Lisa’s music more penetrating than usual.