I’ve always found myself to be endlessly fascinated by music that sounds like it would play after the end of the world. So, for a while this fascination has been held up by Belong’s 2006 track “Who Told You This Room Exists?” 

This track is wordless and repetitive, serene and terrifying. It is at home in an imagined place without homes or anything to create them. It is one with the dust that would remain. “Who Told You This Room Exists?” seems to wither as it grows stronger, as it grows closer to that dust sitting after the end. Weakening as it builds itself up — a paradox, a seemingly impossible thing. But on the heels of imagined end times, perhaps that is what makes the most sense.

Born from nothingness and dead from nothingness. In between, someone had to have discovered it by accident. “Who told you this room exists?” was asked and then the music faded away. Whether a person asked this or the dead air asked this, I do not know. My 2:00 a.m. brain seems to have carried me to a spot where I’m asking strange questions that legitimately have no connection to the track. But that’s the allure of “Who Told You This Room Exists?”: It carries one’s mind to strange, beautiful places. Perhaps to the end of the world. Or for some, maybe the beginning of it.