“The fall is inevitable. Learning how to collapse is necessary.”
With canciones del fin, Medellín-based sound artist ross delivers a hushed and luminous meditation on endings. The five-track EP unfolds like a cycle of lullabies for the Earth’s last night — intimate, fragile, and strangely consoling. If the end of time often arrives in art as spectacle, ross renders it as a whisper.
Across its five pieces: “dejar atrás” (leave behind), “siempre es el fin” (it is always the end), “el colapso” (collapse), “decir adiós” (saying goodbye), and “el gran silencio” (the great silence), the music moves with hypnotic restraint. These are not grand elegies but small, glowing songs that fold inward. Synth lines drift like fading light over mountains and valleys; tones shimmer with the conforting reassurance of birds retreating to their nests, never to see another dawn. The mood is neither catastrophic nor sentimental. Instead, it settles into tender acceptance — an embrace of the void that awaits us all.
Working within Colombia’s ambient and experimental scene through the audiovisual research space Éter Lab in Medellín, ross approaches sound as part of territory itself, capable of holding memory and articulating ecological inquiry. That sensibility permeates canciones del fin, though here it feels more interior.
Her 2020 album yubartas evoked encounters with humpback whales through layered underwater atmospheres, proposing sound as a bridge for interspecies healing. While both releases share an ecological concern, canciones del fin turns away from immersive environmental documentation in favor of a more inward reading. The textures are pared down; atmosphere replaces identifiable ambience. Where yubartas felt oceanic and expansive, this EP feels terrestrial and introspective, as if the landscape has already dissolved into memory.
Recognizable soundmarks are largely absent, even though the five pieces are interwoven with field recordings. Some were captured in Santa Elena, in the mountains surrounding Medellín; others on the Colombian Pacific coast. Additional fragments come from audiovisual material about the Palisades fires, including a brief excerpt from an apocalyptic scene in the Colombian film Embrace of the Serpent.
“The soundscape is truly an element that runs through all my music, and on this EP it helped me weave the narrative and emotions I wanted to express,” ross told me.
The project can be heard as an exercise in letting go, in learning how to say goodbye with ross not shying away from the beauty inherent in death and emptiness. The music is tender and painful at once — melancholic rather than nostalgic — summoning the ghosts of landscapes that may vanish yet continue to resonate in absence. The closing track, “el gran silencio,” does not erupt into void; it disintegrates into white noise, slowly receding until it is turned off, leaving a charged stillness that feels less like annihilation than suspension — like images impressed on the retina when we close our eyes after staring into the light.
Even the artwork suggests erasure — a canvas wiped clean with broad strokes, as if history itself were being gently removed to create a clean slate. The gesture mirrors the music’s refusal of spectacle. Collapse, here, is quiet. Grief for the world is processed through beauty and restraint.
canciones del fin ultimately feels like a final embrace with the planet, as ross describes it. Not a protest, not a warning, but a soft vigil. In her hands, the end becomes luminous — an invitation to listen closely as the world exhales. (Gianmarco Del Re)
a closer listen 