Human Sadness: eleven minutes built on four chords taken from a requiem

An eleven minute single is not a single. It is a request.

On 2 September 2014 the Voidz introduced themselves with exactly that: “Human Sadness”, ten minutes and fifty seven seconds, the first thing anyone heard from the band. Three weeks later, on 23 September, the album Tyranny came out on Cult Records, with the track sitting fourth.

Listen while you read

Four chords taken from a requiem

The bed of the track is four chords sampled from Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, the work the composer left unfinished.

It was drummer Alex Carapetis who brought the sample into the studio. Casablancas heard it and started writing melodies over the top.

The choice is not a piece of decoration borrowed from the classics. A requiem is music written for the dead, and this track was made inside a specific bereavement.

The grief that is never named

John Casablancas, founder of the Elite modelling agency, died of cancer on 20 July 2013 in Rio de Janeiro. He was seventy. He was Julian’s father, and the two had long been estranged.

The lyrics contain no account of that death. No name, no date, no bedside scene.

This comfort that you didn’t realize you had is gone; there’s no one to ask, as a man, and that has a deep effect.

That is how Casablancas described the loss a year after the record came out, talking about the video. He pictured it as the roof coming off the house.

In place of the story, one line keeps returning, adapted from Rumi, the poet Casablancas names as his favourite: beyond all ideas of right and wrong there is a field, and we will meet there.

What happens inside the eleven minutes

The track has none of the verse-chorus shape Casablancas had trained his listeners to expect. It moves in blocks that replace one another.

What is left of it

An eleven minute track fits no radio format at all. The band led with it anyway.

In May 2015 the track became a thirteen minute short film, directed by Warren Fu with Nicholas Goossen and the photography duo Wiissa.

What remains is a piece that asks for eleven minutes to say one thing, and says it without ever spelling it out. The requiem is in the structure, not in the words.