Tiny Listens #36 (Shackleton - Blood on My Hands (Ricardo Villalobos' Apocalypso Now Mix))
Shackleton - Blood on My Hands (Ricardo Villalobos' Apocalypso Now Mix)
Once a week Tiny Listens sends out suggestions for things to listen to — music, podcasts and what-not. No particular genre, style or format, just something to enrich your day.
TINY LISTENS 0036 • January 26, 2025
Shackleton - Blood on My Hands (Ricardo Villalobos’ Apocalypse Now Mix)
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
If movies and TV taught us anything, the bad guy loses and everything works out in the end.
Now you're scrolling past climate disasters, police brutality and economic injustices on your phone, shrugging because your morning coffee is getting cold.
Blood on My Hands (Ricardo Villalobos' Apocalypso Now Mix) is a reckoning. A 17-minute descent into the abyss of dread, where the walls close in slowly, rhythm by rhythm, layer by layer, until there's nowhere left to hide. Shackleton’s original already sounded like a late-night confession shouted into the void, but Villalobos stretches it into something both transcendent and oppressive, like the world’s longest exhale after realizing how deeply screwed everything is.
The vocal refrain “When I see the towers fall” is a blunt instrument, wielded not to provide comfort, but to sit heavy on your chest. It’s quiet, restrained, yet devastatingly clear. You hear it, you feel implicated, and then you realize that implication is the point. It’s not really about you, but maybe it is.
Maybe it’s about all of us.
His voice could belong to a man sitting in a dark room. Staring at his palms. Wondering how we got here. Whether ‘here’ is the political carnage of war, the relentless grind, or just another Monday scrolling past horrors we’ve learned to ignore, the weight of it remains the same.
It’s the silent, gnawing guilt of benefiting from systems you despise.
The track refuses resolution. It doesn’t want you to feel better. Instead, it drags you through layers of discontent and leaves you with… nothing.
It’s music for late-stage capitalism, for a world where every headline feels like satire, and every ideal you cling to gets ground down in the gears of compromise. It’s the soundtrack to your cynicism when the enormity of it all feels too vast.
There’s no tidy resolution because there isn’t one in the world it reflects. Villalobos doesn’t want you to dance your way out of it; he wants you to sit with it, to let the unease settle in your chest. The track doesn’t resolve because the world doesn’t resolve, and the enormity of that truth is what lingers when the music finally stops.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
And yet, here we are.
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