The work is a collaboration with artist and performer Mel Chan. Starting from Chan's performance of the same name, I composed and performed a live soundtrack for her piece. Mel Chan here uses guided meditation to lead the audience through smoking the last cigarette before the world ends. Moreover, tobacco production is connected to colonial exploitation and the development of capitalism.
The soundtrack uses samples from the album "Music for Zen Meditation" by Tony Scott, which is considered a landmark of New Age music. This genre mixes non-Western influences and strives to produced a general sense of "relaxation", mirroring a similar attitude in the cultural development of late capitalism: creating an unspecific "world culture" unified in the name of endless production.
Moreover, other samples and loops come from Marlboro advertisements, entering the flow of the improvised live-set as a recurring detritus from the past. All those materials are manipulated beyond recognition, creating a new, ambiguous form of "relaxation music".