We have been through some really dark times. In fact, Tuesday was exceptionally dark. And today looks no better than Tuesday, and Tuesday looked no better than Sunday. There is very little light between the late darkness of the morning and the early night of the evening. "O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark. The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant." The dimness of the day is subjectively experienced as the dimness of consciousness itself. One seems to be either leaving bed, or entering it. And the dreams are also dark. There is no brightness in the sky of the slumbering mind. As in dreams, the moments of the day are too dim to confirm the distinction between waking and sleeping. How I love this mood, this bleak feeling.

And so I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk when I heard Piano Nights by the German band Bohren & der Club of Gore. The bartender in Bimbos Cantina happened to be playing the album. It had reached its last track, "Komm Zurück Zu Mir" ("Come Back to Me"—this, of course, is said to someone who is never ever going to come back to you). The piece is slow, like a funeral procession, but with all who are involved (those carrying the coffin, those following it, those weeping) proceeding, step by slow step, to a black hole.

The echoed horn line, the faded glitter of the dust-covered electric piano, the lonely taps on the rickety high-hat—all fatefully swirl around this force that even captures and pulls light into the most extreme nothingness possible. How I love this song. Piano Nights is as right as rain for these days when everything is dark-green and gray. This is the doom jazz of Bohren & der Club of Gore.