Listening Tip September 2026: Save Me Last

This Listening Tip is particularly close to our hearts.

Sound the Alarm is a project by Australian double bassist Clayton Thomas and inspired our We See You series last year. The composition was also partly reworked and performed here.

Now the 22-piece ensemble has released a new recording: Save Me Last.

Once again, the recording is dedicated to the children of Gaza. It draws attention to their situation and serves as a fundraising effort. But it is also a gesture that clearly asks a few more questions.

Because while the first recording, Sound the Alarm, captured scenes of destroyed landscapes, fear and devastation in intense images, something quite different happens now.

The unbearable reality has entered us. It is present in our conscious and unconscious minds. And this ensemble plays to something deep inside us.

Loneliness in the face of suffering.

Grief.

And then, slowly but unmistakably: support.

Human support, sensitive support, support that is felt. And it comes in waves. It reaches the loneliness and then ebbs away again.

Waves.

The first piece.

The loneliness and abandonment of the individual cannot be resolved. But they can be met, touched, seen.

And out of this touching emerges something that runs through the whole album: the possibility of remaining present.

In Alma, from under the Rubble, a 42-minute piece, the ensemble creates a tremendous presence in relation to the subject.

It is moving because you can feel that the musicians allow themselves to be moved.

It is powerful because, even in the face of this subject, the music manages to be fully present.

This music plays itself free without losing its focus. That is very powerful.

It gives voice, sets something in motion, and creates a space in which we can breathe with the subject and respond to it.

Perhaps it is precisely this endurance that is the real strength of this music. It does not try to resolve the suffering. It does not make it smaller either. But it refuses to be silenced by it.

And there is something special about a large group of musicians achieving this.

At times, you even have the impression that every single voice articulates its position with complete precision, always oriented towards the subject, becoming freer and more powerful in its gestures.

The large number of musicians creates a very clear, many-voiced body of sound. The individual voices speak distinctly, and precisely through this, the experience of listening together becomes tangible.

Listening and giving sound in order to remember, to mourn and to awaken.

And then, at the end, comes Names (an incomplete List).

We hear an endless sequence of names, names of children who did not reach their first birthday. For a long time, we listen to Maissa Alameddine as she strings one name after another.

And at some point, the music enters.

It releases the names from their letters, turns them into souls, wrests them, at least for a moment, from oblivion and from the silence that Western politics has so relentlessly imposed upon them.

Everything that can save our way of living together, everything that nourishes understanding and hope, begins with listening.

Resilience emerges when we can endure what we hear without pushing it away.

This music does not offer an answer.

It asks the next question.

And it looks at us.

Please listen.

https://claytonthomas.bandcamp.com/album/save-me-last