The End of Time: Ingrid Ene, Mihnea Balan

Today we’re talking about the end of time. Or maybe… the end of the world. Or maybe just the end of our way of imagining it. Because time, as we’ll keep discovering in this episode, is a strange thing. It feels solid, measurable, objective — and yet it’s deeply personal, cultural, even fictional.

In this episode of The Sonic Turn Podcast, we explore how humans imagine endings: the end of time, the end of the world, the apocalypse. Across religions, philosophies, and cultures, apocalypse doesn’t always mean destruction. In apocalypse studies and eschatology, the end is often a revelation — a moment when something hidden becomes visible. In Christianity, it’s judgment and salvation. In other cosmologies, it’s renewal, repetition, or return. Some cultures fear a final ending; others assume time will simply start again, slightly rearranged.

And then there’s our modern version of the apocalypse — ecological collapse, economic exhaustion, permanent crisis — an end that never quite arrives, but never fully leaves either.

You’ll hear music by Sun Ra, Mahmoud Awad, and Toze Ferreira, opening the episode with This Is Music, As It Was Expected. But before we go further, I want to start this episode with a book that has deeply shaped how we understand music, power, and the future: Noise: The Political Economy of Music, by Jacques Attali. Attali argues that music doesn’t just reflect society — it predicts it. That noise, disruption, new sounds appear before major social changes. We’ll listen to a short extract from his lecture “Music as a Predictive Science”, delivered at Harvard University, as a way of opening the questions that guide this episode.

To explore what the end of time might mean — culturally, artistically, personally — I’m joined by two guests.

Our first guest is Ingrid Ene, artist and cultural practitioner, and the initiator of Artists Play With Time. Her project began with old clocks — ticking, amplified, turned into a collective instrument — and evolved into a living, itinerant practice passed from artist to artist.

The second guest is Mihnea Bălan, a film maker based in Bucharest, with a background in anthropology, founder of The Motion Picture Shaman. Part of our conversation comes from an interview recorded in his kitchen in October 2025 — because kitchens are good places to talk about the end of the world.