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Apr 24, 2025 Web Exclusive By Ben Jardine Photography by Lina Gaißer

The arc of history is punctuated by losses and discoveries. Entire languages are lost, solely to be remembered in texts or hardened tablets. Animals die out, their existence demarcated by the bones they leave behind. Works of art are lost too, often without a trace. What then is history but a temporary preservation of things that will eventually be lost? And if all will inevitably be swept away by the tides of time, what, then, is the whole point of it all?

These are questions that Beirut’s Zach Condon has entertained his whole life, and it took his latest record A Study of Losses to help him get closer to an answer. As a boy, young and ambitious, Condon was struck with bad insomnia, staying awake all night and gazing at the stars, at the moon, asking life’s big questions: What’s beyond the edges of the universe? And what color is the universe? And what came before the Big Bang?

“As a kid, I had to reconcile two extreme emotions,” Condon says. “One was this extreme kind of nihilism. It’s all just going to disappear anyway. And hating that my parents just got up and went to work every day and then came home and ate and then just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. That felt very empty and void to me, especially in the face of death and all these things.”

But on the other hand, Condon admits, he had brutal ambitions. He knew he wanted to be an artist, to create meaningful work, whatever it may be. Those restless nights, he’d think, “I should be getting better at this. I should be working on this. This song didn’t come out right, this idea didn’t come out right. Sitting there, the other half of me would come up and say, ‘Well, what’s the fucking point?’”

Over time, though, Condon grew afraid of those existential questions, stopped asking them so frequently, and started to ignore the perceived meaninglessness of life. He turned instead to ambition, to searching for meaning in his work. That cynicism, that everything will eventually disappear, remained—it just turned into a desire to preserve those things disappearing.

On Beirut’s early albums, Condon captured the sound of Eastern Europe in the Balkan folk and klezmer sounds of his 2006-released debut, Gulag Orkestar. On 2007’s The Flying Club Cup (whose title came from a photo Condon saw, one of the first color photos ever, of a 1910 hot air balloon festival in Paris) each song aims to capture the essence of a different French city. Not to mention the band’s name itself, some of their most well-known songs are named for cities of personal significance—“Santa Fe” (where Condon grew up), “East Harlem” (to honor his stint in New York City), but also “Nantes,” “Goshen,” “Perth,” “and “Guyamas Sonora,” to name a handful. Even his record label, Pompeii, is named for the ancient Roman city where Mt. Vesuvius decimated, yet preserved, its inhabitants. Condon’s music is at once an act of archiving, if not for an audience or an historic record, for Condon himself.

So it’s fitting, then, that Condon’s latest album fell into his lap. A Study of Losses is an expansive archive of treasures that have been, in one way or another, lost to time.

In spring of 2023, Condon was commissioned by Swedish circus company, Kompani Giraff, to provide music to their piece, also called A Study of Losses, which itself is an adaptation of the 2018 book An Inventory of Losses by Berlin writer Judith Schalansky. The book, Schalansky writes, “springs from the desire to have something survive, to bring the past into the present, to call to mind the forgotten, to give voice to the silenced, and to mourn the lost.” Over a dozen “studies,” written like immaculately researched short stories, Schalansy explores various lost entities from history: an extinct tiger, an heretic prophet’s burned books, Sappho’s lost poems, a lost silent film, and a disappeared atoll in the South Pacific, among others.

“When I first took on this project,” Condon says, “I found the topic to be very heavy and painful, because it touches that nerve the whole time. My brain was always like, ‘You can’t save everything. It’s all going to disappear. What’s the point of any of it anyway?’”

He’d been asked to compose soundtracks before, for film, but had always felt creatively stuck, being asked to write music to scenes with an energy already dictated by the director. “They would send me scenes and say, ‘Can you write a song that sounds menacing right here?’ And I couldn’t do it on command. I would sit at the uke or the piano or something, and then, like, something really happy and goofy would come out.”

Condon acknowledges that a big part of why he took on A Study of Losses is that Kompani Giraff director Viktoria Dalborg never told him what the scenes were, or how they would feel on stage. She would build their performance to his music.

This flexibility helped, because Condon’s life was in transition at the time. He and his partner, who designed the album artwork for A Study of Losses, were moving between their homebase in Berlin and their new place in Stokmarknes, Norway: a town on a remote island north of the Arctic Circle, where 2023’s Hadsel was written and recorded. Dalborg would send Condon summaries for each chapter of the book, describing how she saw them in her mind. He’d stop in to the theater in Stockholm to watch Kompani Giraff at work, then return home to Berlin to write songs based on the summaries Dalborg had sent. This process meant Condon was writing on the move, and through several filters of imagination—Schalansky’s words of real topics, Dalborg’s interpretations of them, and then Condon’s interpretations of those interpretations—which led to some foggy “cart or horse” moments. Song titles differ from the corresponding chapters in the book, and Condon can’t remember where some topics that appeared on the album (such as Swedish-American actress Greta Garbo on the heart-wrenching “Garbo’s Face”) show up in the book.

“The process was very sketchy,” Condon says. “It wasn’t until I bought the book, I want to say, two months later, after I had started writing, and I’m like, ‘There’s no Garbo’s face.’ To this day, I can’t even remember if she even mentions Garbo, even in passing, in the book.”

The album artwork, which features figures from the book arranged like a mobile around a glowing light, includes a photo of Greta Garbo and a watering can—another topic Condon couldn’t recall from reading the book, but his partner, who read the book too, could remember.

“The watering can was supposed to represent a German tradition that I don’t think we have in the States,” he says. “There’s a flower garden in all the cemeteries here, and you water them to pay respect to the dead. Judith mentions it because that was one of the first times she was introduced to the concept of death as a young girl, and that’s what stuck in her mind.”

During our conversation, it’s clear that to Condon knowledge is both a basic need and an unceasing pursuit. Right now, he’s on a deep dive of various religions throughout history, so he “can better understand their philosophies.” He mentions gnosticism, that ancient religion that emphasizes spiritual knowledge as the path to salvation—“gnosis,” here, meaning literally, “knowledge,” specifically of an esoteric flavor.

He and Schalansky share this unquenchable thirst for archiving and list-making. “It’s how my mind works,” Condon says. “Which is why I have just city names listed on all my albums. I could just do albums of her books at this point, and it would probably fit really well, because we both have that, almost like we’re trying to make this beautiful object that is not trying to be sensational, or dig so deep, or anything like that. It really is just like an obsession with maps, an obsession with interesting objects.”

Condon talks of his greater career with a candor that sounds both bitter and grateful. He was in his early 20s when “Elephant Gun” took the indie scene by storm, and as a young artist he got pigeonholed as the ‘ukulele’ guy, the ‘accordion’ guy. “Everyone who wanted to do a T-shirt design, or a music video for us, was like, ‘Hey, you’ll be riding a penny farthing, and you’ll have a huge mustache.’” Over the years, he’s found a return to those first loves.

“I let that get to me a lot back then. And I think I tried to hide certain aspects of my character, aspects of my music and aspects of my kind of visual imagination. And I think that now I’ve gotten to this point where I’m like, ‘That’s what made me stand out, that’s what made me unique.’”

In addition to more divergent modular synths and electronic drumbeats, A Study of Losses features Beirut mainstays, such as the accordion (an inherently circus-y instrument) and the ukulele, which Condon plays like a Renaissance lute. Condon’s revisiting these instruments signals another return for Condon, a return to authenticity, which he says has been absent from modern art for so long.

“It feels like we’ve hollowed out the reason for existence and art to begin with, instead of being like, ‘I feel a transcendent beauty and order to the universe, and I want to transmit little bits of it to my friends and family and community.’ That, to me, is the loss that is the most painful of all and the most ridiculous and excruciating. In doing this project, I have to admit, I became a little bit of a classicist again, being like, ‘Why don’t we have this anymore?’ It doesn’t have to look like it used to look. It can be different. It can be modern. I’m not a fundamentalist, but I do feel like we lost the point.”

It might seem impossible, then, to write of the world’s lost treasures without being earnest. To acknowledge time’s passing, one has to assert that they too are passing, and going the same way as the Caspian tiger or the lost film. One must pay respect to those things that have been lost to time in the same way one might water the flowers in a German cemetery. “You can’t be,” as Condon sings on “Mare Nectaris,” “above all this!”

In A Study of Losses Condon grapples with his own existence more directly, in ways he hadn’t done before. It’s an album of vast imagination, shimmering and strange at times, but never losing its deeply human voice. And at 18 tracks and nearly an hour long, the album is also Condon’s largest. Each story in the book gets its own song, from the moving “Villa Sacchetti,” about a deteriorated family mansion, to the woozy synth and hypnotic refrain of “Guericke’s Unicorn,” about the alleged “discovery of a unicorn” by the German physicist Otto von Guericke.

Condon wrote the album’s lyrical core, but needed to pad the album out in order for it to reach the full hour-long runtime of the show. So the idea dawned on him to rework the melodies of some songs into purely instrumental tracks, named for various lunar seas, or “mares.”

“It made all the sense in the world to me that the album should do this ricochet thing,” Condon says, “where it goes into a topic, and then it disappears off to the moon for a while, and then it comes back to the topic at hand.”

This device was inspired by a specific story in the book, “Kinau’s Selenographs.” In it, a man becomes obsessed with archiving all of humanity’s lost thoughts and creations, and eventually moves to the moon, only to realize all too late that he has lost his life in the process. I ask him if he ever feels like that man on the moon, archiving all of Earth’s history by himself. He pauses, a slight smile on his face, his eyes heavy, and says: “That one hit me very, very hard.”

So what, then, is the point of it all? Maybe it’s to remember, to create a record. To share the stories of what once was. As Schalansky writes in the book’s preface: “Writing cannot bring anything back, but it can enable everything to be experienced.”

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