all the love that i have lost

fade away

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It’s difficult to explain why an album like all the love that i have lost is worth your time.

If you are not familiar with harsh noise wall as a genre, the confrontational production from artist fade away may seem like agro bait with no redeeming musical value. But trust that there is beauty to be found in the abrasive.

fade away underscores a transcendent musicality both within and obscured by a truly magnificent work of HNW that is expansive, abrasive, emotional, beautiful, and profane. It is a work demanding some speakers to soak your room in its sound. If you are willing to put in the patience, your time will be greatly rewarded.

Backed by a coarse drone that lifts and lowers the track over its 37-minute run time, all the love that i have lost moves from one sound to another, holding on the audial textures of the abhorrent as it reveals something fascinating and transcendent. Sharp, rippling, blown-out, needling, rough skinned. It is music akin to a dental cleaning or an industrial factory line recorded on a Lav mic (I promise this is a great album). 

The perverse beauty in these noises is spotlighted amidst a gorgeous wash of synthetic drones and a trumpet-like pall cast over the track, bringing an emotional catharsis to its elements.

If fade away wanted this to be a miserable album they would have made it so. But the artists willingness to invest time in an album wrestling with ecstatic highs and lows with such skill and care is felt in the experience of all the love that I have lost. The sensorial cacophony makes for a pained and beautiful album, capturing an honesty to grief. It’s a work that understands if the love were not there, loss would not feel so painful. Both of these feelings never really disappear. Instead, they tangle together in body and memory onward.  

If listeners still feel put off by this album, fade away’s other new release, oh, what i would give to forget it all, offers a calmer, more ambient soundscape with similar emotional weight. If the former is aggressive the latter is fragile, with the echoes of breaking glass and footsteps haunting its tender drone. 

The cold lightness to this album holds itself at arm’s length, as the back half introduces voicemail’s left by an unintelligible and concerned speaker checking in on the subject. This work more explicitly discusses its themes of mental anguish, as seen in the subject “I” in the album’s title.

oh, what i would give to forget it all captures a feeling that’s all too familiar, the nagging want to disappear. It feels trapped in its own head, tethered back to earth in pleas to connect. The noise becomes overwhelming in an ethereal cluster until it’s calmed down in its last beats.

The feelings caught by these two albums speak to emotions that are not often spoken aloud. And yet they don’t indulge in their heartbreak, finding something cathartic in weathering the storm.

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