Fade To Grey perfectly conveys through melody, tonal color, space, and timing—all these feelings of isolation wrought by the rise of a medium that once sought to connect us but now seeks to control, influence and deceive us.
Fade To Grey — An altogether different beast
A new album by 36 is always cause for celebration among ardent ambient-heads, and while Dennis Huddleston continues to tirelessly self-release (and rapidly sell out of) his material, the appearance of The Infinity Room on deluxe ambient label A Strangely Isolated Place in 2016 was a very welcome surprise.
It’s 2019, and here we are again with Fade to Grey, an altogether different beast from the concept album that went before it on ASIP. The musical concept has —by and large—been dropped in favour of the more traditional, emotive ambience we’ve come to expect from 36, but this time the emotion is writ larger than ever before. Its themes of loneliness and isolation caused by the rise of social media platforms to which we’ve become addicted, together with its manipulation by unseen and unchecked institutions resulting in confusion, loss of privacy and personal choice suggest that we’ve created our own personal dystopias.
And so 36 has returned to the introspective and painful melodies that made earlier work like ‘Reunion’ or ‘Cocoon’ such devastating experiences. “DNI” almost picks up where The Infinity Room left off, with delicate, plaintive piano keys driving the melody, but this time set among curls of soft ambient noise, an almost ominous, distant, scratchy wail and blossoming bass tones. It’s as ethereal as we’ve come to expect from 36 until “Apartment 451” brings the piano on a tumbling descent and adds a raspy synth flute to the mix before building the track to a Vangelis-like crescendo.
By contrast, “Esper” rides an emotional high, the string-melodies another heart-breaker as City Center Offices and Morr Music styled electronic keys and a twinkling that recalls mu-Ziq’s remix of Aphex Twin’s seminal On ring through clouds of sweeping pads and smooth sub-bass. That doesn’t last, however, as the deeply disturbing “Night Rain” pours Zimmerman versus Vangelis out of the skies, a distant, echoing cry of despair calling throughout.
For the next two tracks, Huddleston pulls out the guitar, first soaring high but all too briefly in the weightless, aching and utterly spellbinding “D.R.E.A.M Link,” then laying low in the solitary and gauzy cascade of “Midnight Tether.” The wispy, distorted and digital detritus-ridden opening of “Soul Boundary” provides a brief but chilling respite from this intense emotional journey only to fall into deep wells of echoing field recordings whispering beneath the most grounded and personal piano solo yet, before ending with the full-on Blade Runner glory of the ten-minute title track.
Fade To Grey perfectly conveys through melody, tonal color, space, and timing—all these feelings of isolation wrought by the rise of a medium that once sought to connect us but now seeks to control, influence and deceive us.
Fade To Grey Reinterpreted — A seamless atmosphere
The Infinity Room was pressed up with a surprise embedded in the vinyl: a secret URL and code for a website from which you could download the bonus album Further Rooms. Wishful thinking wouldn’t be hard to understand when hearing the announcement of Fade to Grey, but 36 has actually gone one step further on this occasion as the album comes packaged with a CD entitled Fade To Grey Reinterpreted, a full length, continuous ambient remix of the entire album, track by track, that clocks in at a good twenty minutes longer than the original.
But don’t think for one moment that “reinterpreted” here means slight variations or remixes of the tracks on Fade to Grey. Goodness no. Fade To Grey Reinterpreted is an experience so different from the original it’s often nigh on impossible to divine the source material and therefore defies comparison. Where Fade to Grey is concerned with discrete moments of feeling and emotion, Reinterpreted is all about seamless atmosphere and space and so—depending on your ambient preference—you might even find this album superior.
All of the traditional instruments found on the original have been almost lost now, “DNI” transformed into a billowing, booming, cavern of foggy drones, echoing voices and sawing pads, “Apartment 451” now soaring through chilly space and dazzling glare while “Esper” is borne on angelic wings across an ocean of reflected sun, sky, moon and stars even as slow and mournful synth piano arpeggios abound.
“Night Rain” loses it’s eerie and disturbing edge in favor of a warmer, glowing essence drenched with the actual sounds of a torrential downpour with “Midnight Tether” taking its place as the album’s discomfiting, tense passage, it’s ominous pads displaying almost Gas-like levels of unease. And finally, the title track is extended out to an epic seventeen minutes of soft sea spray, suspended organ-like drones and sweeping strings.
If you are lucky enough to be able to snag yourself a physical copy of this latest opus, you will be treated to ASIP’s usual deluxe packaging: a beautiful matte-laminated gatefold sleeve adorned with artwork by Huddleston himself pressed on anachronistically glorious lemon-yellow translucent vinyl in a run of 451 copies (a neat callback to the track on the album that bears that number) and the bonus glass-mastered CD tucked away in a sealed, full-color printed cardboard wallet.
For those of us that already find ourselves disconnected, in a state of isolation and removed from other people to the point that social interaction has become hard or even frightening, the result of a technology that is slowly disenfranchising us from the real world and leaving us in another where nothing makes sense any more, Fade to Grey resonates in devastating ways. In this world of left and right, of black and white, and where our own lives are simply reflected back at us in an echo chamber we willingly signed up to, we fade to grey.
Fade To Grey / Fade To Grey Reinterpreted is available on A Strangely Isolated Place.
