You might not expect someone who composes music for theme parks and scores video games to come up with something as beautiful as “Fading.” But I would argue that anyone who creates sounds that cross so many boundaries and which have so many different aims and purposes is someone who really understands music and how to realise the sonic vision in their head.
And “Fading” is indeed a thing of beauty, and aptly named. Its hypnotic, cycling acoustics are perhaps the only constant, Sophia James arabesque-infused vocals, and the subtle atmospheres that drift in her wake, often on the edge of disappearing completely, as if a change of wind direction would see the whole thing suddenly dissipate and dissolve.
A gorgeous and fragile thing, even as James purses her voice into those highest of realms, it seems always more ethereal than energetic, more majesterial than merely melodic.
“Fading” is opaque and gossamer, its sonic colors filtering through a sonic realm of faded beauty, the light of the real world becoming diffused, dream-like, and drifting as it streams through.
Although the more you listen to “Fading”, the more you uncover new textures and tones and brief touches and motifs hidden within, every time you find one of its finessed hidden depths, the song seems to get even more fragile, more fractured, more finessed, until you feel that you can’t listen to the song too many times in case on one play, it ceases to be altogether.
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