While Washed Away Memories is highly calm and for the most part bathed in soothing sounds, there are very deep dissonant moments when you can’t help but feel something is missing, that there is a certain disturbance you cannot grasp entirely. If memory constantly interrupts and overcomes the flow of life, it rarely leaves any traces of its diffuse presence, producing strange, inescapable gaps in everyday activity, to the point of blurring all sorts of different sensations and feelings together. Whenever we attempt to recall everything ‘as it was’, the same kind of disturbance emerges, an essential vividness forever out of reach that separates us from ourselves – the one who lived from the one who is living. Leonardo Rosado aims to detonate such a thing, to bring us to the neural explosion that is a trigger for remembrance, outlining, with fragmented drones, the twisted path where both memory and experience converge.
While similar to ambient, both in form and in subject, the album distances itself from the workings of sound layers that aim to let attention drift, choosing instead, like more aggressive kinds of music, to erode the attention of listeners, to slowly sculpt it into a sleepy dispossession that encourages letting go. Like those moments when you stop because you don’t remember what you were doing or about to do, tracks like “Fragments of an absent summer” and “Hush now”, building noisy soundscapes that resemble the echoes of conversations long past, offer a quiet sort of disconnection, one that comes not from being obliged to remain silent (think of a high-volume concert) but from being obliged to speak, to do, to remember. Like those sounds impossible to identify, like the end of every track feeling as an unnecessary break, memory will always signal incompleteness, the inability to just be. Washed Away Memories drives the point particularly well by clearly defining each sound, configuring a series of tones and their movement towards nowhere, creating a distinct feeling of knowing where they are and how they are evolving only to pull that away time and again by means of short silences, disruptions of rhythm and different volumes, leading instead to the certainty that those developments reside solely in our imaginations.
In the end, this is definitely not a straightforward album built around the familiar theme of memory; the way it is built, the way its sounds interact betray an enormous sensibility from which all disturbances spring, not methodically but poetically, as ephemeral as any act of remembrance. Like the amazing photograph of the album’s cover, there is a certain surreal logic in play: a setting sun-colored sky reflects in the water as a clear day’s heaven, inflicting dissonance upon our senses, a subtle suggestion that perhaps they’re not to be fully trusted, that perhaps they’re just as dependent on memory as our mind is, and all we do whenever we touch or taste is to remember. (David Murrieta)
a closer listen 