Life through Loss
Artwork: Anna Salzmann
About the project
Life Through Loss is an album for anyone who has experienced grief, composed and performed by a musician with a deep insight into the grieving process.
For the last few years, Garreth Brooke has been volunteering as a ‘Trauerbegleiter’. These ‘grief companions’ sit with people who are grieving and help them to explore the complex of emotions they are experiencing. It’s not therapy, just companionship, but it gives a profound glimpse into how people cope with loss.
Grief doesn’t end, it just changes. People learn to live with it. The intense emotions of the first days often die down over the course of the next weeks and months, but can rise up at unexpected moments. This can be hard to manage, especially in a society where grief has become strangely taboo.
This is an album about how to live through loss. It’s partly a personal reflection on the composer’s own evolving grief for his suicidal mother, including his early guilt at failing to “save” her and his struggle to figure out how to feel about someone who died through suicide. It’s also a distillation of the many conversations that he has shared with other people who are already grieving or fear bereavement.
Buried at the core of all these conversations, beneath the sadness, is love. There’s no grief without love.
Art by Anna Salzmann
Like so much of the composer’s work, including 2019’s Healing, Life Through Loss is a collaboration with the artist Anna Salzmann. For Life Through Loss she has created a nature scene showing rebirth in all its vibrancy, a powerful image of hope that profoundly enhances the album’s message.
Neue Meister
This album represents the composer’s first full length release with Neue Meister, a label dedicated to today’s generation of young composers. These new masters (‚Neue Meister‘) combine the classical tradition with new and up-to-the-minute musical influences.
Singles
Mourn
21.03.2025
Artwork: Anna Salzmann
This is for the low moments, for the times when you can no longer see the light. "Mourn" weaves swirling minor-key arpeggios into a poignant journey of sorrow.
Concrete Bunks
20.2.2025
Artwork: Anna Salzmann
We lay our loved ones to rest in strange capsules. We visit them, but we only see the container in which they lie.
‘Concrete Bunks’ is the first single from Garreth Broke’s new album, Life Through Loss. Informed by the Oxford-educated composer’s work as a grief companion, this beautifully strange piano piece drifts through eerie harmonies that somehow offer solace, reflecting on the solemn spaces we build to visit our lost loved ones.