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Nicholas Szczepanik, "Please Stop Loving Me"
While he's spent much of this year designing and composing his Ante Algo Azul subscription series, Szczepanik has managed to also complete this full-length album, consisting of a single, beautiful piece of lingering ambience. Released on Christoph Heemann's Streamline label, it is a heartwrenchingly gorgeous piece of melancholy sound that is wonderfully unique and sounds like no one else.
The subscription series thus far seems like an ideal outlet to try new and diverse approaches to music, while this album is a culmination of a style he has essentially perfected.What he does best is composing emotional, expressive expanses of sound, conveying far more in the way of feeling and humanity than the genre is known for.
Drone is over-used to the point of almost being pejorative, so I'm hesitant to even mention it, but the genre’s staunch minimalism and attention to detail is definitely prevalent here, but it in the truly respectable classic sense.Drone does not have to be synonymous with lazy and repetitive, and here it most definitely is neither.Szczepanik works with natural, symphonic like rich tones, forceful and commanding, but not oppressive or heavy.
The disc opens with deep, resonating notes, slow and melodic, but also dynamic, constantly varying and shifting all throughout.Rather than the slow, often tedious build of similar artists, this disc just launches into the rich atmospheres.The album essentially feels like that heavily emotional, but beautiful and powerful moment of a great film stretched out for its 47 minute duration.
Throughout the piece, the sound builds up to dramatic crescendos before falling back to more pensive, quiet moments before reaching up again to even more dramatic heights, creating a cyclic, but still varying structure that continues throughout.The dramatic moments keep getting bigger and richer until there is essentially nowhere else to go, as the piece then comes to its pensive, funereal ending.
I've referred many times to the feeling and emotion that Please Stop Loving Me conveys throughout, and I must say that it is really a defining facet of the album, and also one that feels extremely subjective based on mood.During some listens it felt pained and agonizing, with a sense of loss that music rarely conveys.At other times it was much more glorious and uplifting, radiating a natural beauty that few albums can match.
Within that trite and generic "drone" label, I'd have to say that this is on par for me with the best Organum works, which is always a high water mark for me.There are very few albums like this that can remain enchanting with each and every listen, with new subtle elements to be heard.For such a relatively new artist, Szczepanik has the talents and ability of someone with a much larger discography, which makes this album all the more impressive.
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