Nicholas Szczepanik – Please Stop Loving Me (2011)

Sczcepanik’s love in this near fifty minute drone piece is one of painful accuracy: it is a consumptive effort that takes the listener on a beauteous, emotionally tender journey across redolent highs, lush crescendos, and intricate lows with such ease and grace that it must have originated from a heartfelt and very real place.

Functionally it finds itself built on rich sonic folds, synth drone lightwaves that hum and coo with a luxurious radiance, slowly swirling in tender and unambiguous passages that slide elegantly one into the next: a constant stream of motion and emotion. It is intoxicatingly bright and unfiltered, lost in unabashed infatuation: toothy grins on a sunny day; light fabric tugged suggestively by a soft breeze; slow, tracing finger strokes on skin.

Its beaming harmonies are underpinned by something more solid and fundamental though, a meaty core of overlapping drone denseness and faux organ rumbles that creates an emotional anchor that descends further than the epidermis. More importantly it finds itself permeating through every moment of the record, a consistent subconscious presence that resists erosive forces and momentary upsets, of which there are a few.

Where would love be without hesitation and strife? Of dark yin to its yang? Littered here are faltering moments where strength of bonds are tested: descents into minor key inflections and dimming discord occur at intermittent points, random periods of doubt that marble the gleaming fabric of the piece. Even in the slow motion cavalcade they are imbibed with a certain vertiginous feeling, of tumult, that at any moment it could split at the seams and the whole edifice would come crashing down and all that precious radiant energy would just leak pitifully away.

Yet it never does. Each dip, each trough in the bleary rollercoaster that we’re taken through is always overcome, recovery never not an option as that thick, driving drone heart beats away the threat of failure. And then, when it’s all said and done, when all obstacles have been reached and countered, there’s the closing ten minutes. Ten minutes of such euphoric drone sustenance the likes of which you’ve scarcely heard before. It starts as a triumphant emergence, a sunbeam caught and encouraged by thick tufts of tidal drone waftings to nurture it like a small flame, a pilot light that catches and feeds itself. For what feels like a lifetime we’re caught in its self-sustaining exhalation, a crystalline sigh that seems to defy sonic possibility hovering as a note held in luminous, heady satisfaction that slowly burns itself out of existence.

Replete, contented, we return to a peaceful silence and wonder why we were ever worried in the first place.

 

2 thoughts on “Nicholas Szczepanik – Please Stop Loving Me (2011)

  1. Pingback: Julianna Barwick – Nepenthe (2013) | Hear-Feel

  2. Pingback: Nicholas Szczepanik – Not Knowing (2014) | HearFeel

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