Hot New Joint: "Not Knowing" by Nicholas Szczepanik

The environment that one listens to and enjoys music in can be incredibly important. The car; the ear buds; the laptop; home stereo system—these are just some of the places and ways available. Sometimes the enjoyment or understanding of an album or a song can rest solely on how and where you hear it.

For most of the music that I write about on this blog, I unfortunately listen to a bulk of it at my desk, at my day job, at a respectable level of volume, from my Google Play music cloud. It’s not the most desirable of set ups for me, but since no one is paying me to write these reviews, I can’t just sit around my living room all day listening to records—I have to go to work, and listen to this stuff when I can.

Some music is not conducive to listening to at work. I find that I have to be very delicate when listening to rap music, for fear that my bosses may have a problem with all of the profanity and racial epithets they hear coming from over my cubical walls. I have also found that some ambient/experimental/droning music is also not conducive to listening to while at work. Not because it’s distracting, but because if it’s well made, I become too emotional, become entirely too depressed, and then can’t really focus on whatever important work-related task I have been assigned to do for the day.

Enter “Not Knowing,” the new 52-minute piece by Chicago-based experimental artist Nicholas Szczepanik. At around the thirteen-minute mark, the very harsh, creeping drones begin to give way for incredibly gorgeous, lush, and devastating strings, taken from an old, manipulated sample. A far cry from the decaying tape loops of William Basinksi, in the hands of Szczepanik, the sample is toyed with just enough to add a cavernous reverb on, creating the feeling like it’s happening in the next room over, and you are hearing it through the walls.

The sample rises and falls, reaching incredible swells, each one slightly more heartbreaking to hear than the previous. It’s so perfect and well executed, it’s like a movie moment, but that movie is your life. And in my case, my life is staring into an abyss of spreadsheets at my desk and hoping that nobody talks to me or asks anything of me for the rest of the day. In short, Szczepanik has created a movement within “Not Knowing” that is entirely too real to be listened to in the workplace for someone who suffers from near-crippling depression. Because like all good ambient artists, you can say more without words, and evoke more emotions with simple chord changes and tone shifts.

Let’s just back up for a second though here and talk about Nicholas Szczepanik. He first showed up on my radar a little over a year ago thanks to Justin over at Anti-Gravity Bunny repping the 2012 LP We Make Life Sad—a beautiful and unsettling record focused on the concept of heavy nostalgia and all of the things that come along with that. All of Szczpanik’s pieces are drastically different from one another, and “Not Knowing” is another huge step for his body of work.

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Broken roughly into four(ish) pretty distinct movements, the track begins and ends with the same unnerving, low, rumbling drones—again, like a movie moment. Except, this time, rather than being gorgeous and epic, it sounds like you are just waiting for something horrible to happen to you. And it’s the third movement that kind of bridges the beauty into the underlying sense of dread. After the string sample slowly becomes more and more engulfed and distant sounding, it is juxtaposed with a somewhat harsh, incredibly unsettling, shrill tone that changes the feeling of the piece. An interesting sonic experiment actually occurs between the second and third section—as one piece is fading out, the other is fading in, and they begin to collide at times, creating a jumbled, slow motion moment of both beauty and terror.

The first two sections of “Not Knowing” were originally released in an 18-minute format in 2011, on Szczepanik’s Ante Algo Azul collection. Here it stands alone, expanded out to nearly an hour, released via Desire Path Recordings new “Tangent” series, where pieces that are too long to press on vinyl are released instead on compact disc.

I feel like it goes without saying to mention that when you listen to “Not Knowing,” you’ll be taking a journey, so hopefully you are prepared for it, because it honestly isn’t for the faint of heart. This piece is proof that as an experimental artist, Nicholas Szczepanik is incredibly meticulous, and that he’s poured an unfathomable amount of emotion into it. A hour long piece like this isn’t for everybody, and not even every movement is going to be for everyone, but there is no denying that there are transcendental moments of beauty, fear, and heartbreak throughout.

"Not Knowing" drops on the 25th of February, via Desire Path Recordings.