Album Review(s): Alex Cobb, Nicholas Szczepanik, and Celer

The last week or two has delivered an unprecedented amount of excellent ambient, experimental, and droning music—with not one, not two, but three noteworthy releases from Alex Cobb, Celer, and Nicholas Szczepanik.

Students of Decay label head Alex Cobb’s solo LP, Chantelpleure has been a long gestating project, originally announced in the spring with an intended release in May, but then pushed back until the end of June because of delays manufacturing the vinyl.

Chantelpleure, in a sense, picks up where last year’s Students of Decay release from Kyle Bobby Dunn left off—crafting distant, haunting, and mournful cascading waves of guitar tones, and creating an atmosphere right out of the gate on the opening piece, “Prayer Ring,” that could be considered the perfect soundtrack for making your way through the dense, foggy imagery on the front cover.

 Like all successfully executed ambient music, the four pieces on Chantelpleure evoke strong emotions—and thankfully, it isn’t just impenetrable haunting sadness; the short “Disporting With A Shadow” brings to mind a kind of bittersweet nostalgic warmth, and the album’s final track, the 16 minute “Path of Appearance,” swells quietly, simmering on the cusp of something hopeful.


The album arrives at slightly over a half hour—so it’s an effort that doesn’t overstay its welcome by any means, and as “Path of Appearance” fades out into the distance, it leaves the listener longing for more. On Chantelpleure, Cobb shows that he’s not only capable of putting out excellent records via Students of Decay, he is more than capable of creating is own.

If there’s one artist that should be more prolific than they are, it’s Chicago-based ambient and experimental performer Nicholas Szczepanik.

The last time the gawd put anything out was in early 2014, when he dropped the multi-movement piece, “Not Knowing,” and he’s been pretty quiet ever since then.

Without much advance notice, Szczepanik raided his archives of material the other night, releasing Here, for now, a collaborative joint he recorded in 2012 with Japanese artist, Will Long, who records under the name Celer.

Here, for now is a four-track collection of untitled pieces, originally intended for a vinyl release that never saw the light of day, and to say that it’s an intense listening experience is vastly underselling it.

Each selection runs between 15 and 20 minutes long, and they are each structured to be pretty much no build up, and all release—however, that release just keeps building up, if that makes any sense at all.

Long and Szczepanik work together to craft long, sustained, hypnotic droning pieces—each unique in the sense of cacophony that it creates, or the spell that it lulls you into through the unrelenting torrent of sounds.

Since Here, for now is made up of four untitled droning compositions, it is difficult to specifically point out one that is more successful than the other, or to say one of them is more akin to being “hot fire” than another; however, the first and the final pieces work the hardest at building up a feeling, and evoking more emotion from the listener.

After receiving that Bandcamp email that Szcezpanik had dropped a new joint, and after happily plunking down $10 for Here, for now, I wondered who Celer was (prior to just looking on Facebook for Long’s artist page) and I happened upon his vast discography, including his brand new effort—the incredibly titled, How could you believe me when I said I loved you, when you know I’ve been a liar all my life. And one quick listen to the transcendental opening track, “Bleeds and swell blends,” I knew that I had stumbled across an incredible listen.

“Bleeds and swell blends,” hyperbole aside, is nearly 13 minutes of sheer auditory perfection. Reserved, somber, and nostalgic, Long weaves an absolutely captivating and hypnotic loop that I could seriously listen to all fucking day. It’s simple—the sequence repeats itself only after a short while—but that’s the beauty of it. It’s warm, calming, melancholic, and comforting. This track alone is what we talk about when we talk about ambient and experimental music.


And lucky for you, the listener is that there are three more tracks following that—the whimsical wood-wind swirls of “These dreams, how portentously gloomy,” the mournful, Basinski-esq ripples of “Natural deflections,” and the balance of the dreamy and the shrill on the final piece, “Acrimonious, like fiddles.”

How could you believe me is both an outstanding record in its own right—innovative and imaginative, but it also serves as a gateway to the vast canon that Long has on his Bandcamp page, taking you down a swirling hole of reserved, at times omnious and shadowy, and at times gorgeous tape loop manipulations.

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