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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