Nicholas Szczepanik – We Make Life Sad (WEME, 2012)

Nicholas Szczepanik – Her Last Breath (WEME)

 
We’ve never had any vinyl from Szczepanik and now we’re treated to two at the same time. Too good to be true. We Make Life Sad is the international vinyl release and is the polar opposite of the other, The Truth Of Transience on Isounderscore. This is 10 short tracks, variations on Szczepanik’s view of life’s memories, moments, emotions, etc. There’s an overall sound to this, lots of turntable crackle, lo-fi, white background noise, but each track is its own isolated experience, taking small melodies, or even fragments of melodies, and looping them into an endless dream, similar to Zomes’ records, or like Szczepanik’s highly personalized Buddha Machine. You could look at this as his Ante Algo Azul series boiled down to LP format, although those pieces were fully formed, whereas these are almost like excerpts, rarely having a defining beginning or and end and almost never developing into anything more than it was when it started, these are memories frozen in our mind, not encapsulating the whole original, but only what our less-than-reliable mind can recall, and replayed without control, no matter how sad the memory may be, until it blurs into something only mildly recognizable, a faded and washed out version of the past, tragic in its own right, but unbelievably fucking beautiful when Szczepanik turns it into sound. This is truly outstanding work from literally the best dude on the scene. Everything he makes is 100% unstoppably awesome and We Make Life Sad is no different.