ALBUM // Szymon – Blue Coloured Mountain
Post by Misha
I’ve listened to Szymon’s first album, Tigersapp, many times. I stumbled upon it in a haphazard way that I’ve now forgotten, but I remember the way it captivated me. I remember thinking that it sounded like music made by a forest – like a single instrument that somehow combined the sacredness of mountains with the playfulness of dancing treetops. It wasn’t until I went looking for more of his music that I found out that Szymon had died three years before the release of Tigersapp. I keep coming back to the album, and though I still hear the dancing and the playfulness, there is more melancholy baked in than I remember from my first listen. Knowing what I know now, I listen with a sense of solemnity that the music doesn’t always share. It’s gorgeous and sad and touching in a uniquely real, concrete way.
Today I was recommended Szymon’s second posthumous release by Spotify. I sat for a while looking at the track list without hitting play, running through emotions I don’t have names for, and feeling pain in my chest for the people this music touched on its way to me.
These songs carry so much meaning with them now, much of it acquired after they were written. I try to imagine what Szymon might have had in his head when he was working on them. ‘Blue Coloured Mountain’, the title track, pops with light in a soft darkness. It bounces, begs for dancing feet. ‘Yakuza’ is similarly fizzy, light and alive with winking synths. It’s easy to get lost in the whimsical world he built, but it’s hard to stay there. I keep bumping up against hard words and the walls of mortality which are particularly close together on this one.
Death closes off an oeuvre, makes a river into a lake. But suicide settles over everything like a fog. It puts its fingers on every song, every word, every chord. I notice that I come back a lot to the music that has this fog around it – Frightened Rabbit, Silver Jews, Purple Mountains, Soundgarden – in search of a special kind of comfort that exists here. Sometimes I need to be steeped of the tragedy of it all because I need to make sure to remind myself, again and again, of the beauty and potential that exists in spite of the deep and consumptive hopelessness I can often find myself mired in.
Posthumous works carry a particularly sharp jab, because they are so close to the truth of it. They pulse with the sheer magnitude of all that was cut short. They have the wispiness of a last chance. These songs are like that. For all their loveliness there is an unshakable eeriness, a sense of being new and old at the same time, both unfinished and profoundly final.
There’s an understanding that finality and preciousness often walk hand in hand, a conventional wisdom that to feel joy one must also be able to conceive of tremendous loss, and I am tempted to try to use this logic to dig myself out of the great sadness I feel listening to Szymon’s music. But I don’t really believe in it; after all, I’ve never been able to draw more joy from life after watching people leave it.
Still, I’m left with these songs, and how special they are to me, and the unavoidable fact that the way they’re here is part of the reason that they’re special to me. It feels complicated, but maybe it doesn’t need to be. Perhaps what I’m feeling is just the solemn alchemy of gratitude – both for the songs themselves and for the occasion to ponder the ripples that existence creates even (and perhaps especially) when it feels like drowning.
Buy Szymon’s music here.