Ambient music is always something that I’ve appreciated, but never fully engaged in. My first real experience with the genre was on a late night drive back from Philadelphia with my dad, when we could find nothing else on the radio to listen to but the excellent John Diliberto-hosted Echoes on NPR affiliate and independent radio station WXPN.

Though individual artist and song names have been long forgotten, I remember how calm and soothing the music was, really accentuating the darkness and surreal beauty of the mostly empty highway we were driving on. Despite this captivating experience, however, my attention has never again been fully captivated by other pieces of ambient music, despite their quality. My consequential exposures never quite had the same magic as the initial.

Enter Nicholas Szcezpanik’s (pronounced, to my knowledge, ‘skitz-uh-pan-nik’) Please Stop Loving Me, an album which singlehandedly renewed my interest in ambient music. This one-track, 47-minute-long journey is more fierce, more lush, and more engaging than most fully developed, traditional albums. Released last year, the album is not a difficult listen. The sounds are pleasant to the ear, never attempting distortion or over the top experimentation. And, while one almost hour long song may seem initially intimidating, the album does not feel long by any means. Nor, however, does it feel short; it just seems to be whatever length it wants to be, as it allows no reference points by which to measure its length. It has seemingly just begun, yet is always about to be concluded.

While easy to listen to, this should not be taken as a measure of it’s depth. Szcezpanik has a masterful understanding of his craft, shown in his precise attention to detail seen over every inch of the record. He understands the importance of variation, providing swells, chord modifications, and volume changes at precisely the moment you are about to become content with what is occurring. There are points of immense volume, and points of almost deafening quiet. The sounds are in once sense soothing, while at the same time ferociously engaging. This is not homework music. This is music to experience, to delve in to, to listen to multiple times and still find something new with each and every repeated listen.

I cannot say what Szcezpanik intends with the title of the album, Please Stop Loving Me. It is a heartbreaking sentiment, calling for someone to cease caring and move on from what they love. While there are no lyrics to deconstruct, no mood to convey from a singers intonation, what we can hear in the synthesizers and drones of the album is an astonishing amount of emotion that will likely take you off guard upon first listen. There is something about the construction of the music which is narrative, evoking pictures of lovers, skies, and an entire plethora of such images. You will not know precisely what emotions are being felt while listening. You will be both distraught and blissfully content, and have no reason for this.

At its end, Please Stop Loving Me will nearly make you break down and cry. Whether these are tears of happiness, saddness, or something in between, will never truly be known.