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Nicosonoio – Nostlgia
The misspelling feels deliberate, doesn't it? That absent 'a' in 'Nostlgia' suggests memory's inevitable gaps, the way recollection fractures and reforms itself. And indeed, Nicosonoio has conceived this debut solo piano piece as precisely that – a soundtrack to phantom cinema, music for films that exist only in the mind's eye.

The composer's stated intention to "evoke memories, images taken in the past" finds its perfect vessel in the piano's voice. Each phrase arrives like a half-remembered photograph, slightly out of focus but emotionally precise. The piece unfolds with the non-linear logic of reminiscence, where moments blur into one another without regard for chronology or narrative sense.


Captured on a modest Schimmel upright in the artist's living room, the recording breathes with domestic intimacy. The natural reverb of that space becomes crucial to the work's meaning – these aren't concert hall memories but kitchen table revelations, the sort of involuntary emotional archaeology that happens when light falls differently through familiar windows.


The harmonic language remains deliberately restrained, each note weighted with the gravity of genuine melancholy. Influences from Jacob David and Philip Glass are acknowledged, yet 'Nostlgia' achieves something more personal than either reference point might suggest. Where Glass constructs monuments to repetition, Nicosonoio builds something closer to a diary entry – private, unguarded, achingly direct.


Strategic use of muting techniques creates a palette of whispered tones, as if the piano itself is struggling to remember. The piece's temporal structure mirrors memory's own rhythm – moments of clarity punctuated by drift, recognition followed by forgetting. This is music that understands how the past actually feels, not how we think it should sound.


'Nostlgia' succeeds because it trusts in the power of implication. This is cinema for the ears, inviting listeners to project their own phantom films onto its carefully constructed emotional architecture.