Tomasz Bednarczyk

Simple melancholy, without the benefit of swelling strings or children's choirs, is a delicate thing to achieve in music. On his previous Room40 release, Summer Feelings, Poland's Bednarczyk dismantled and reduced simple piano themes to find deeply hidden melodies. Now at the ripe age of 22, he both opens up his library of sources and trusts negative space even more. "Freckled Cheeks" is toy-like in its simplicity and flecked with digital grit from someone's sticky fingers. On "Tokyo," Bednarczyk finally leaps into outer space, turning to field recordings of water, bicycles and a walk through a bird sanctuary to aid a jittering, backwards running oriental theme's descriptive strength. "January" loosens the hold on precision, sounding like a bank of sampled moments from the album run on random. Bednarczyk inarguable pinches elements from pioneering electronics artists (Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi, BJ Nilsen), but he brings those little pinches together in a way that is all his own. It's praise-worthy work from a gifted young artist.