Nicholas Mycio writes as if peace were something that has to be imagined before it can exist. On Please Plant Flowers, recorded as a guitar trio with bass and drums, his compositions move through jazz and ambient spaces without settling into either, holding onto abstraction as a way to speak without explanation. The music carries the weight of war, illness, and loss, but refuses to turn them into narrative, choosing instead to let sound hold what language would have to justify.
Please Plant Flowers
“Please Plant Flowers” is a request made from exhaustion, a piece that frames death not as an event but as a condition that needs to be softened. The title arrives already complete, there is no buildup toward it, only the quiet insistence of what it asks for. The guitar leads with a restrained tone, phrases spaced out as if conserving energy, while bass and drums provide a minimal structure that never interrupts that sense of fragility.
When I’m Gone
Nicholas Mycio’s “When I’m Gone” completes a sentence that never needed to be spoken in full, extending the gesture of the title track into something more distant. Where “Please Plant Flowers” stays close to the body, this piece steps back, framing absence not as a singular moment but as something that continues outward. The trio maintains the same stripped-down language, but the phrasing feels more open, less anchored to a single point.
