Pacione, Adam

Pacione, Adam

Dobranoc

Elevator Bath

There are artists that look into the subconscious aspects of perception through plain coincidences generated by even simpler sonic architectures, achieving results that are unequivocally inimitable. Without a doubt, Adam Pacione can proudly stand among them. Dobranoc (Polish for “good night” – thanks, Adam!) comes on a limited edition picture disc – the vinyl is adorned with the artist’s experimental photographs – and constitutes an amazing illustration of his sound art, destined to generate extensive stretches of what I love calling “silence of the mind”.  The record contains two long segments, one per side, called “Dobranoc” and “Always”. Basically, not many differences subsist in their temperament, the impression of extremely gradual movement toward an inestimable stasis definitely felt throughout both pieces. Pacione utilized field recordings, guitars, shortwave radio, analog keyboards and Moog filters to craft the music, yet you’re not going to identify any of these instruments, as unremitting as your probing might be. What’s detected is only a massive accumulation of murksome clouds with very few openings, from which pale lights transpire amidst superimpositions of acutely poignant monochromatic harmonies. Frequencies that could induce someone to think of a concealed choir, quasi-frozen loops activating a sense of acquiescence to occurrences that can’t be possibly be controlled by our strength of character.  The spellbinding quality of these forward-inching masses makes sure that thoughts are left aside, and that any kind of overheated reaction is all but discarded. As the hiss, the unspoken throbbing and the private fluctuation set in...

Pacione, Adam

Sisyphus

Elevator Bath

Original CD released in 2005 by Elevator Bath in an edition of 329 copies.  Recorded in & around Nightmare Castle, Texas 2002-2005. Those waiting on the next Stars of the Lid record can rest easy now as here is another diamond of the Texas hinterlands, shining low and weary through the endless fenced-in wild yards and upturned bedroom windows of another druggy afternoon community.   Stars come out early when this dry womb surrounds, when Texan hills and houses become miniature ziggurats under heat-lamp, and faces adopt the timelessness of cut Roman masks without hesitation. The music reflects the gauzy thickness of the air, the feeling of conscious breath, of thorough body suspension, but rock-garden clean, sacred sterile, and nearly monolithic in the clarity of each second’s noise. Guitar becomes keyboard becomes air-conditioned wall becomes air itself.  Howling, chiming, cyclical drone patterns can consume the space while simultaneously occupying some central issuance-point, some quiet locus in the room like a melodious pulpit obscured as a shoe or a sideways piece of trash, riddled in glyphic writing and piping away with pieces of the world’s happiest death knell, maybe the sound Sisyphus likes when he’s doing normal stuff, cooking, mowing the wild lawn or just laid-out between the bed and the burning window.  Pacione makes primordial ambient drone sound simply made, a comfortable place though inseparable from the ur-primitive impulse that keeps me slouching back for clues into what is transforming this everydayness to pure light, to slow-motion heat. Sisyphus is...