Pacione, Adam

Sisyphus

Elevator Bath

MP3 $9.90

11/01/2005 655035183121

FLAC $11.99

11/01/2005 655035183121

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 a sprawling meditation of grainy, slow-motion radiance, if derivative then also a humble and transcendent work.