#paul paccione

[dustedmagazine]

Paul Paccione and Apartment House — Distant Musics (Another Timbre)

Is Apartment House too prolific? As Another Timbre’s house band, they’re on about 40 releases. Do we really need another record of theirs, especially one focused on a lesser known composer? It seems like a fair question. And yet Distant Musics is a welcome addition to the catalog. Across five pieces the ensemble plays in a variety of configurations and introduces listeners to Paul Paccione’s music. He’s a composer and educator who taught between 1981-2018 and has been composing for over 40 years. But his discography has been sparse, making Distant Musics a good introduction.

Musically, Paccione is deeply influenced by minimalist composers like Morton Feldman and John Cage’s Number Pieces. His music is dominated by long notes played on stringed instruments and his pieces slowly unfold over five to ten minutes, if not longer. “Exit Music” opens this record with a string trio playing slow droning passages that surround the listener, pulling them along in a slow drift as the textures overlap and shift. It’s similar to the feeling Kali Malone evokes in her organ dirges and the way they envelope you in a warm space of sound.

Meanwhile “Gridwork” adds a wrinkle by introducing clarinet and piano into the mix. It starts with small plinks of piano as the strings create an eerie background texture. Heather Roche’s clarinet has a thin, wiry tone that feels like it’s a piano string pulled tight. Soon, sounds start to mesh and move around between short pauses, giving this one a lattice-like feeling of intersecting lines or a sliding tile puzzle.

“Distant Music” has a similar instrumentation - two clarinets, a violin, a viola, and a cello - and instead of the short phrases, this one is built around overlapping lines: as soon as one instrument takes a pause, two more spring up in its place. At times it’s like watching waves crashing on the shore, one after another.   

Key to this record is “Violin.” Both the longest piece here and the only one written for only one kind of instrument (four violins) this one goes deepest into his influences. Between its tense, thin opening and the way the violins overlap, it builds tension by both stretching the notes as far as they can go and emphasizing the slight dissonance between the four players. The music creaks and groans, droning like a set of bagpipes, and settles into an unsettling, otherworldly ambience.

As noted above, Paccione wears his influences on his sleeve, so one should approach Distant Music with that in mind. There’s no bombast or marches here, just five pieces of slow, sometimes atonal music. Those who’ve been keeping up with Apartment House will find this one compares well to their Number Pieces or Naiads records. So yeah, we did need another Apartment House record.

Roz Milner