Paniyolo establishes his own signature of intimacy on his debut effort for Schole. A careful blend of imagination and memory, cradling remote images in clearly delineated motifs and melodies with one hand and populating them with more distinctive bursts of fine rhythmic detail with the other, the disc soothes and stimulates the creative psyche, conveying worldly sentiments indirectly, by first touching upon the whitebread of the everyday.
It stands largely outside any critical consideration, resting more on the primitivity of the imagination than any overt expression of skill. If its tendency to dive so readily into a dossier of pastel drawings sometimes ties it down to a soporific and foreseeable oneirism, Paniyolo’s hand often makes itself felt just enough, interrupting the self-satisfied progression of some of the tracks, and directing the proceedings outward, toward other, more exploratory miniatures. The intimate, threadbare guitar plucking strung over “Snow Country”, for example, paired with solitary piano chords, and a solemn whisk of ambience, shows a particular sensitivity to pace and spacing.
Paniyolo moves in this direction on a number of occasions, demonstrating an increasingly simple yet elegant instrumental palette. When he doesn’t make use of subtraction, though, his knack for addition proves equally capable: the layered guitar harmonics and pizzicato violin on “Room”, for instance, build and eventually resolve into seesawing lines. Ready-made garments drape over this work, but Paniyolo demonstrates an intuitive sense for these spaces and, on occasion, even escapes from their identity toward hazier areas of allure.
Max Schaefer
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