“I have aimed at creating with my work, a music at one with nature. Nature is melodic within itself, without abstaining from true harmony. Everything is sound. Everything is music.” — Carlos Pacini Aires da Silva
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
I’m frequently dumbfounded but hardly with music. Yet, here I am sharing Finalmente by Tocantins’s own Pacini, an album I’m dumbfounded in figuring out how to describe to you.
In the self-penned liner notes to Finalmente, Pacini admitted to creating this album as an attempt to write impersonal music. To make music that sounded as if no one was playing the instruments in it. To take inspiration from the “free” sounds of nature and move away from subjective melodics and time. Interestingly, Pacini urges you to ignore attempts at relaxation to enjoy Finalmente. Instead, he urges: let it relax you, as you’d lose track of time when you’re in the throes of the sea, merging with nature.
So, what does it sound like? Rarely, do I mean and say: “try not to listen too closely”. The opening track is a perfect example. For 5-odd minutes, there’s a whole expanse of formless or semi-formless music that ebbs and flows (somewhat) listlessly…only to coalesce into a deeply spiritual “song” that is full of very human emotion.
Most musicians who speak of creating music in tune with nature likely speak of using the sounds of nature as atmosphere for their music. Pacini’s work on Finalmente recalls the headier music of Hermeto Pascoal where the music itself seems to be a vehicle to intertwine “nature” with music. Using a phalanx of synths and samplers, it appears that settings were placed to make this music generate itself as if free from human touch.
It makes sense this music sounds like it does, if you know a little bit of Carlos’s story. Born in 1949, in Natividade, smack dab in Brazil in one of the nation’s most ecologically biodiverse provinces, it always seemed that one Carlos Pacini felt his ties to nature more actively than passively. His precocious and preternatural talents in the arts, from a young age, grew into full-blown studies in musical composition, philosophy, and literature.
Sometime in the late ‘80s, Carlos Pacini’s interest and development in the holistic world blossomed into a spiritual awakening. Becoming a sort of guru, he formed a kind of Aquarian movement aiming (like many other New Age sects) to unify various philosophies, theologies, pseudosciences, and beliefs. To shoulder his first spiritual tract, 1988’s O Sol: A Unidade Do Conhecimento, Pacini realized that music (his music, specifically) could be a conduit for those uninspired by words alone.
In 1991, Pacini created and released his first of a series of Brazilian “cosmic” albums, Mahadeva that would try to merge improvisatory, electroacoustic music with the freer, more structured, syncopated stylings of the Brazilian indigenous and folk tradition. From all my research, it wouldn’t be until four years later that Carlos Pacini would restart his musical career.
Somewhere in Manaus, Pacini would turn up to create his own label, one he’d dub Nueve De Copas S/A with a symbolic name taken from the “Nine Of Cups” card found in the tarot. This CD, Finalmente would mark his returning musical statement after being lost in the wilderness of organized religion.
Featuring field recordings, groove boxes, samplers, and all sorts of electronic gadgetry, 1995’s Finalmente definitely belonged in the post-90s milieu of New Age. Finalmente was entirely based on a poem “At Last” written by Pacini, with seven longform tracks that were meant to cover seven themes. The opening track “Instills A Sense Of Inner Peace And Happiness” sings in Brazilian Portuguese a translation of the poem, intoning it with a unique atmosphere of environmental music, electro grooves, and floating synthesizer tones that immediately places you to the treatise remaining in the rest of the album.
That idea of a new form of orchestral music speaking in the singular tongue of “love” found all over the greater world, as you’ll hear in “Aims At Creating An Ambiance For The Birth Of Light”. Microgrooves, leading to binaural biorhythms, that manifest themselves as “Aims At Fixing Within You Happiness Through The Awakening Of Peace”. Embryonic jazz disguising itself as “Reminds Us Of The Traversed Patch”.
Somehow, in this, his musical saga of a man and a woman in search of their inner self, Pacini unifies some of the overtones cast off by deeper resonances and finds a way to mold them into their own tonality by using this album (one of many, it seems) that as a means to explore the out-there reaches of Brazilian music. You know what, it was an outro tempo back then…