Paul Pinto – Water Music

released digitally December 20th, 2024

Crossing the Atlantic, seeking work or in bondage, thinking of the family you may never see again. Paddling on New Jersey’s Passaic River, in repose or in disgust, perceiving the layers of history in an urban waterway. Paul Pinto captures these states of mind and more on Water Music, his second full length album. Water Music collects two recent works that showcase Paul’s voice in its glory, collecting thoughts on the serene and mundane alongside the universal, historical, and unknowable.

Pinto is acclaimed as a composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist for his ambitious, text-heavy, electro-acoustic operas, songs, and installations like Thomas Paine in Violence (2017) and Whiteness (2023). Creating an album has been rare in his prolific output, but here like his first album, the album format is used as a pathway to create new music that does not yet have a clear live iteration (more on that below) For those not in NYC unfamiliar with his work, Water Music’s appearance as an album will  help spread his highly evolved, sui generis stylings to the broader world. Paul is a founding member of thingNY and Varispeed, and has been a major player in restagings of the work of Robert Ashley since 2011.

What seems like ancient-pronunciamento-but-from-the-distant-future forms the eruptive “Opening” of Pinto’s half hour song cycle, River Songs (Things Left in the Passaic).  Lush, biting voices form the choral backbone on which swirling synthesizers and a wild quartet of oboe, trumpet, saxophone and percussion play. These diverse tunes draw influence from, and pay homage to, the industrially disrupted and unconventionally attractive confluence of the Passaic and Hackensack rivers. Paul writes: “It could’ve been written about any body of water near anybody, but the tranquility, pride and shame this particular area brings, makes me think of Newark Bay as the wellspring of the continent. Along and within those rivers are trees, trash, monuments and fauna. Characters. Threads in the fabric of a story that extends to prehistory and to the distant future, bookending the brief modern time in which this 300 acre stretch of wetland has been in the temporary custody of the Munsee Lenape, the Dutch colonialists, and the pan-global citizenry of New Jersey.”

And what gets left in those familiar (but seldom touched) Jersey estuaries include the waste of industry, lost languages, birds (dead and living), golf balls and our own DNA. Listen for inspirations from Parliament to Perotin to Louis Andriessen and that very first TV On The Radio album, as well as other Gold Bolus artists, including his collaborators in thingNY (their new operas like Dear Nancine) and Jack Anger’s Victorian guide to beasts.

Shallow Brown is a brilliant example of Pinto’s ability to express research and historical commentary as song. The recording is an audio excerpt of the multi-channel video installation Whiteness, which Pinto created with Kameron Neal. In it, the narrator excavates the layers of meaning in a familiar sea shanty and teases out how its meaning changes through alternate versions capturing the experiences of singers of different races, geography, classes, and time. The narrator situates their own family and body in this narrative and collapses the time between a dreamt of sepia-toned past and the present in part by reminding us that this is a pull song, meant to be felt in your body while raising a sail or moving cargo.
Pinto’s first album, The Gentlemen (2010), was like Water Music a uniquely studio-first creation, engineered for stereo headphones. This album exists comfortably in that form, but for a fuller experience, listeners can enjoy an accompanying River Songs geolocated soundwalk at Jersey City’s Lincoln Park. Later in 2025, Con Vivo Music will perform a hybrid version of the Songs: a sort of audio scavenger hunt featuring live musicians scattered around the park, interacting with the audience’s headphones.