Review: Adam Golebiewski - Pool North

What is Golebiewski hoping to find? A lot of these percussive improvisations evoke images of rummaging, prising open, scrambling – wading into piles of cymbals and frantically upturning bass drums, in a desperate search for an object that Golebiewski needs right now. There’s a violence and urgency to his process. He doesn’t so much abuse his instruments as disregard their welfare as he tosses them aside and shakes them empty, treating them like collateral casualties in his hunt for something that, as Pool North progresses, seems less and less likely to reside in the vicinity of Golebiewski’s search. By the time we reach “Half Blame”, he’s sawing a rusted cymbal in half and producing a thoroughly gruesome metallic whine in the process, running his eyes up and down the growing incision to see whether this lost article has been miraculously wedged deep within the alloy fibers. The hunt has become desperate.

It’s rare that Golebiewski “hits” a drum in the traditional sense. Instead, he favours those labored, lingering expressions of physical contact; vigorously bowed surfaces, the aggressive throttling of cymbals, hands rattling through a plumber’s toolbox, sticks rolling through forests of wind chime. Each gesture is presented in immaculate detail, magnifying every bronze harmonic and moan of taut skin, fetishising over percussive pimple and coarse wooden edge. I hear him responding to the discovery of sonic detail. He burrows into each new overtone and strange sonorous inflection, amplifying until it wails into the foreground, transforming details from incidental nuances to main events. Suddenly, hairline fractures become canyons for fresh exploration; new potential homes for Golebiewski’s hopelessly lost object.