Pan Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 15 Items

Last year, Eartheater released her latest album, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, via PAN.After sharing a fully reworked version of the album, Phoenix: La Petite Mort Edition, digitally out February 26, 2021, PAN is now releasing a special, color vinyl LP edition of it. Originally conceived as a "sleep" mix for CRACK Magazine, Eartheater re-sculpted her entire album Phoenix into a seamless ambient edit."This is Phoenix crushing, undressing, and compressing like carbon particles under the weight of boulders folded into silky soil, and decomposing. She is folding over and over and over and over like the rolls of young gummy stone. This is one REM cycle. I suggest listening to Phoenix: La Petite Mort Edition while asleep after climax. You are wet ash smudged across a pillow case." - Eartheater

For anyone who can remember, Arca's &&&&& was a moment. Its 25-minute stretch of coiling, contorted grime and glitch; dub and hip hop dropped with the buzz of an impending co-production credit on Kanye West's Yeezus in 2013. It included cuts of sound and beats that were too weird for that pop project, while becoming a piece of experimental art that what would come to define what is by now broadly known as a `post-club' sound. It's music that is as visceral as it is experimental; made as much for the mind, as it is for the body. Released with no warning seven years ago, &&&&& became a bridge between Alejandra Ghersi's time partying and collaborating with her queer peers, while still living in New York to the next stage of her career releasing on Mute in London. She'd go from making beats for rapper Mykki Blanco and fashion label Hood By Air, posting lurching bass reworkings of pop hits on YouTube, and producing her first fluid mixtapes with DIS Magazine, to finishing off this seminal mixtape on the synths in Daniel Miller's studio. After dropping three impressive EPs the year before, &&&&& marked a transition. Continuations and extrapolations of material from Stretch 1 and Stretch 2 appeared in the mangled RnB sampling of "Century" and Arca's signature vocal layering in the pitched flow of "Waste". Along with the fluttering, muted heartbeat of "Obelisk", and the lumbering piano chords of "Mother", fourteen sonic sketches were elegantly woven together into a single, downloadable whole. As Alejandra's course turned toward moving to Europe from the United States, &&&&& became a remarkable challenge to the form of the mixtape, which was a relatively new trend taking hold of the online-oriented underground at the turn of the 2010s. But where many, if not most mixtapes where treated simply as a showcase of individual tracks presaging a more `official' release to come, &&&&& was a complete piece in its own right. "I wanted to make something that was my best work," Alejandra says about a record that has stood the test of time, "I listen to it very fondly today." This reissue of Arca's 2013 debut mixtape &&&&& features an etching on side B of the vinyl.

Amnesia Scanner announces Tearless, the Berlin-based duo's second LP. As Amnesia Scanner founders, Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala watch their icy home country of Finland thaw, the staggering scale of political recalibration and the worldwide climate crisis to come blows open old norms. This album reflects what it feels to experience Earth at a time when collapse is emerging as the prevailing narrative.The musical scope of the record is expansive, with guest vocalists - the Peruvian artist Lalita and the Brazillian DJ/producer LYZZA - descending into a vast uncanny valley of sound. Tearless follows the 2014 `AS Live [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]' mixtape, 2015 audio play Angels Rig Hook, two EP's for Young Turks, and their 2018 debut album, Another Life (PAN)."There's a looming sense of radical change," they note, connecting the present to a fin de siecle horror and curiosity regarding what new world is being ushered in. Someone called Tearless a "breakup album with the planet." To which Amnesia Scanner responds, on the LP's closing track: "You will be fine, if we can help you lose your mind."With the crossfader on Tearless sitting closer to pop than abstraction, so too does the audience for this record widen in scope. Listening through: Opener "AS Enter" sets a sombre tone until the fucking riffs of the second track (the titular, Lalita-helmed "Tearless") make clear there's plenty of roaring to come. A feature from metalcore band Code Orange on "AS Flat" follows, along with "AS Trouble" (feat. Oracle, the third, machinic ghost-member of Amnesia Scanner) and together they hit as blackmetal-gaze dirges. At the album's midpoint, Lalita returns for the beautiful, operatic breakdown of "AS Ac" (released as a single in 2019), before "Center of the Labyrinth" guides listeners through three club ready tracks - the grain-processed dembow of "AS Too Late" and "AS Going" with LYZZA, and then the ambient headbanger "AS Labyrinth." Closing 'Tearless' is the sadboy grunge of "AS U Will Be Fine" with a clear statement o...

‘Workaround’ is the lucidly playful and ambitious solo debut album by rhythm-obsessive musician and DJ, Beatrice Dillon for PAN. It combines her love of UK club music’s syncopated suss and Afro-Caribbean influences with a gamely experimental approach to modern composition and stylistic fusion, using inventive sampling and luminous mixing techniques adapted from modern pop to express fresh ideas about groove-driven music and perpetuate its form with timeless, future-proofed clarity.

On The Sport of Love, seasoned collaborators Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga and Tapiwa Svosve consider the language, competition and contradiction of modern romance: its yearning, incomprehensible vastness and the inevitable darkness and fleeting fragility. For the trio, love is the emotion that propels all of us whether we acknowledge it or not, and its expression can be realized in many forms.

Pan Daijing's exhibition-performance Tissues premiered in the Tanks at the Tate Modern in autumn 2019. A five-act immersion in performance, sound, movement, space, and most of all emotion in its most distilled and conflicted states, Tissues engaged with the conventions of opera and tragedy to present a searing representation of the embattled human psyche in space and time. While the ambitious multi-sensory artwork made use of the range of Daijing's artistic capabilities, music, particularly the voice, was at its formal and emotional core. The vinyl and digital release of Tissues on PAN serves as a record of that work, in the form of an hour-long audio excerpt: an invaluable archival document from Daijing's expansive live practice. Tissues is both a solitary work and a formal study in relation. Composed, directed, designed, written, and performed by Daijing (alongside a cast of twelve dancers and opera singers), the work_its libretto written in a mixture of old and modern Chinese_lingers inside a single human perspective. Daijing conjures states that are by turns delicate and severe, the tension between opposing modes animating the work as it unfolds. And yet, for all its interiority, Tissues foregrounds an intimate relationship with its audience through details like its engulfing visual landscape and its rattling, confrontational narrative arcs. Daijing uses the opera form as a prism through which to question the boundaries of music itself: perhaps, she proposes, music is much more than simply what is heard. It is in the relationship between voice and electronics that this limit is most clearly breached. Across the four acts gathered in this documentation, a counter-tenor, a soprano, a mezzo-soprano, and the artist herself voice a mixture of stunning laments and cries over an instrumental landscape, built out from industrial texture. Meant to be heard in a single listen, rather than track by track, the work unfolds through tender hollows and agitated peaks. At its crescendo, the operatic vocals melt away and the synthesizers themselves seem to howl with grief. Daijing uncovers an essential, sometimes painful, music in all that surrounds us, inviting something like catharsis but also a greater understanding of the thing she and her cast conjure and draw close. A tissue, after all, is both a disposable object one uses to wipe away a tear, and the building block of our fleshy human forms. Daijing reaches and excavates the roiling core of what it is to be alive and full of feeling. Music from Tissues, an opera of five acts at Tate Modern, London on Oct 2nd, 4th and 5th, 2019 Composed, written, produced and directed by Pan Daijing. Performed by Anna Davidson, soprano ; Marie Gailey, mezzo soprano, Steve Katona, countertenor and Pan Daijing, additional vocals. The recording is mixed by James Ginzburg , Jan Urbiks and Pan Daijing, mastered by Rashad Becker. *2xLP comes in a gatefold cover, and includes an obi strip and a booklet containing images from the performance & liner notes, as well as a postcard granting access to exclusive video documentation*

What if a song was not a culmination but a singe, an imprint, or a crater left in the wake of creative process? On her new record "Jade", Pan Daijing composes at a different scale than that we've come to know. Since the release of her groundbreaking LP "Lack" in 2017, Daijing has expanded her operatic vision into a series of major commissioned exhibition-performances at institutions including the Tate Modern, Martin Gropius Bau, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Developed for full casts of opera singers and dancers, and reaching for an all-encompassing durational experience of intensity for both performer and audience, the development of these works was for Daijing as emotionally disarming as it was thrilling. In order to continue accessing her own limits, Daijing had to develop a place of sanctuary within her own practice. Its nine tracks written and recorded over the last three years, "Jade" is the sound of solitary release and refuge, of creative self-sustenance. Written without the imperatives of direct address to performers or audience, "Jade" speaks inward, while inviting a kind of rhetorical listening. The artist draws on materials familiar from her previous work: namely, ascetic electronic textures that rumble and pierce, and voice bent in irreverent directions. In place of catharsis, however, her arrangements here linger in tension, extending curiosity towards the delicate void that nourishes extremes. They toy with the minor capacities of song: repetition, chant, observations that conclude without resolving. "Jade" comes from a vulnerable place, tender as in an undressed wound caught in the midst of healing over. Vocals, mostly Daijing's own, arrive as wordless sequences of notes soaring alongside a drone, or plain laughter, or in a few places spoken word. What is said or sung provides fragments of experience and reflection. In the process of piecing together these fragments, the listener is confronted with the tender parts of her own. "Solitude is like an immense lake you're swimming through," says Daijing of these songs. "Sometimes you dip your head in and sometimes you lift it above. On album centerpiece "Let," she speaks to us over the sound of rippling water, returning between anxious scenes to a refrain: "I take my bath in the ocean." We are not just consuming Daijing's story; we are being invited to join her in the water. The album is mixed and mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by Pan Daijing, cinematography by Dzhovani Gospodinov & design by NMR.

Ziúr's music has always been difficult to classify. A longtime fixture in Berlin's nightlife, the musician, producer and DJ has cut through decades of threads to arrive on a sound that accurately represents her journey. She's sung, played guitar and drums and reduced club music to a burning cinder; with "Antifate", her third album under the Ziúr moniker, she approaches electronic music without any preciousness or reverence to genre. 2019's acclaimed "ato" re-introduced songs to her canon, contorting her vocals over an undulating electronic backdrop. On "Antifate", she takes this idea further, pushing abstracted pop forms into mists of digital euphoria and extracting unexpected instrumental flourishes from collapsing clouds of distorted rhythm. Electronic instrumentation is melted into acoustic sounds and vice-versa, creating a breathing organic universe that's entirely Ziúr's. "Antifate" is an abstract reference to the mythical land of Cockaigne, a utopia where wine flows freely and houses are made of cake, that provided escapist fantasy for medieval peasants. As the space between our private worlds widens, this fantasy becomes alluring once more - a place where we feel free, with the people who allow us that freedom. With this in mind, Ziúr crafts a soundtrack that's fantastical and magical, hinged on the idea of closeness and connection at a time when distance is mandatory. Ghostly voices echo wordlessly over clattering beats and dubwise bass on opener `Alive, Unless?', while the album's title track sings a more epic fanfare, with a chorus of voices echoing into glittering synthesizer pearls and volcanic kicks. "Antifate" is almost even theatrical at times, something never more evident than on the Talk Talk-esque `Fringe Casual' with its dreamy piano and plucked bass and on closing track `The Carry', where flute is introduced into Ziúr's rapidly expanding narrative. It's tempting to say that this is the album Ziúr has been destined to make, but "Antifate" rejects this concept. Rather, this is the album that Ziúr needed to make now, surrounded by the people that have been able to offer her the place to do it. In mapping out her mythical paradise, Ziúr has produced an album that is deeply tender and inescapably human. It's an album about freedom, and she has never sounded so free. The album is mixed by James Ginzburg & mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by Stefan Fähler.

This album follows intergenerational trauma, fugitives of Christian violence in a twilight called Puruma, returning to Mama Cocha, the sea that theorists call Nowhere.Dedicated to the life of Paul Sousa, who while incarcerated, worked years as an inmate firefighter across the Sierra Nevada of California. Also dedicated to the work of Sage LaPena and Dr. Gretel Mendizabal Nolte. (Includes misreadings of Jimenez, Saenz, Claudel, & Wright).Not one, not world, not body, not god, not salvation, not zero; only a ceaseless approaching toward, with, and as the great mystery, by Grace, Tatamama. Jallalla.ORCORARA 2010 was commissioned and released in 2018 by Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva, CH for the first floor at the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2018 'The sound of screens imploding'.The album is mastered by Jeremy Cox.All proceeds go to the American Indian Movement West / AIM SoCal chapters.

Pan tout a real beauty with Stine Janvin’s scintillating vocal suite ‘Fake Synthetic Music’ - a transfixing and distinguished demonstration of the voice as a hugely flexible instrument, presented in a range of minimalist yet extreme, probing scenarios providing a radical new perspective on familiar sounds. Conceived as a full-body physical and ambient live performance for theatres, clubs and galleries, ‘Fake Synthetic Space’ is an intently focussed and singular follow-up to Stine’s previous solo LP ‘In Labour’ [Pica Disk, 2014] and her input to last year’s Native Instrument release ‘Camo’ for Shelter Press. Where both of those releases found her vocals combined with field recordings in myriad ways, the Norwegian artist’s latest side is stripped right back to vocals and FX, offering a visceral investigation of her full frequency range with results that explore the deeply uncanny auditory phenomena of otoacoustic emissions in melodic, minimal sequences referencing pop, techno, and trance.

Lexachast is an ongoing collaborative work by Amnesia Scanner, Bill Kouligas & Harm van den Dorpel. Initially birthed as a joint, improvised performance between Amnesia Scanner and Kouligas at the ICA, London in 2015, it was later recreated and extended with visual artist van den Dorpel into a 15-minute online-only audiovisual work – known simply as Lexachast. Since then, it has expanded into a live show that has been performed at Transmediale, CTM Festival, Unsound Krakow & Adelaide, Next and LEV Festival and during Paris Fashion Week in collaboration with the brand Ottolinger. Now to be released on PAN, is a new document of Lexachast in its current, full-grown form.

Further departing from both the cinematic abstraction of ‘Piteous Gate’ and the hectic drums of ‘Damaged Merc’, Berlin producer M.E.S.H.’s new full-length, ‘Hesaitix’, is marked by its hyper-ornamented rhythms and a sense of pensive, moonlit spaces.
The atmosphere has shifted; the radical deconstruction of previous releases has given way to subtler interventions, building new structures in strange territories. Shifting from the meditative to states of manic unease, Hesaitix is an unnerving injection into both the social space of club music and the interior space of digital audio fantasy.
How did I become so stupid?
A sound can be both formless and over-rendered, like a boneless but fleshy hand from a life
drawing class.
What agent could set these broken sounds in motion?
A laugh behind an evil curtain. A drummer that’s cool and grotesque, a detuned siren. A brushfire
under a full moon.
Recorded in Berlin and Umbria, Hesaitix sees Janus resident and PAN staple M.E.S.H. firmlyengaged in a kind of sonic worldbuilding, a place where the unconscious and the alien intersect

Hundebiss bossman Simone Trabucchi - a pivotal figure of the Italian scene - debuts his STILL alias on PAN with a batch of banging, multi-layered dancehall tracks inspired by the complex historical links between his hometown, Vernasca, with Jamaica, and Italy’s colonial past in Ethiopia.Part of a wider visual arts project, Invernomuto, helmed alongside Simone Bertuzzi, and comprising a series of sculptures, installations, a book, and a long-feature experimental documentary under the title ‘Negus’‘, Simone takes cues from a “cleansing counter-ritual performed by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry in the Vernasca square where 80 years earlier, an effigy of Haile Selassie I was burned” to cook up a madd set of dancehall tracks voiced by six Milan-based, African-Italian vocalists and singers.The results weigh in remarkably close to the colourful, plugged-in dancehall art/science of Equiknoxx, effectively pulling together the diffracted aspects of his project into a direct yet psychedelically-charged set which strongly reverberates with its roots.Keener observers will be quick to identity the amazing Nazenet (Wasp Rhythm) as a vocal version of STILL’s uncredited Untitled riddim from Halcyon veil’s Conspiración Progressocompilation, but unless you’ve been listening to Bill Kouligas DJ sets, the rest is all new and exclusive, taking in the weightless prayer of Haile Selassie Is The Micro-Chip, wobbly acid hall knocks in Bubbling Ambessa, and the meter-messing flux of Rough Rider along with style recalling that Vipra ace on Presto!? in Banzina, plus the warped Bionic Ras bumps of Gozpaal and some seriously salty dubbing in the plasmic squeeze of Mangrovia

PAN is pleased to announce the debut release from Lifted, an ongoing collaborative project initiated by Matt Papich (AKA Co La) and Beautiful Swimmers' Max D.

Drawing on studio sessions recorded in their respective hometowns of Baltimore and Washington DC, the album sees the pair break free from the constrictions of the grid and exercise their versatility through improvised fusion. Working outside the framework that underlies their solo output, the eight tracks on offer showcase experiments in freeform techno, hyaline electronics, and ambient, with the duo reaching out to Motion Graphics, 1432 R co-founder Dawit Eklund, and Jeremy Hyman for additional synthesis, drumset and percussion.

The album also exhibits solo performances from Gigi Masin and Jordan GCZ (Juju & Jordash), who submitted overdubs from their bases in Venice and Amsterdam.Lifted are Max D, Co La, Gigi Masin, Jordan GCZ and friends.

During the Tang dynasty (around the 9th Century CE), traveling intellectual Li Yuanming would routinely leave home to write and debate poetry with likeminded scholars across China, isolating his wife Cifu for sometimes weeks on end. Frustrated, she found comfort in the arms of a widowed neighbor, but when Li remained at home for an unexpected stretch of time, Cifu was prompted to develop a method to signal her lover it was safe to approach. She stitched a special green hat that she handed to her husband as he was about to leave town; when Li was wearing the hat, it worked like a traffic signal - green meant go. But this didn't last for long, during one trip Li returned home early and caught Cifu and their neighbor together, and when the local community caught wind of the story, the green hat became an enduring symbol of infidelity. On Tzusing's sophomore album the Malaysian-born artist, who lives between Shanghai and Taipei, meditates on China's complicated history of patriarchal heteronormativity, and how these archaic double standards continue to dominate the culture in pervasive, often invisible ways. Even in progressive circles, internalized male inadequacy and its inevitable projection of possessiveness and aggression has been brushed underneath the rug, so by addressing it head-on, Tzusing attempts to question these structures using a level of aesthetic anxiety and thematic intensity that's hard to ignore.