USAR02: Music and Technology

Pan Sonic 'Live' At Insomnia

Loh Chih Hui. USAR02 ["Music And Technology"], University Scholars Programme, National University Of Singapore.

Apart from Nokia hand phones, vodka and reindeer, there is much more to the frozen bleakness of Finland, and I had the opportunity of catching at Insomnia Café the country's most daring and remarkable export - the internationally acclaimed minimalist techno duo Pan Sonic, whose modus operandi is the search for the untried and untested in this genre of music. As I experienced firsthand the complex yet scintillating performance they pulled off, it evoked thoughts of how one man's white noise is another's high-tech lullaby. Indeed, the one and a half hours of electronic sounds and sonic feedback that the group produced opened up the doors of perception and encouraged one to approach music from a very unconventional stance.

Originally named Panasonic (Greek / Latin meaning "every sound"), the group is renowned for the droning, intense physicality of its minimalist techno (or as some critics would say, post-techno). An inevitable confrontation with the Japanese manufacturing giant of the same name in 1998 resulted in a name-change of sorts, but the essence and significance of their original name still remains today, which harks back to the musical beginnings of musique concrete in 1948 where all sounds became available as musical material, something that features strongly in basically all their creative work. Eschewing the clean, processed sounds of modern synthesisers, Pan Sonic relies instead on its outmoded tone generators and homemade composite sound generators built from spare parts and old analog debris to create continuous ebbs and flows of rhythmic and mesmerising sine waves. Its lo-fi analog minimalist but attention-grabbing sound manages to maintain the visceral energy of punk while treading a fine line between what can be considered good music and the avant-garde, and its heavily improvised edge also incorporates both accidents and errors in playing, adding a significant degree of indeterminacy to the compositions, which all serve to interrogate preconceptions of aesthetic views of how and what music should be, as well as the role and responsibility of the composer. All the minimal droning, white noise, bleeps and sonic sculpturing is ultimately not discordant, progressive rubbish, and is instead reminiscent of the ground-breaking contributions of the pioneers of early electronic like John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen or Steve Reich. While Pan Sonic's music sounds abstract like the precedents it attempts to emulate and recreate in a more contemporary context, it is in fact experimenting with and utilising the very foundations of modern dance music, where house, techno, and drum 'n' bass DJs today owe their roots to these early electronic experiments and equipment.

While their approach to music is avant-garde and certainly mind-blowing, central to Pan Sonic's performance in Singapore was the new paradigm towards performance that they introduced to concert-goers here, for their music encompassed both a perceptual as well as acoustical show that emphasised on portraying the physical properties of the music itself. By utilising the method of spectrum analysis (in analog form), the minimalist techno duo provided a visualisation of the acoustical qualities and complexity of the tones they produced (either by the playback of recorded sound samples or through oscillators) expressed as sine waves. Indeed, the main attraction that night was not so much the two guys behind the darkened sound console manipulating the controls of audio processing devices, but the actual sound waves produced that were projected onto a big screen that covered one of the walls in the café. It was particularly interesting to see how sounds of different frequencies, amplitudes and envelopes generated waves that appeared and behaved very differently, and especially how certain sounds created distinct wave patterns. Sometimes the oscillations of the waves represented on the projection were so intense that they seemed to break down into multiple pure lines of motion, but that could probably be attributed to the fact that the sounds produced by Pan Sonic were beyond the range of the spectrum analyser that they employed. Most importantly, this performance was significant in the way it portrayed sound / music as occupying space and time (through wave motion), transforming music into a much more multi-dimensional as well as 'living' entity, something that has been examined and advocated by modern music composers and critics such as Iannis Xenakis.

What Pan Sonic did was ultimately to redefine existing perceptions of music, rethink the threshold of what constitutes noise and sound, as well as the ways music is performed and appreciated. Unlike your de rigeur club music, their avant-garde mode of techno music did not constitute the backdrop for dancing but was an experience in itself to be felt, seen and heard - this was certainly not for the narrow-minded, and anyone expecting the usual disco fare would have been sorely disappointed. In the final analysis, Pan Sonic ultimately challenges the belief that music requires catchy, repeated melodic figures or some semblance of identifiable harmonic progressions. To them, even defining music as organised sound is too constraining, and they focus primarily on distinctively electronic timbres that stimulate the imagination, instead of emulating traditional instruments or familiar sounds. Apart from this, with the trend of music these days becoming increasingly visual / visceral in presentation, Pan Sonic also plays with the idea of a highly graphic performance, albeit along very different lines. While liking Pan Sonic's music is an acquired and rather technologically aesthetic taste, the recent deluge of insipid and highly commercialised mainstream music certainly makes their innovations and strange sounds a welcome remedy to a media environment increasingly dominated by boy-band fodder.