★Pan
Àlááfíà
Honour’s debut album is a ligament stretching from Lagos to London and to New York, curling across the diaspora and brushing the darker hues of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient, gospel with Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. As cinematic as it is painterly, Àlàáfíà is a meditation on themes of life, death and love that pulls inspiration from the poetic profundity of God, remembered dreams, unexpected casual conversations, field recordings, literature, ephemera, and personal archives. The…
Two Cycles
Billy Bultheel's debut solo album is an ambitious distillation of the composer's,' sprawling litany of influences and his unique approach to site-specific composition. A compilation of pieces created between 2016 and 2023, the album is a forceful testament to Bultheel's expansive performance practice and collaborations with cutting-edge visual artists like Anne Imhof and James Richards. Drawing inspiration from industrial music and metal as well as medieval and baroque polyphony, Bultheel devise…
Tissues
Pan Daijing’s exhibition-performance Tissues premiered in the Tanks at the Tate Modern in autumn 2019. A five-part 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…
Jade
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 ope…
Island of the Hungry Ghosts
Deeper-than-deep field recordings, sub-aquatic drones and microtonal rhythmic flurries from veteran Aussie producer Aaron Cupples, composed exclusively for the award-winning hybrid documentary "Island of the Hungry Ghosts". Cupples, who's worked with Spiritualized, Blanck Mass, Broken Social Scene and others, was eager to reflect the atmosphere of Gabrielle Brady's film. The hybrid documentary follows the journey of millions of migratory crabs on Christmas Island and juxtaposes this phenomenon …
Orcorara 20202
Influential composer Elysia Crampton commits a deeply arresting album about intergenerational trauma as their debut for PAN, originally comissioned and released in 2018 by Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, CH for the first floor at the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018 Acting as vessel for the voices of great and dispossessed people of the Americas, Elysia Crampton’s music and art since the late ’00s has arguably re-configured modern composition. In their prescient deconstruction and colla…
RFG Inventions for Cello and Computer
Remarkable collaboration between inventor, synth pioneer and EMS co-founder Peter Zinovieff and preeminent cellist Lucy Railton, capturing a life-altering dialogue between two figures with a more than 50-year age gap between them, and with very little shared musical vocabulary. Pursuing common ground through an open-ended series of conversations and experiments, the pair somehow produce what we can only describe as creative alchemy; transforming banal conceptual triggers into a work seeping into…
Workaround
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.
Lexachast
**clear vinyl edition with alternate cover** Lexachast is an ongoing collaborative work by Amnesia Scanner, Bill Kouligas, and 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, CT…
Fake Synthetic Music
Vocalist, performer and sound artist Stine Janvin works with the extensive flexibility of her instrument of the voice, and the ways in which it can be disconnected from its natural, human connotations. Created for variable spaces from theatres, to clubs and galleries, the backbone of Janvin’s projects focus on the physical aspects of sound, and potential dualities of the natural versus artificial, organic / synthetic, and minimal / dramatic.Fake Synthetic Music is Stine Janvin’s latest live perf…
Faust
**Includes an expansive booklet of photography by Nadine Fraczkowski** The stunning next instalment in PAN’s Entopia series is an audio document of Anne Imhof’s acclaimed ‘Faust’ performance at the German Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale - awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. It’s a dramatic, rich and complex album that within the first three pieces alone transports you into multiple dimensions - from the distorted electronic burst of 'Opening March’ - something like Aute…
Nimiia Vibie
Aspiring to connect with a world beyond our consciousness and our planet, nimiia vibié sounds the interactions between a neural network, audio recordings of early Martian language, and microscopic footage of extremophilic space bacteria. Here, the computer is a medium, channeling messages from entities that usually cannot speak. However, it is also an alien of our creation. Drawing on nimiia cétiï, Jenna Sutela's project on machine learning and interspecies communication, the record manifests a …
2
The Lifted ensemble return for a second, fluid jazz excursion on their new album for PAN, this time with an expanded lineup that includes Beatrice Dillon, Bass Clef, Jordan GCZ, Dawit Eklund, Will DiMaggio, Aya (OOIOO) and Martin Kasey, plus Future Times boss Max D and fellow core members Matt Papich aka Co La, Jeremy Hyman and Motion Graphics. Sublime, late night listening for smoked-out jazz heads and fans of anything from Move D's Conjoint to those excellent first couple of Flanger EP's from …
Chemical Flowers
Luke Younger yields his most engrossing work as Helm with the sorely romantic dynamics of ‘Chemical Flowers’, his follow-up to 2015’s ‘Olympic Mess’. Bolstered by J.G. Thirlwell’s rich string arrangements, it’s a hugely ambitious work that extends from whirling, panoramic vistas to insular, pulsing dynamics, somewhere between Earth, Oren Ambarchi, Keiji Haino and Actress. Recorded in long, sustained sessions in the Essex countryside, giving him breathing room from the choke of London, ‘Chemica…
Kuro
PAN inaugurate Entopia, their highly promising, soundtrack-focussed sister label, with the tremulous beauty and dreamy ambient detachment of Tujiko Noriko’s ‘Kuro (OST)’ Realised alongside musicians Sam Britton and Will Worsely, experimental J-popstar and composer Tujio Noriko conceived the ‘Kuro’ soundtrack for the eponymous 2017 film which she wrote and directed with Joji Koyama, and in which she also plays the lead role. The film follows the tale of Romi, a Japanese woman living in the subur…
The Drought
After some serious pressing plant problems and several rejected pressings, here it is...Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically-acclaimed releases, Puce Mary breaks new ground with The Drought, evolving from the tropes of industrial and power electronics to forge a complex story of adapting to new realities. Remnants of noise still exist, sustaining the visceral penetration offered on previous records, however The Drought demonstrates an intention to expand on th…
Cocoon Crush
Mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring photography by Kasia Zacharko, and layout by Bill Kouligas. Objekt returns with Cocoon Crush, his first LP since 2014’s Flatland. Over the past four years he has continued to challenge conventions with his club output, while maintaining his reputation as a DJ who deploys impeccable technical finesse in crafting elaborate narratives from a diverse and challenging palette of electronic music. "Written between 2014 and 2018 in Berlin and on the road, Cocoon Crus…
Another Life
Another Life is the debut album from Amnesia Scanner, the Berlin-based music duo, performing arts group, experience design studio, and production house, created by Finnish-born Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala. Founded in 2014, Amnesia Scanner's approach is informed by a unique perspective on technology and the way it mediates contemporary experience. System vulnerabilities, information overload, and sensory excess inform their work, which has found a home in both clubs and galleries. Building …
Blinks
Swedish producer Toxe's new EP Blinks is a fractal bloom of candied melodies and minor laments set in a sweep of frenetic rhythmic scenes. Developed throughout last year, Blinks journals a period of inward flux. Meditative glimpses of soaring synthetic landscapes are woven across Blinks in brief snatches. Awash in horrific and gripping fluorescent hues, these environments are augmented by a comically mischievous patchwork of voices and saccharine rasps that clamor for attention, hinting at Toxe'…
Irisiri
Eartheater (aka Queens based artist Alexandra Drewchin) distills foley-filled digital production, a three-octave vocal range, and classical composition into works suspended between obsessively detailed sonic tapestries and almost recklessly romantic and gestural electronica. IRISIRI, Eartheater's third full-length record, lays out a shifting network of abstract song craft, laced with sudden structural upheavals, and collisions of mutated tropes from numerous sonic vocabularies. Modular synth sta…