Pan Sonic - 'Kesto (234:48:4)' (Mute)
2/5
By: Tim Dellow
Hollywood is experiencing a nasty trend of Epic films at the moment. Following the lead of the tedious 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy, filmmakers seem to have problems in keeping a blockbuster under the three-hour mark. It makes perfect sense in an age in which your casual viewer requires the full DVD remake with a hundred bloody hours of outtake misery in a collectors-pack, but the punk in me is crying out for short films, or at least a piece that has some semblance of structure.
Pan Sonic are, it's fair to say, not the antidote to this condition. Indeed, they are probably the aural equivalent of 'Troy', with static heart-throbs and an impressive manner of special effects (all constructed in real time by stuntmen with analogue gear), but no sense of where they're going.
Apparently (as in I read it on the press release) influenced by Francis Bacon's trilogies, these Fins must have translated 'Trilogy' to mean four parts, as this album (a translation of the title can be read as 'Duration') is in the deliberately obtuse format of four full-length CDs.
Unsurprisingly, it's a daunting listening experience, and a patchy collection. The first two discs, complete with reinterpretations of songs by Suicide and Throbbing Gristle, update the visceral industrial drumbeats of Foetus to create a jarring, uncomfortable attack of ping-pong migraines. The minimalist jarring of these abrasive scab pulling beats occasionally surfaces on the third CD, but the collection veers towards the ambient, with almost sounds creating the façade of near-silence for a number of minutes before trickling back in with technically perfect recordings of waste pipes, sewerage and the like.
In terms of a cerebral challenge however, the collection digresses, falling into the horrific sound-as-art trend of naming a track by a literal representation of its clatter. For example, 'Ilma', or 'air' as it is translated, is meant to sound like, well, air, while 'Corridor' is an echo-chamber which closely resembles a, wait for it, corridor and the trying final track (which takes up an entire CD) 'Radiation' resembles, for a whole 60 minutes, the fuzzy clicks of a contaminated area. Perhaps a trend started by Oldfield's monstrosity 'Tubular Shite', which sounded like a steaming pile of turd, this inane titling technique of instrumental music frustrates us beyond comprehension.
Y'see, language is a system of signs that we are taught to recognise as having some relation to the objects that these words represent. Music, meanwhile, is a different language, still a collection of representational signs, but one entirely independent of the spoken-word. In this case, to combine these two systems clearly works to the detriment of the artist as each potential meaning only serves to limit the other. Music can be complimented by poetry, signalling in the form of a song, fresh ideas that the listener may not have drawn from the music alone, but in a flippant title for a vocal-less piece, the listener's musical voyage is limited by the artist's lack of foresight.
This titling system only really begins on the third CD, carrying over to the entirely superfluous forth, suggesting that they fell into the trap of quantity over quality, conception over completion. Four discs that you can easily live without, but a possible edited single CD that would be a refreshing old-school-synth equivalent to your Autechre and Squarepusher collection. Perhaps this is an attempt to challenge the download generation's reclassification of what an album should be, with the time constraints of vinyl or compact-discs no longer being an issue, but when faced with four hours of such exhaustive expanse, give me The Shins any day.
Artists in this article: Pan Sonic
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