Mute Pan Sonic‘s eclectic music is
featured in world-famous art galleries.
By Antero Garcia
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
With music that has been featured in art galleries around the
world, Pan Sonic has been pushing the boundaries between what is
music and what is experimental noise.
“We sometimes play totally improvised music when we play
at art galleries,” group member Ilpo Vaisanen said in a phone
interview from his hotel room near Tijuana.
The electronica duo, consisting of Vaisanen and Mika Vainio, is
currently performing a one-of-a-kind, around-the-world tour, to
present its graceful music to audiences unfamiliar with the group.
The tour is in support of the group’s latest release
“Aaltopiiri,” on Mute Records label.
As Vaisanen explained, Pan Sonic has been performing in unique
locations such as Easter Island, Buenos Aires and Tijuana. In
addition, future dates include stops in Iceland, Croatia, Turkey
and Israel. Surprisingly, each location seems to have the same type
of crowd, and Pan Sonic has seen little diversity in the
composition of the crowds in each area of the world, Vaisanen
said.
“We’re playing the kind of places where we have
never been seen performing earlier,” Vaisanen said.
“The kind of places where people don’t know us so well
and we can play for that audience world wide.”
Before the group achieved enough success to be able to tour
around the globe, Pan Sonic formed immediately after Vaisanen and
Vainio met.
“It was in the early ’90s, and I was doing
performance art while Mika was kind of organizing illegal house
parties,” Vaisanen said. “I went to these parties, and
that’s how we met. He kind of joined my performing
group.”
However, after working together to create the group’s
avant-garde noise, success was not immediate. Vaisanen said the
pair originally performed under the name Panasonic. But pressure
from the well-known electronics distributor of the same name,
forced the group to change its name; or at least remove the letter
“a.”
Having settled the name dispute, Pan Sonic has released six
albums, including “Endless,” an album featuring Alan
Vega of the group Suicide, famous for starting synth-pop music.
“The recoding process is very different from the live
shows,” Vaisanen said. “In the live shows we can get
more power and we can be more physical with loud drums, bass and
deep sounds; and,of course, the music is much more
improvised.”
Unlike the loud boisterous energy of a Pan Sonic concert,
“Aaltopiiri” is a very mellow album, more of a lush
presentation of background noise than a collection of hummable
melodies. Vaisanen said such an album is only a natural progression
of the group’s ever-evolving sound.
“The previous album is maybe even more mellow,” he
said. “”˜Kulma,’ the green one, sounds much more
raw. “˜Vaiko’ is very analog and doesn’t sound
clear. Then there are the other projects like with Alan Vega, that
have vocals, and that’s totally different.”
In fact, having different sounds has been an important key to
Pan Sonic’s success.
For skeptics wondering what separates Pan Sonic’s
electronic brew of blips and pops from the gamut of other artists
performing today, it should be noted that Pan Sonic plays the
majority of its music on its own, handcrafted instruments.
“Our custom-made synthesizers are built by our friend from
Finland, Jari Lahtinen,” Vainio said. “They are totally
analog.”
The polished tastes of the artists account for the use of such
extraordinary instruments. The analog devices add natural
vinyl-like warmth to Pan Sonic’s minimalist music.
“We can get really pretty sounds from our
equipment,” Vaisanen said. “The other products, they
just don’t work for our needs.”
By using such interesting instruments, and creating gravely
subdued music, Pan Sonic has become almost a buzz in modern art
communities around the world. To date, Pan Sonic has exhibited its
unique improvised sound in such prestigious locations as the
Haywood Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and
the Walker Museum in Minneapolis, Minn.
The group has also been involved in other musical projects
including remixing a song for Björk, creating music for Nissan
advertisements and producing the soundtracks for two fashion
shows.
“The most different were the fashion shows; they were an
odd and different situation,” Vaisanen said. “I really
liked them a lot. We did two. The first one we composed the music
ourselves, and the second one we were using scores.”
With its music impacting so many different areas of world
culture, it is no surprise that Pan Sonic finds much inspiration
from sources other than music. Often Pan Sonic describes its sound
in non-musical terms.
“If our music were food, it would be sashimi:
fresh,” Vainio explained. “Our influences vary from
weather conditions to food to books ““ Ilpo is reading Thomas
Pynchon’s “˜Gravity’s Rainbow,’ and I am
immersed in Celine’s “˜London Bridge,’ which is
not his best work.”
When it all boils down, however, Pan Sonic is only driven by two
things.
“We are rhythm and noise,” Vaisanen said.