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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Kesto
Pan Sonic
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There is no theory for Pan Sonic. We have no plan. We just make the music. (Mika Vainio)
Kesto’s epic four-disc structure was inspired by 20th century artist Francis Bacon’s use of the triptych. The four full hours of this work all function as different views of the same musical ideas that are embodied in the work’s title, which can be translated as both “strength” and “duration”. The strength emerges as screeching blankets of controlled processed noise, rolling and piercing into each track in different ways for different effects. The duration, meanwhile, emerges not only in the work’s sheer length but also in the long, slow, plodding electronic tones that curl back on themselves and underlie so many of these tracks.
Those familiar with Pan Sonic’s work may detect a correlation between their use of sound and Bacon’s use of paint; the Kesto recordings represent a substantial new depth and vitality in the quality of their sound palette that brings a new-found life force and delicate violence into their music. A threatening mood floats over the onslaught of abrasive noises and saturated drums. As denser clouds gather while the tension escalates to become almost unbearable they create density out of silence, chaos out of vacuum. The harsh soundscapes might have been replaced by more placid ones, but the disturbance is more palpable than ever.
Taken as individual works, the first three discs function like a triptych, harnessing the same core sounds yet interpreting those sounds in fundamentally different ways. Hence, on the first two discs, one hears different combinations of propulsive, punchy beats, ear-splitting howls, murmuring low, sweeping tones, a crumbling racket, and a whole lot of random snaps and whirls, chops, with an occasional crash. Finally, the last two discs remove many of the pulsing rhythms and replace them with acre after acre of slowly-building, incremental tones that build up and up and up until they become some kind of hypnotic melody (crunching and mumbling and roaring like a crackinduced bowel movement).
Pan Sonic have remained true to their original and pioneering use of their special hand-made, purpose-built analog tone generators which owe more to old radio-style sets than synthesizers, with the occasional use of digital samplers for the more rhythmic sounds. They are very much into sounds felt by the body and the effect of various frequencies on the brain.
Kesto’s epic four-disc structure was inspired by 20th century artist Francis Bacon’s use of the triptych. The four full hours of this work all function as different views of the same musical ideas that are embodied in the work’s title, which can be translated as both “strength” and “duration”. The strength emerges as screeching blankets of controlled processed noise, rolling and piercing into each track in different ways for different effects. The duration, meanwhile, emerges not only in the work’s sheer length but also in the long, slow, plodding electronic tones that curl back on themselves and underlie so many of these tracks.
Those familiar with Pan Sonic’s work may detect a correlation between their use of sound and Bacon’s use of paint; the Kesto recordings represent a substantial new depth and vitality in the quality of their sound palette that brings a new-found life force and delicate violence into their music. A threatening mood floats over the onslaught of abrasive noises and saturated drums. As denser clouds gather while the tension escalates to become almost unbearable they create density out of silence, chaos out of vacuum. The harsh soundscapes might have been replaced by more placid ones, but the disturbance is more palpable than ever.
Taken as individual works, the first three discs function like a triptych, harnessing the same core sounds yet interpreting those sounds in fundamentally different ways. Hence, on the first two discs, one hears different combinations of propulsive, punchy beats, ear-splitting howls, murmuring low, sweeping tones, a crumbling racket, and a whole lot of random snaps and whirls, chops, with an occasional crash. Finally, the last two discs remove many of the pulsing rhythms and replace them with acre after acre of slowly-building, incremental tones that build up and up and up until they become some kind of hypnotic melody (crunching and mumbling and roaring like a crackinduced bowel movement).
Pan Sonic have remained true to their original and pioneering use of their special hand-made, purpose-built analog tone generators which owe more to old radio-style sets than synthesizers, with the occasional use of digital samplers for the more rhythmic sounds. They are very much into sounds felt by the body and the effect of various frequencies on the brain.
Formed in Turku in the early ‘90s, Pan Sonic began as the duo of Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen. Pan Sonic released its self-titled debut single through Finnish label Sahko in 1994 before being joined by third member Sami Salo and landing a contract with Blast First! the following year. The group’s first BF! release, Vakio, was a full-length CD/triple-10" boxed set featuring the same brand of furtive, passively aggressive techno, though with a fuller, more thought-out sound. Soon after Vakio’s release in 1995, Salo left the group (apparently to join the army), and Pan Sonic’s subsequent releases—the Osasto EP and the group’s 1997 sophomore longplayer, Kulma—reflected his absence in their comparatively harder, less subtle tone. By 1998, an inevitable confrontation with the Japanese manufacturing giant Panasonic resulted in a name-change of sorts, to Pan Sonic. The missing letter re-surfaced the following year, as the title of the duo’s third album. Vainio and Väisänen also recorded the Endless LP (as VVV) with the addition of Suicide vocalist Alan Vega. In 2001, Pan Sonic returned with Aaltopiiri, and toured the world in a very unique manner. (Sean Cooper)