Pan Daijing’s first two releases—the 2015 tape Sex & Disease and this year’s A Satin Sight EP—for the most part fell squarely into the realms of noise and techno, respectively. Meanwhile, “Zhao Hua,” her standout collaboration with HVAD from Pan’s MONO NO AWARE compilation, was a cloudy and dreamlike ambient track. Useful as these genres have been as guideposts, the Chinese-born, Berlin-based artist’s practice is more expansive than any one of them, incorporating movement, improvisation, and installation—and also taking an interest in the potential of sound beyond music. Lack, Daijing’s ambitious debut full-length, incorporates all of this as it draws from the past two years of her live performances, accommodating a deeply felt theatrics.
Though Lack collects pieces from different contexts, it follows a well-structured dramatic arc, building from eerie, ominous atmospheres into pulsating industrial fuzz. Daijing has noted that the record is her take on an opera, and this emerges literally on the piercing opener, “Phenomenon,” in which a soprano oscillates between two tones over struck strings and dissonant drones. Moving forward, she turns to a wilder sonic palette: a muted atonal chorus of synthesizers on “A Loving Tongue,” and on “Practice of Hygiene,” the claustrophobic sound of a groaning voice, either ecstatic or tortured—it’s unclear which, and maybe irrelevant.
But amid such explosive aesthetics, there remains a formality to her delivery, a sense of control and even elegance. In “Plate of Order,” for example, Daijing portions out snarls of distortion that act as blistering punctuation underneath her own sustained vocals. Not merely aggressive, her application of crashing percussion or squalls of noise develops a near-meditative quality as Lack progresses. Certain songs may at first have an anxiety-inducing effect on the listener, but this is not anxious music; rather, it transmits an intense sense of presence.
The voice is often the means by which we get to know a performer, and while Daijing’s offers some of the most arresting moments on this album, other elements of her productions are equally expressive: the melodic clanging of “Come to Sit, Come to refuse, Come to Surround,” or the frenzied, arrhythmic sawing of “A Situation of Meat.” Without adopting legibly confessional language or even, for the most part, affectively triggering sonics, Daijing places herself in daring proximity to the listener, linking the production of noise to physical embodiment. In an interview earlier this year, the artist described the sensation of using a Buchla: “I ended up getting stuff that made me feel like part of me and part of this thing I’ve been touching every day for the past two weeks had come together.”
Most distinctive about Lack is the way it moves beyond catharsis—sometimes through the intellectual distance that comes from dramatization, but sometimes simply through an openness to fear. At moments it can seem as if we’re privy to the development of Daijing’s relationship to pain—her respect for it and desire to understand it. Much sharper-edged than the sounds one would usually associate with healing, Daijing’s music still seems to cultivate a space in which one might grow.
