Performance art is by definition grounded in the avant-garde. It is a mode for artists to communicate viscerally with an audience: to share conflicted intimate thoughts, to trigger us. Pan Daijing carefully excerpted her 2019 Tate exhibition, Tissues, which featured an ensemble of twelve opera singers, actors and dancers, to release this version.
In an hour, Pan does what few can: she ensnares her listener in a conflicted sonic space that feels both terrifying and comforting. She explores her own anarchic movements in four parts – but to simplify this piece to this measure is to underestimate Pan.
Her record begins with “A Raving Still”. Synthetic burbles quickly evolve into an angry swarm of wasps of what Edgard Varèse was referring to when speaking of music as “organized noise.” While the remains of her work were not similarly destroyed in a fire, Pan’s choice to rescue this 55 minutes explains what is the heart of her work: “what it is to be alive and full of feeling.”
The second movement gives into the meaning of tissues as an instrument, something tactile. You feel a gentle touch of that Kleenex we reach for to soothe. We are joined again by the alto, on an insecure synthetic pad. She eases the listener back to a break in her psyche, challenging the listener to remain captivated. I… cannot…stop. This is not performance art that is lost in the lewd and crass, we are not watching Chris Burden being shot in the arm by a friend, we are not watching a man nail a scrotum to the floor.
This hurts. The operatic vocals of “A Tender Accent”, laid over droning electronica, feel unsettling and frightening – but it is familiar to what we are haunted by in our own witching hours. She seems to take every visceral formation of musicality and plays with what could be chants, Aborignial didgeridoo, howling winds of a haunted child, and sludge-rock.
This is pure sonic poetry, a titillating psychological adventure that takes patience and perseverance to appreciate. Let this album wipe away your memory for a bit. Indulge.
