KILLED in CARS

Pan Sonic & Keiji Haino - “Shall I Download a Blackhole and Offer It to You”: Live in Berlin 15.11.2007 (Blast First Petite, 2009)

This 2009 publication probably does no justice to the 2007 live concert from the Haino-Pan Sonic collaboration at all, and yet, when heard even at medium volume, it fills your head with clashing neuro-images that constantly implode with feedback. Shall I Download a Black Hole and Offer it to You is not entirely a description, or even an action, it’s a question poised by the artists; as a question with no immediate answer (it’s too late to say ‘no’, anyway) it remains in limbo, in the realm of ideas, that platonic existence that sounds like religious ritual and applied science at the same time (Haino chants and tears his own body apart with wails as Pan Sonic mechanically, industrially forges sounds to build the backdrop). As differing yet essentially converging lines of thought, both forms of truth throw themselves against each other at every passing second; the duo constructs drones and beats full of digital interference as the soloist charges at them head-on with multi-instrumental insanity and vocal distortion. Rationality meets its contrary, and can only press on.

With this fierce and forceful encounter, both forms become contaminated. Slowly, Pan Sonic’s sound becomes a bit more uncontrollable (a beat disrupted, a buzz amplified, a longer silence) and in the meantime Haino fades in and out of cosmic possession (a short, calm koto segment intervened only by a few screams, not ruled by them) in longer lapses of time. The result is that nothing sounds like it should, or rather, like it’s supposed to; the transfiguration of an astronomical “region” into kilobytes is unfathomable, unknowable and incredible just like truth itself, in platonic terms, whether a part of an incantation or an experiment. And yet it’s stuff like that what modern experiences are made of: someone puts a Hubble picture of Andromeda in a calendar, and someone else that puts that calendar on his or her refrigerator of choice “owns” a star he or she can look directly at. A priest takes a piece of bread, dips it in a cup of wine, and they become a piece of a body and its blood. Andy Warhol puts a Brillo box in a museum, and it becomes something that is not only a box of soap.

I think that is the nature of such a collaboration: an arcane edge pervades method just as much as rationality pervades the arcane back, creating an eerie atmosphere of pain and revelation; Haino conducts his own sacrifice to the beat of modern electronics, to the analyzing eyes of Pan Sonic, and both seem to emerge from the digital underworld irrevocably changed (in the horror sci-fi commonplace of “That’s not my daddy!”). As listeners of this permanent clash, I guess the final question is: are we changed as well? The people at the 2007 concert are, without a doubt, a little bit madder. Will this version do the same? I hope so.

False Bread