The old joke with Steve Reich's music was that if the record started skipping you could never be sure if it was a fault with your gear or if Reich was exploring some kind of Eastern modality far beyond the realm of your meager mind. Now, with groups like Pan Sonic, this old joke has a digital analog. This kind of post- post- post modern sound- shaping can seemingly be enjoyed by only the most open minded (or deluded) of consumers. I think Pan Sonic must have been what Mark Leyner was talking about when he wrote of "the electronic music they use to drive fleas and cockroaches crazy."

Quickly, now, Pan Sonic used to be called Panasonic (they got in obvious copyright trouble) and they're two Finnish gents with a penchant for minimal, ambient electronica based on pure sine waves, static, and the tones of discarded machinery. Example: that sound your portable CD player makes when it spins a disc, that might take the place of the drums. That hum you get when you fire up your turntable and the grounding wire is not properly connected, that could be the bass. And the whir of your computer fan could be lead guitar. In short, think of them as Oval with a sense of rhythm; rather then entering the algorithms and letting the apparatus do the rest, they sculpt a variety of digital noises into something distantly related to standard musical order.

The result is as ice cold as you would expect from sounds this divorced from the human hand. And to me, therein lies the interest. Much electronic music uses the heartbeat dance rhythm as a way to humanize, to take the sounds from the realm of physics into that which can be understood by the body. But when this connection is discarded, things can get interesting. You're forced to pay attention to details that would normally cause to you check the warranty on your equipment. It can be disorienting, nauseating even. You may feel funny. You may even feel like an idiot. But you will not say, "I've heard this before."

-Mark Richard-San