Pan Sonic

[Luka]

Glitch was a strange music category at the time. I was reflecting on this recently when looking at Fennez’s Endless Summer which also was flagged at glitch. It seemed like a catchall for anything electronic and not fitting a mould with some processing some erratic sounds. I liked the term electronica better at the time and still do as a catchall alternative electronic for things not easily defined.

Minimal techno can mean lots of genres now. We used to call the main stream 2k 130b techno minimal as it was very repetitive- many tracks 1 loop with slight variation, then there stuff like hawtin’s era of minimal techno which became its own thing. Not sure if pan sonic fits either of those. It is more industrial.

[scuto]

Hmm, I'd consider Endless Summer closer to glitch than Pan Sonic, but still it's intentional, not focused on harnessing error as an aesthetic choice. so I'd not consider it glitch, myself. I hear you, I think I've softened on the term "electronica", but at the time I hated it. I just said electronic music and let the other person figure it out if my other (non-genre) descriptors piqued their interest.

True--I was playing a bit fast and loose with "minimal techno", in that when Pan Sonic made a change/added or subtracted an element in the track it had a large impact just as in minimal techno. Robert Hood's Minimal Nation and Ø's Metri came out the same year, which is wild! Sounds palette wise you make a good point Pan Sonic came more from an industrial sound.

Glitch was a strange music category at the time. I was reflecting on this recently when looking at Fennez’s Endless Summer which also was flagged at glitch. It seemed like a catchall for anything electronic and not fitting a mould with some processing some erratic sounds. I liked the term electronica better at the time and still do as a catchall alternative electronic for things not easily defined.

Minimal techno can mean lots of genres now. We used to call the main stream 2k 130b techno minimal as it was very repetitive- many tracks 1 loop with slight variation, then there stuff like hawtin’s era of minimal techno which became its own thing. Not sure if pan sonic fits either of those. It is more industrial.

[synthfanatic]

Yeah I don’t think Panasonic or Mika Vainio’s music can be considered “glitch”. I feel Mika’s music was quite deliberate in its approach and he only released music that matched what was inside his imagination. Super sad thinking that we’ve been without Mika for almost 6 years now. I remember finding out about his death in 2017 and feeling crushed knowing one of my musical heroes has passed. I will never forget seeing Panasonic live in 1998 and seeing Mika perform solo twice, including at Berghain!

[synthfanatic]

Yeah I don’t think Panasonic or Mika Vainio’s music can be considered “glitch”. I feel Mika’s music was quite deliberate in its approach and he only released music that matched what was inside his imagination. Super sad thinking that we’ve been without Mika for almost 6 years now. I remember finding out about his death in 2017 and feeling crushed knowing one of my musical heroes had passed. I will never forget seeing Panasonic live in 1998 and seeing Mika perform solo twice, including at Berghain!

[scuto]

Yeah I don’t think Panasonic or Mika Vainio’s music can be considered “glitch”. I feel Mika’s music was quite deliberate in its approach and he only released music that matched what was inside his imagination. Super sad thinking that we’ve been without Mika for almost 6 years now. I remember finding out about his death in 2017 and feeling crushed knowing one of my musical heroes has passed. I will never forget seeing Panasonic live in 1998 and seeing Mika perform solo twice, including at Berghain!

Agreed, its deliberateness and intention are aspects of what makes his music so good, effective and affecting.

I'm jealous! Kulma is my favorite (though A didn't hit the same spots for me), so that live show must have had some great tracks! I've only seen them live once, I think during the Katodivaihe era. Fortunately, the gig I saw is interspersed throughout the Brainwashed/The Eye interview with Mika so I can relive it in tidbits. I think it was 2006.

Found it:


I can only imagine how physical the set at Berghain was! What a musical treasure.

[dubonaire]

Glitch is a new type of of label to me. Most of their releases around the Y2K mark were te be found in the minimal (techno) section of the record shops I frequented. There's Noise and Industrial influences as well and some of their releases can indeed be labeled as such. And and some is Elektro of course.

So Kim Cascone wrote "The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-Digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music" which was really the seminal paper on glitch, so I don't see it as a new label.

I think Mika worked across genres, I'm not sure he cared much about them. I went to a Pan Sonic show that was a wall to wall blast of noise Merzbow style. 100% industrial noise drone. But then you have pure minimal techno pieces on Sähkö, and a range of styles on releases like Oleva. By the way I love the Set The Control to Heart of the Sun cover on that album.

[grayghost]

Glitch is not so hard to understand but requires adopting the mindset of the mid 1990's.

This was the first time, that many people owned a personal computer that could handle digital audio on a PCM basis, not controlling analog synthesis or FM chips as in the 1980's.

There came about inexpensive "computer music" tools, for instance Soundhack, CSound, Max, that run on slow hardware of the time (mid-90's), so there was no possibility of the tools being able to do detailed simulations or modeling, this came only in early 2000's.

With these tools came the promise of certain operations done with perfect transparency, for instance changing the duration or pitch of a sample independently. But with either time-domain (granular) or frequency-domain (phase vocoder) techniques there are always "artifacts". Academic researchers kept evolving methods to suppress them, but these required knowledge and processing power that was not widely accessible to ordinary people who owned personal computers. This is why the mindset of 1990's matters, it is difficult to even conceive of a time where every such technique is not accessible (AI of course, being a different story...)

Beyond artifacts there are bugs. The initial creation of a software tool is exhilarating, but then comes the laborious and frustrating effort of debugging. It often takes more work to eliminate bugs than to write the original code. Bugs arise, not from defects in a human's knowledge or intelligence, but by the absolute mismatch between human intelligence (as such) and digital logic, the absolute incomprehensibility of the machine that the "linguistic" construct of modern programming languages try to cover up. Besides artifacts, bugs are another type of phenomenon that can only arise from the digital medium and be determined by this medium as "error".

Still beyond artifacts and bugs, there is the physical materiality of hardware. A computer is not an abstraction, but a particular collection of circuitry and interface elements that purports to implement an abstraction. The same goes for a CD player or other medium. It's physical stuff, and thus subject to temporality (decay), multiplicity, and so on.

So -- if one can't get rid of artifacts, bugs or physical hardware, all very salient in the mid-1990s, why not embrace them? This is the origin of "glitch", digital error. Or, because digital is the platform that promises exactitude, via Nyquist or other theorem, there emerges glitch as its shadow side, as that which is always lurking and threatening to reveal this promise as a sham. Digital is not transparent, universal, or perfectly repeatable as its promise, but something that mediates, that expresses itself through its mediations, including at the totally non-repeatable level of hardware. Glitch is thus unthinkable without digital media, glitch is native to it.

The related developments of circuit bending and disk skipping also belong to glitch -- they deal most directly with the materiality aspect. While originating in the 1970's with Michael Waisvisz, circuit bending became widely known in the 1990's via Reed Ghazala's experiments. Circuit bending reveals digital as not simply abstract logic, but physical hardware -- voltage and current, capable of operations through feedback routing that are not interpretable in terms of logic. One can verify with an OR gate, to either input it behaves as a comparator, and if the comparator output is inverted and mixed with the input, the result is a voltage follower, something that does not output exclusively binary values. In a similar sense, Oval's experiment with skipping CD players, which forces the listener to question the transparency of the medium, exposes the materiality of that which is supposedly abstract and universal.

The truth that exposes the lie is once again, from the perspective of the lie, revealed as "error" or "glitch". Embracing error is then ultimately an event of truth. It means embracing the digital medium as-is, as something wholly incomprehensible and alien to humanity, refusing to accept its promise of exact clarity, repeatability, simulability -- offering in exchange a free relation to the medium, one without false promises to perfectly replicate, simulate, commodify all that is.

The increasing accessibility of higher "quality" tools, and "virtual analog"/physical modeling simulations, made these glitch aspects avoidable, this is why digital is increasingly associated with the retro-nostalgic, with universal commodification and cancellation of the future, and why glitch has a more obscure meaning these days. But all that was impossible in the 1990's.

It is in this context something like Farmers Manual - FSCK appeared and immediately sounded nothing like before, except maybe Nuno Canavarro - Plux Quba from 1988 made on hardware samplers. There was mainly this Austrian scene, they were friends and shared programs, the label Mego came from this. Fennesz eventually had a less radical approach, as the poster pointed out. But he is classified as glitch simply by being in the same scene and using some of the same tools. Fennesz' work from Endless Summer onwards proved itself musically at a somewhat higher level of development, but lost some in the purity of its concepts. To be fair, by 2001 most of the possibilities of glitch were exhausted, people were searching for something new.

[scuto]

Glitch is a new type of of label to me. Most of their releases around the Y2K mark were te be found in the minimal (techno) section of the record shops I frequented. There's Noise and Industrial influences as well and some of their releases can indeed be labeled as such. And and some is Elektro of course.

So Kim Cascone wrote "The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-Digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music" which was really the seminal paper on glitch, so I don't see it as a new label.

I think Mika worked across genres, I'm not sure he cared much about them. I went to a Pan Sonic show that was a wall to wall blast of noise Merzbow style. 100% industrial noise drone. But then you have pure minimal techno pieces on Sähkö, and a range of styles on releases like Oleva. By the way I love the Set The Control to Heart of the Sun cover on that album.

Thanks for the reminder of that paper, it has been some time since I read it.

Agreed on his cross-genre/no adherence to genre approach. I have a couple Ø releases, but not Oleva, so now I must find it since I'm a huge fan of both LPs of Ummaguma. It was unexpected, but a pleasant surprise to learn he covered anything at all, let alone Pink Floyd!