Review Summary: The human voice is malleable and mechanical; the ocean is vast and soggy
For a while, I thought Pan Daijing was the kind of artist better experienced with eyes than ears – and not in
that way! On 2020’s
Jade, her blend of fragile vocal contortions with oppressive mechanical beats and soundscapes was more remarkable for the (limited) friction between the two than anything particularly appealing brought by either side, but if you were a writer taken with the pure concept of warped vestigial humanity persisting in a dehumanised space, chances are you’d be overjoyed to harp about her day and night. Consider her God’s gift to anyone endeavouring to justify “post-industrial” as a credible genre labelling. When I think of
Jade, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t an musical impression of any kind, but Pitchfork’s eloquent diagnosis of a duality of claustrophobia and agoraphobia in Daijing’s standalone lyric
I take my bath in the ocean / I can’t get out. Enclosed spaces, open spaces, ambiguity, intimacy, constriction, and so on: those are indeed nice words. Her new record
Tissues seemed destined for the same fate: nothing screams
talking point more than a droning synth-opera plucked straight from the Tate Modern and sliced into four glacially paced movements, the intelligibility of each locked behind a Chinese libretto.
Perhaps [...] music is much more than simply what is heard, posit the release notes (among a million other things), and so I, Sisyphean dunce that I am, went in with the sole expectation of ending up with some forgettable aesthetic steel wool with which to scratch out a few pretentious musings.
Well, surprise of all surprises, I don’t think
Tissues would benefit from that treatment at all. It’s an engaging listen on or off paper, parts of it are straight-up gratifying on a purely musical level, and its ideas are developed coherently enough to speak for themselves. If her commentary on the specificities and limits and whatevers of the human voice on
Jade rarely rose above the aesthetic, here she structures it in a slowly developed arch such that each idea is supported with compositional substance. Singing as one part of a quartet, she writes her vocal arrangements with inbuilt interference, full of quirks and particularities that mirror mechanical warpings just as much as they juxtapose them. This is most clearly explored on “Part 2”, where a Tangerine Dream-esque synthscape provides a tranquil canvas for ‘glitching’ vocal stutters, and on “Part 3”, where increasingly erratic voices wrench themselves away from their background pulse and the whole arrangement marches and unravels as a deconstructed climax, the momentum of which guides the album to its very end. Both pieces, and the work as a whole, benefit from their generous runtime; its developments may be slow, but their progressions are obvious enough to circumvent the need for inhibitive lengths of patience.
Tissues is occasionally uninviting in its austerity, but it makes up for this by being so easy to follow; it’s intuitive enough that it doesn’t have to be ‘deep’, but at the same time, it’s too fleshed out to be shallow. If Daijing is still taking that ocean bath, she’s no longer treading water.
