Jade 玉观音

I was put on to this album by John DeVore in one of the videos on his YouTube channel a while back. It is superb, well worth buying for those of a more curious musical bent.

Pan Daijing is a Berlin based artist and musician, “Daijing describes herself as an outsider. She lacks any formal musical training. She taught herself all she knows, eventually developing the acumen to compose her own opera. In fact, the best analogue for Daijing’s experimental storytelling is Richard Wagner’s definition of opera, the combination of narrative and drama. There is a latent visual flair to Jade 玉观音 as if Daijing is drafting a soundtrack without a host film. The soundscapes are unsettling, strung into a portrait by someone more intrigued by the idea of horror than actively terrorizing. It is through this lens that Daijing dramatizes her ailment. Her compositions are informed by mise-en-scene with the visuals being represented by tense audio layers. If it feels constricting that’s Daijing’s intention, but it’s done to bring the experience into a world both parties can recognize as solitary.”

According to Spectrum Culture, “Solitude is colored by the questions it asks: how responsible are we for our distance from others, does it ever become a rejection of community, can that warmth ever be rekindled, and when does isolation slide into helplessness? Jade 玉观音 should then be alarming relevant this year. Pan Daijing’s second album is her place in isolation. But the Berlin-based experimental musician recorded it over the past three years, thus removing Jade 玉观音 from any endemic seclusion. It’s a plain of jagged footing where Daijing tries to find how autonomous she can be in a place dedicated to oneself. Her rejection of musical traditionalism forces her soundscapes to hold their own markings outside of any genre. The terms noise and drone both paint Jade 玉观音 as violent, something it’s very much not. Instead Daijing filters these harsh influences into episodes that share her isolation without imposing it.”

You can have a listen here at the Bandcamp page, or on the usual streaming platforms, but I highly suggest getting hold of the cool white vinyl release. The bowed bass and ethereal voice on the third track Dictee will become a staple demo track for me, it’s amazing.

“What if a song was not a culmination but a sign, an imprint, or a crater left in the wake of creative process? On her new record Jade, Pan Daijing composes at a different scale than that we’ve come to know. Since the release of her groundbreaking LP Lack in 2017, Daijing has expanded her operatic vision into a series of major commissioned exhibition-performances at institutions including the Tate Modern, Martin Gropius Bau, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Developed for full casts of opera singers and dancers, and reaching for an all-encompassing durational experience of intensity for both performer and audience, the development of these works was for Daijing as emotionally disarming as it was thrilling. In order to continue accessing her own limits, Daijing had to develop a place of sanctuary within her own practice. Its nine tracks written and recorded over the last three years, Jade is the sound of solitary release and refuge, of creative self-sustenance. Written without the imperatives of direct address to performers or audience, Jade speaks inward, while inviting a kind of rhetorical listening. The artist draws on materials familiar from her previous work: namely, ascetic electronic textures that rumble and pierce, and voice bent in irreverent directions. In place of catharsis, however, her arrangements here linger in tension, extending curiosity towards the delicate void that nourishes extremes. They toy with the minor capacities of song: repetition, chant, observations that conclude without resolving. Jade comes from a vulnerable place, tender as in an undressed wound caught in the midst of healing over. Vocals, mostly Daijing’s own, arrive as wordless sequences of notes soaring alongside a drone, or plain laughter, or in a few places spoken word. What is said or sung provides fragments of experience and reflection. In the process of piecing together these fragments, the listener is confronted with the tender parts of her own. “Solitude is like an immense lake you’re swimming through,” says Daijing of these songs. “Sometimes you dip your head in and sometimes you lift it above. On album centerpiece Let, she speaks to us over the sound of rippling water, returning between anxious scenes to a refrain: “I take my bath in the ocean.” We are not just consuming Daijing’s story; we are being invited to join her in the water. The album is mixed and mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by Pan Daijing, cinematography by Dzhovani & design by NMR.”