Chinese artist and berlin resident Pan Daijing releases with „Tissues“ a massive piece of opera like soundtrack. Back in 2019 that project comes to life at Tate Modern and premiered as a live performance. Everything in here feels extra ordinary. From the undefined chinese vocals to the heavy noise parts and the industrial electronics.
Within the first seconds of „Tissues“ there is something special. That kind of using vocals combined with electronical noise isn‘t unusual, but in this case Pan Daijing uses very carefully opera elements to combine both worlds, the classical old world at one hand and the modern world on the other. „Tissues“ is splitted in 4 different parts but without any interruption between the tracks it could be easy an one piece loop. The opera elements leads undoubtful to an immersive, emotional and tragedy atmosphere.
The record starts with „A Raving Still“, an synthesizer driven intro. After a while some emotional Chinese vocals attend the track. Half in the track it switches to a ritual/ceremony kind of spoken vocals. The emotional intensity peaks at that part. Anyway the opera style in music leads to an kind of a tragedy. „A Found Lament“ picks the initial style of the opener and starts with a spacious ambient melody until fragile voices fades in. The melody will set more to the background while singing parts are more dominant here. It‘s purely esthetic and impressive as well. In „A Tender Accent“ the tone will changes a bit with a more industrial style of intro with massive drone effects. The atmosphere here is more dark, oppressive and alarming. The feelings will be reinforced by loud shouted vocals. The ground tone feels like one impressive drone that encloses the entire track. The album closes with „A Deafening Hum“ where fading drones and noise sections are combined. It starts with a beautiful sound landscape until a prompting tone like a bell interrupts and changes the scene. At the end a singing and piano part will finished an emotional journey.
Pan Daijing creates with „Tissues“ an extra ordinary world. Highly driven by the intense opera sections that builds it‘s own immersive surroundings. Like a tissue himself the record feels very fine layered with all the details in there. It could be very interesting to see how „Tissues“ will work as a live performance with additional visuals to further increase the emotional and tragedy impact. There is no doubt that „Tissues“ will be one of the lost pearls in drone music of 2022!
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