The Berlin producer is a master of negative space and biomechanical sound, lacing her uneasy compositions with voices that excavate images of unceasing loneliness and longing.
Pan Daijing has a keen ear for the vicissitudes of the human voice—the way it can commune or conflict with its environment, or how it can spark immediate, visceral sympathy and then plunge into revulsion with a choking throttle. Since the release of her 2017 debut LP Lack, the Berlin-based experimental artist has written and staged operatic works for upward of a dozen singers, constellating voice in the service of narrative, finding the edges where difference makes friction. In the studio, she laces her solo work with voices that beckon and spit, hinting at story and then submerging those hints in discomfiting electronic noise. She is a skillful collagist of biomechanical sound. On her second album, Jade 玉观音, Daijing breaches more intimate terrain, using the voice and its antagonists to excavate images of unceasing loneliness and deep, unruly need.
“I take my bath in the ocean/I can’t get out,” Daijing says in the closing moments of “Let 七月.” The couplet reveals the paradox of scale on which her work often plays. Within the span of a few words, she drifts upon the ocean’s inconceivable expanse and, at the same time, is crammed into a bathtub. An open horizon and a tight, windowless room collapse into a single scene. Inside it, Daijing luxuriates and is trapped. “Let 七月” offers something of an oasis from the album’s industrial scrapes and whines. Yet the terror and discombobulation central to Daijing’s work never quite ebbs. Even at their calmest and most curious, the voices she orchestrates don’t soothe. They fester; they salivate; they probe, rooting for more than what the surface offers. If the voices on Lack could feel abstracted, alien, the ones that appear on Jade 玉观音 venture direct address: “Did I ever need you too much?” Daijing asks on “The Goat 二月,” her murmur barely audible against an ominous synthesizer pulse. “If you ever leave, I’ll go with you.”
These spoken-word soliloquies carry the urgency of intolerable secrets, irritants that require indiscriminate purging. Throughout the album, strands of voice drape across instruments that sound just enough like they come out of a body that they take on an uncanny quality. A low, snarling stringed instrument seems to breathe on “Dictee 三月”; analog synthesizers chirp and burble alongside impromptu laughter and a brambly, computerized growl on “Tilt 四月”; a diaphragmatic bass tone stumbles and lurches through “Ran 乱.” Daijing delights in that confusion, the ear’s misrecognition of an instrument as another body, tortured to extremes and calling out.
Jade closes with the gutting “Moema, forever 九月,” a piece with uneasy Sprechgesang at its heart. “I forget her,” Daijing repeats against purring machine drone and intermittent piano strikes. Her voice arcs upward, as if she’s searching for a question mark. “Forget her face, forget her smell, forget her finger.” She is able so precisely to remember the things she forgets, to enumerate them. They pile up like keepsakes in a box. Her voice trudges on, strained to the point of breaking, but it does not break. The whirring environment sputters and stalls. The piano calls, insistent; a synthesizer wordlessly shrieks. Daijing, her voice shallow but steady, goes on forgetting, making a spectacle of the absence until there is no light left, until all that remains is loss.
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