Pan Daijing – Jade 玉观音 Format: LP / DL Cat.No. PAN 113 Release date: June 4, 2021 Purchase: pan.lnk.to/Jade What if a song was not a highlight, but a song, footprint or crater left during a creative process? On his new album “Jade”, Pan Daijing composes on a different scale than the one we know. Since the release of his groundbreaking album “Lack” in 2017, Daijing has expanded his vision of opera in a series of major exhibitions commissioned from institutions such as the Tate Modern, Martin Gropius Bau and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Designed for full casts of opera singers and dancers and the pursuit of an overall intensity experience for performers and audiences, the development of these works has been as emotionally disarming as it is exciting for Daijing. In order to continue pushing his own limits, Daijing had to develop a refuge in his own practice. With nine tracks written and recorded over the past three years, “Jade” is the sound of solitary liberation and refuge, creative self-sufficiency. Written without the imperative of addressing the performers or the audience directly, “Jade” speaks internally and at the same time invites a kind of rhetorical listening. The artist draws on materials she knows from her previous works: ascetic electronic textures that rumble and penetrate, and a voice that bends in irreverent directions. Instead of a catharsis, however, his arrangements here remain in tension and extend curiosity to the delicate emptiness that feeds extremes. They play with the weak abilities of singing: repetition, singing, observations that end without resolution. “Jade” comes from a vulnerable, delicate place like in a naked wound trapped in the middle of healing.
Singing, usually that of Daijing, comes in the form of sequences of wordless notes rising along a roar, or a simple laugh or, in some places, a spoken word. What is said or sung provides fragments of experience and reflection. In assembling these fragments, the listener is confronted with his own delicate parts. “Solitude is like a huge lake that you swim through,” Daijing says of these songs. “Sometimes you dip your head into it and sometimes you lift it over it. At the heart of the album “Let”, she tells us about the sound of undulating water and returns to a chorus between two anxiety-provoking scenes: “I take my bath in the sea”. We are not only consuming the story of Daijing; We are invited to accompany them in the water. The album was mixed and mastered by Rashad Becker, with illustrations by Pan Daijing, photography by Dzhovani and design by NMR. @pan-daijing.