PAN presents: KEVIN DRUMM + THOMAS ANKERSMIT + HELM

Event information

The two day PAN festival here in January cemented the label's reputation for bringing together a first-rate array of adventurous and unpredictable sound explorers - from R/S cranking the houselights and melting brains to CC Hennix and Werner Durand's extended duration drone pallative. It's a pleasure to have PAN back at OTO with iconoclastic improvisor/noise artist KEVIN DRUMM, sax/synth master THOMAS ANKERSMIT and London's own HELM.

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related releases:

THOMAS ANKERSMIT / VALERIO TRICOLI - Forma II CD (PAN 16)
KEVIN DRUMM / MIKA VAINIO / AXEL DÖRNER / LUCIO CAPECE - Venice Quartet LP (PAN 28)
HELM - Impossible Symmetry LP (PAN 29)

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KEVIN DRUMM

Avant-garde tabletop guitarist Kevin Drumm was born and raised in 1970 in South Holland, IL, playing in a handful of rock bands before relocating to Chicago in 1991 to work at the city's Board of Trade. He soon began his experiments with prepared guitar, applying objects including magnets, binder clips, chains, a violin bow and even toenail clippers to distort the instrument's sound; in time Drumm befriended a number of members of Chicago's growing improv community, including Jim O' Rourke (with whom he served in Brise-Glace, additionally contributing to Gastr del Sol's Upgrade and Afterlife album and Ken Vandermark. In late 1997 Drumm made his solo debut with a self-titled (Perdition Plastics) and has released superb duo records with Taku Sugimoto (Sonoris), Axel Dörner, Martin Tètreault (both Erstwhile) and Ralf Wehowsky (Selektion). His chameleon-like presence has been documented on a number of projects, each revealing new facets of his wide-ranging and unique talents on both guitar and electronics. Drumm seamlessly melds the worlds of acoustic and electronic sound, occasionally teetering on the edge of silence, yet always remaining impeccably musical. Kevin Drumm has recorded and performed with Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, Jim O'Rourke, MIMEO, Mats Gustafsson, John Butcher, Thomas Ankersmit, Taku Sugimoto and many others.

THOMAS ANKERSMIT

Thomas Ankersmit (1979, Leiden, Netherlands) is a musician and installation artist based in Berlin and Amsterdam. His main instruments are the Serge analogue modular synthesizer, computer and alto saxophone. He frequently works together with New York minimalist Phill Niblock and electroacoustic artists Valerio Tricoli and Kevin Drumm.

"Ankersmit constructs a musical world that feels alive and capable of going anywhere, and yet also manages to give the music a strong sense of structured purpose, a degree of compositional control unusual in this area of live performance. It is the fine balance between the sense of chaos that threatens to pull everything apart and the controlled formation of the music into clearly defined sections of differing intensities that raises the work above that of so many of Ankersmit’s contemporaries." Richard Pinnell, The Wire

"A dynamic performance that comes at the listener from all sides, as unpredictable as it is self-assured … Ankersmit is adept as ever at making transitions and staying one step ahead of himself with a keen ear for evolution and the patience to make it effective. There can be excitement in watching a musician grapple with sounds that threaten to escape his or her control, but precision can be equally arresting, and Ankersmit wrangles his material beautifully from beginning to end with a deft touch and a canny sense of timing." Adam Strohm, Dusted

HELM

Helm is Luke Younger - a Sound Artist and experimental musician based in London, working with a vast array of revolving instrumentation and abstract sound sources.

Younger's compositions build a dense aural landscape that touches on musique concrete, uncomfortable sound poetry, noise, and hallucinatory drones. His most last LP for the Kye label, Cryptography, presents a five-part suite of expertly rendered electro-acoustic study which uses processed piano, Casio MT-40, cymbal and broken guitar strings. Younger creates a world where these instruments morph into spectral rust, a shimmering klang swims alongside passive noise and the relationship between acoustic and electronic derived sounds forms a solid foundation. This sound is steered through a melange of fringe territories: glacial drone meditations, reconfigured gamelan clusters, and howling walls of organized feedback, all coalesced in a post-industrial fashion with a commitment to homemade exploratory zeal.

For the past ten years, Younger has also performed extensively in Europe and the US with Steven Warwick as pioneering avant-drone duo Birds of Delay. New LP 'Impossible Symmetry' on PAN coming out in spring 2012.


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PAN Press:

PAN Festival Cafe Oto, London, UK In the space of three short years, Bill Kouligas’s Berlin based PAN label has established for itself a redoubtable, imposing presence. Initial releases marked it as a better-than-average Noise imprint; since then it has diversified astutely, broadening its remit to take in free jazz, sound art, computer music and dissident electronica. The secrets of Kouligas’s accomplishment aren’t hard to decipher: the PAN catalogue is a dud-free zone, tightly packed with strong albums by a blend of new and familiar artists, all of them well chosen and wrapped up in deluxe, eye-catching packages. In 2011 PAN shifted into overdrive, cresting irresistibly with a succession of outstanding, justly lauded releases. The diversity of the PAN roster, as well as its boldness and ambition constitutes a convincing display of strength from a label whose deserved success looks set to continue. - Nick Cain The WIRE Magazine

We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again: PAN is one of the most consistently rewarding and praiseworthy experimental music labels in Europe. Operated out of Berlin by Bill Kouligas, who also co-designs all the sleeves, PAN’s previous output includes forward thinking electronic, noise, concréte and outsider music. You really never know what you’re going to get next, which is more than can be said for many of its contemporaries. FACT Magazine

Without question one of the most individual and interesting record labels around right now, PAN has been run out of Berlin since 2008 by Bill Kouligas who has spent the last few years frying our tiny minds with one exceptional release after another. Today, for the first time, its incredible catalogue becomes available on download formats via boomkat. The label does that rarest of things, presenting often difficult, experimental material in such a way that you're drawn in by visual signatures and, most importantly, a curator's hand that's never short of inspired. Dipping into the catalogue is like entering into a vortex of sonic treasures, pushing you from Joseph Hammer's fuggy plunderphonics to important archival Sound Art from Trevor Wishart, from the intense noise experiments of Hecker to the unrivalled modular electronics of Keith Fullerton Whitman (who, incidentally, delivered for the label our album of the year for 2010). Boomkat

Given that it is now 22 releases old, and able to sell out a two day festival in London’s Oto, are we any closer to learning what the Berlin-based label PAN is trying to achieve? It is a difficult question given that it is a label of extreme diversity, from the dark empty spaces of John Wiese’s music to the whiteout noise of Florian Hecker, from the circuit bending of Keith Fullerton Whitman to the circular breathing of Andre Vida. The desirable two-part LP sleeves create further contrasts, by overlaying an image with something stark and geometric, at times almost an analogue and a digital element simultaneously. Perhaps this crossing of divisions is the essence of PAN – it is a project which is totally pan-border, pan-genre, straddling the gap between the human and the electronic, the audio and the visual, the improvised and the designed, the concert venue and the gallery. That it succeeds is down to some savvy curatorial choices by Bill Kouligas, in particular by focusing on artists with strong, singular vision. In the manner of Kouligas himself, the likes of Eli Keszler, Frieder Butzmann and Ghedalia Tazartes exist in worlds where notions of genre or style are pretty redundant, where there are no pre-conceived barriers to what their art could or should be. - Scott McMillan The Liminal