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| | Pan Sonic Tallinn 2002 Hanno: Are you brothers? Ilpo: Yes! Mika: If we were girls we were sisters. I: We are also girls. H: So you are brothers and sisters? I: Brothers and sisters, what is this world going to be. H: Your music is abstract, dealing with things on the micro-level, but if one reads about Pan Sonic there is always a spicy legend added... Like the sound gun project you did in ´94 with Jim Cauty of KLF? M: It’s quite embarrassing, the whole thing, because there was a big fuzz that Pan Sonic will play massive sound gun that will make everybody to shit in their pants. We never had our own sound gun. Jim Cauty was up there with his car and it was really cool... In the end we were just driving around in the car and playing. It was loud, but it wasn’t really massive. We have tried to avoid letting out silly legends. But our record label loves them. Andres: Have you ever felt like being agressive, in a negative way? Have you had the feeling of going over the edge? M: I don’t usually feel negative. When I play really noisy parts I feel powerful, strong, which are positive elements for me and I hope people will feel the same way. Sometimes there are really annoying people in the audience, throwing things at us and yelling something. Of course I feel agressive towards them and I will start playing louder, agressively. But in general the loud parts are something I really enjoy myself. A: You are calling your music ”horsemeat rockabilly”, does it mean anything or you are just giving something to people to describe it? M: Well, we get that question all the time – How would you describe your music? So we decided to have this stupid answer ”horsemeat rockabilly”. In a way it is a good answer, because we both like horsemeat and we both like rockabilly. And ”horsemeat rockabilly” could be something Pan Sonic sounds at some moments. Do you know Hasil Atkins, the rockabilly man from USA? We have been trying to make music with him for many years, but it hasn’t worked out. Paul from our label called him and tried to explain what kind of music Pan Sonic is doing. He said, it’s like the broken motor of his van. He is often going to play guitar with this broken machine, so it would suit us well. H: So how do you feel about todays live? Ilpo: There were good parts and there were bad parts. A: You mean it was not powerful enough or what... I: I didn´t mean powerful, I said good, and I am only talking of myself playing... But anyway, it is improvised music. It should go wrong and when it gets good it sounds supergood, exactly because it has gone wrong. Today it was luckily very much intuition. A: I was flattered to see you in this rock´n roll stylée tonight, rumbling around with the equipment and moving yourself quite lively. I have this parallel with the gig you did two years ago at Sibelius Academy. You were performing with a slightly different set. It sounded more minimal and you had this tuba there. I: Yes, that was different... H: Is it because of the audience? I: No, it´s more like the feeling. H: I remember Jimi Tenor telling a story about Mika going to America just to see the Large Glass by Duchamp. Is it true? M: Yeah, I went to Philadelphia specially for it. I had a very strict line of budget. I was able just to go there and return. But in the end I realised that it was Monday and the museum was closed so I couldn´t get in. Uh.. (laughing) It was really sad. H: Any Duchampian dry humour in your work? M: Yeah, I hope so, really... H: Your music is physically so powerful that it seems to be very hard to fit irony in that. What would irony mean in your case? M: Well, irony is in our position. When you are on the stage you are expected to behave in a certain way. It becomes really stupid when you are not honest with that. I: I have a connection to Duchamp through our sound. There is a female and male theme. When I play I am thinking that this is like fucking a woman. A: Weird. I was comparing your live today with rough sex without orgasm. I guess it means that strange thoughts are popping into listeners heads while listening. I also wondered about different frequency levels. The high frequencies loudspeakers were installed on quite a high level, so that people should have been standing, but most of them sat on the floor, on the subwhoofers' level. How was it on your side? I: We hear only monitors. They're compressing a lot because we use low frequencies and they are sucking lots of energy from the amplifiers. A: You had tube amplifiers here today, would you rather use tube amplifiers? I: It depends very much on the situation. For a club they are not powerful enough but here... It wasn´t our choice. We just wrote in the fax that good and big PA is needed. Tube amplifiers are really suitable for analogue sound that we use. It couldn´t take some of the sounds, it was too small. But the system was really good, soundwise. H: At one point during the performance I felt that the glass ceiling of Art Hall is almost breaking down on us. Did you have a temptation? I: No. M: It´s temptating to think that things could break by your sound, but it happens rarely. Jung wrote about the time when he was really young. Once when phantacizing about death of his grandmother while she was working in the kitchen next door, a big knife in the cupboard broke with a loud sound. It was really strong steel, made in Germany. The event was obviously connected to what he was thinking about. We don´t know a fuck what this world is about. We are living in the three dimensional world. There is now actually ten or twenty two dimensions discovered by physicians, but whatever it is, it doesn´t matter, because we don´t know much about it, so cheerio! Pan Sonic interviewed by Andres Lõo & Hanno Soans, August 2002 |