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LP
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BALMAT 010LP
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Panoram makes soundtracks for daydreams gone sideways. Picture the scene: an afternoon nap with the television on, quietly, in the corner; snatches of conversation drift in through the open window. Wandering, half-formed thoughts take unexpected detours; before you know it, there's a movie playing out against closed lids, the colors bright, the characters unfamiliar. Accidental rhythms, incidental melodies, imitations of life, messages in code. Across 17 fragmentary, sketch-like tracks, Panoram carves a labyrinthine path in which nothing is what it seems: a fantasy world of breathy vox pads, faux guitar, detuned synths, bursts of flute and orchestral percussion, and even the occasional cheeky cartoon sample. It's chillout music with a chilly edge, ambient with a darkly ironic undertone. Panoram has been making music under his principal alias for more than a decade now, releasing albums on labels like Firecracker, Running Back, and his own Wandering Eye. Panoram's output has ranged widely, taking in abstract pop, classical composition, twisted takes on library music, and cyborg funk. One record of "bio-acoustic transmissions" came with a cannabis leaf pressed in clear wax; his 2021 album Pianosequenza Vol. 1 gathers his experiments on the Yamaha Disklavier. But Great Times offers the truest picture yet of a project that has never been easy to pin down. Loath to overshare details about his personal life, Panoram instead lets the music do the talking, using his cryptic tracks to express the slipperiest sorts of ideas -- the thoughts that take root where anxiety, distraction, and the most fleeting traces of grace commingle. Panoram's approach flies in the face of contemporary ambient orthodoxy, with its emphasis on immersion and uplift. Great Times expresses something thornier, more difficult to translate, yet also more tantalizing to contend with. Its 17 tracks offer a chance to get lost -- and an invitation to remain in the maze as long as you like.
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RBINC 010LP
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Following up 2022's Acrobatic Thoughts album (RBINC 008LP), Panoram delves even deeper into his own musical universe with Keep Looking Where The Light Comes From. We find the producer in confident form, exploring the fuzzy fringes of beauty and chaos. The result is an album that sounds even more like himself and yet surprising at each turn. Opening track "Feathers" sounds like only Panoram can, buzzy arpeggiated distortion takes flight somewhere in the direction of a distant multiverse where Animal Collective and Boards of Canada soundtracked Koyaanisqatsi. But the psychedelic drift is all Panoram's own, conjuring a stark sense of the uncanny with the repeated phrases. The digital guitar and vocal loops of "I Can Only Repeat Your Love" are practically on the brink of collapsing in on themselves, to the point where the structure begins to shift like a collapsing monument. "Flat Stones" nods towards ASMR, as flute and woodwind tones caress the ears and a whispered voice teases out an altered state. It's this dreamlike mood that pervades the whole album, a maximal effect that's wrung from minimalist compositions. "The Wide House" picks up the baton from Laurie Anderson to trip gently through different states of awareness, while the piano patterns of "Blank Sheep" float through the synth ambience like ideas entering an empty dream. "There Is A Hole Here" is another mutant loop that unravels as it proceeds -- the rhythms turn into a pulse, and despite what the lyrics say, it does indeed mess around with your brain. Panoram balances dance tropes, classical composition, ambient drones and a washed out, fuzzy twist on avant garde pop, and manages to transform it all into a uniform whole that fits all those puzzle pieces together. Yet such is the assuredness of Panoram's production that it sounds effortless. At this point, the music is more like a midwife, manifesting your future self's enlightened consciousness with surreal effect.
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RBINC 008LP
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"Sybilline", "unique", and "peerless". These are some of the adjectives that were used to describe Everyone Is A Door, Panoram's first full-length on Edinburgh's Firecracker Recordings. Since then, the elusive producer, founded his own label Wandering Eye, produced automated piano music in Los Angeles (Thom Yorke Sonos playlist approved), composed synth lines underwater for Amen Dunes Freedom, and toured two years with the band as well being involved in their collaboration with Sleaford Mods Feel Nothing and their upcoming album on Sub Pop. But Panoram can also hold its own very well. His debut on Running Back's Incantations series lets you hear and experience that after the first few bars already. Acrobatic Thoughts is surreal, abstract, puzzling and urgent, yet filled with beautiful, slow-moving melodies, and emotional passages. Eccentric humor meets serious soundscapes, acrobatic thoughts evolve around abstract key notes, while an out-of-time and out-place atmosphere surrounds a microcosmos that seems to be otherworldly and very natural at the same time. Panoram manages to build a house that can be as much of a home for ambient record collectors as for futuristic pop fans and all the ones in-between those poles. Or to describe it one sentence while quoting two titles of this enigmatic record: Seabrains controlled by beautiful engines. Short: Seabrains controlled by beautiful engines.. Eccentric humor meets serious soundscapes, acrobatic thoughts evolve around abstract key notes. One LP to make millions happy.
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